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

post what?! (not) an abbreviated introduction 31
But as discourses are ultimately nothing more than ideas or mental
constructs, they can also change according to the shifting needs of the
discursive communities that use them. Cultural theorists seek out these
changes as further proof of the existence of discourse. They point, for example,
to the variations in meaning of the term black in different national
or regional contexts. They show that it means one thing in the United
States and another in Brazil; that it meant one thing in Brazil in the 1960s,
and another since 2000; or that it meant one thing in southern Brazil since
2000 and another in northern Brazil. How, cultural theorists ask, can
there be a true and objective quality to race if a uniformly held meaning of
it, beyond the unfortunate consistency of white supremacy, has never
existed?
Modernists respond to this type of criticism with an appeal to the scientifi
c method, saying that the quest for truth is often long and arduous. They
believe that we can expect only that, at any given moment, multiple interpretations
of racial essence will exist simultaneously. The challenge, a modernist
would insist, is to determine which one is correct and then use it to
eradicate the others. Cultural theorists reject the idea that any one of these
constructs is any more accurate than the other. Instead, they insist that
each is nothing more than a variation on a common discursive theme, the
variations of which refl ect the needs of distinct discursive communities
and eras.
Cultural theorists also expose essentialism as discursively constituted
by revealing the tendency of essentialists to “collapse” categories. A text,
for example, might superfi cially discuss race but at the same time comment
on nation, class, or gender. A writer from a nineteenth-century Latin American
country might discuss indigenous peoples, describing their traits, the
qualities that make them indigenous, and so forth. This writer might mention
that the majority of indigenous people in his country are lower class
and that they constitute an important proportion of the nation’s population.
Suddenly, by association and without ever having explicitly set out to do so,
the writer has made a major declaration about his nation’s identity, linking
it to essential qualities of class and race. And by commenting on his own
nation, the author might also be making a broader commentary about Latin
America and/or the United States and Europe, as it is not uncommon to use
such broad comparisons. We can assume, of course, that authors sometimes
make these associations purposefully, but the theory of the death of the
author invalidates the attempt to identify intent in writing. So cultural
theorists are interested in exposing these associations as revelations into
the inner workings of discourse.