Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

160 reframing latin america
either a colonized or feminine imagination is that all the signs may have to
be reversed if liberation is to be achieved [. . .].
Europe’s last labyrinthine moment had been the era of the romance at
the end of the Middle Ages. Then, like Latin America after Independence,
Europe had been unknown unto itself, and the novels of chivalry charted
the quest of European consciousness towards its own reconciliation of individual
and collective identity. That discovery coincided with the vanquishing
of the East and the discovery of the New World of the West. In the period
after the First World War, when Europe again entered a labyrinth—recorded
in literature by Joyce and Kafka—from which it has not yet re-emerged,
Latin America’s historical experience had been inherently labyrinthine for a
century, but without the mental tools to think around its contours and without,
as yet, the consolation that Europe was in a similar predicament. On
the contrary, Europe provided, albeit temporarily, such models of reason as
were still available. Thus famous twentieth-century novels like Miguel Angel
Asturias’s The President (1946) or García Márquez’s One Hundred Years
Of Solitude (1967) portray the development of Latin America as a kind of
tragicomic caricature of European history, or as a vicious circle, a repetitive
nightmare in which the same sins and curses come to haunt the continent
and its children through century after century—conquest, murder, violation,
illegitimacy, and dictatorship—countered by the redemptive quest for
legitimacy and identity and the struggle for liberation, inevitably involving
a raising of consciousness, further repression from without and within, and
a new round of disillusionment and despair. Little wonder, then, that the
labyrinth has become a symbol of Latin American literature which may
well stand ultimately for Latin American history itself. García Marquéz has
chosen to entitle his new novel on the great Liberator Simón Bolívar “The
General in his Labyrinth” (“El general en su laberinto,” 1989).
Plots Thicken
Yet somehow there must be a way out. When that way out has been found,
Latin Americans will know where they are, who they are, where they have
come from and where they are going. They will have escaped from the labyrinth
of solitude, have completed the quest for identity: they will be able to
look at themselves in the mirror and see what is truly there. What does this
involve? Above all, it involves exploration of their own Mestizo culture. As
we have seen, the problem for a Latin American, more than for the members
of any other major world culture, is that identity is not given: it has to
be searched for, discovered or even invented. And it is always twice dual.
The most cursory glance at Latin America’s typical cultural expressions in