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

162 reframing latin america
or “labyrinths” (multiplying differences indefi nitely) is really three—among
many—different phenomena. First and last, it is an image of “life” (the Borgesian
version), that is, the human condition, the eternal perplexity of what
some American fi lm-makers like to call “man,” condemned to journey
perpetually through a time and space odyssey towards death, without ever
knowing why. But equally, as we have already seen—and in this case perhaps
more decisively—it is also “history” (Paz’s variant), however abstractly
conceived, and in this instance the history of Latin America, of each of its
individual republics and each of their individual inhabitants, and of the relation
of each of these to each other and to the rest of the world. The literary
debate about the relation of these two categories is interminable. My simple
contention is that the greatest novels, in Latin America or elsewhere, attend
simultaneously to both dimensions. The quest, then, is for identity, for the
meaning of life, oneself, one’s culture, nation, continent, in relation to others.
The triumph is fi nding it, defi ning it, taking possession of it: liberating
the labyrinth. The tensions between the verbs I have chosen are self-evident,
derive from the dialectic of Latin American history, and help to explain the
contradictory dynamism of recent Latin American writing.
Leslie Bary, “The Search for Cultural Identity” 10
Politics and Culture
The central role given the concept of “culture” in the formation of modern
Latin American society will be examined in this chapter. Our texts will
demonstrate the importance in Latin American thought of the idea that the
region’s culture did not develop organically but was—or, according to some,
must still be—specifi cally created. We will see how the imperative, inherited
from colonial times, to seek “civilization” and cultural knowledge outside
the Latin American continent (an imperative that marks, for instance, the
Argentine writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo),
gives way to a complex search for native cultural models. Peruvian intellectuals
and political leaders such as Teodoro Valcárcel, Victor Raúl de la
Torre, and José Carlos Mariátegui created native models based on Indianness
and designed to restore the Indian’s place at the center of society. But the
most recurrent conceptualization of Latin American identity, of which José
Martí and José Vasconcelos are among the best known exponents, posits racial
mixture and cultural hybridization as the true bases of Latin American
civilization since the beginnings of European colonization [. . .].
Postcolonial intellectuals often theorize autonomous identities for their
societies by asserting a radical difference from the culture of their former