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

32 reframing latin america
Where Is the Real Latin America?!
The focal point of this book is Latin American identity in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. So in addition to race, class, gender, and nation,
we are adding Latin America to our list of modernist identity categories.
We might defi ne this as a multinational identity, referring to the group of
nations and peoples in the Western Hemisphere that are south of the United
States. For the past two hundred years, Latin America, like most of the rest
of the world during that time, has been dominated by modernist conceptualizations
of identity and modernist attempts to discern ontological truths.
Whether or not they set out with the purposeful and conscious intent to do
so, virtually every author during the modernist era participated in a broad
project of seeking out the truth about Latin America.
As modernists, these various interpreters debated among themselves as
to who possessed the most accurate version of Latin America. Sometimes
this debate was overt and purposeful, as in the case of the renowned treatise
on Mexican identity by Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude. 30 Other
times, the debate has been less direct, even accidental, as authors simply set
out to write a story or comment on their lives, families, towns, or regions,
but then found that their commentaries, as texts, operated in a broader
whole of interpretation.
In this book, we provide selections from roughly a dozen examples spanning
the past two centuries and fi t each text into its respective historical era
and/or literary movement. Some of these eras and movements will likely be
new to someone unfamiliar with Latin American history, but some might
be quite recognizable. For instance, we fi nd that even people who possess
limited knowledge of Latin America have heard of magical realism, a literary
movement dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, or at least of one of its
main contributors, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. He was one
of a number of magical realist authors to win a Nobel Prize during this socalled
boom in Latin American literary production. We will demonstrate
how magical realist authors were part of a massive, collective, albeit uncoordinated
attempt to reveal the true Latin America. Our goal is to illustrate
these modernist foundations and show their ideological and discursive
makeup.
Hopefully, it is evident by now that we do not distinguish between fi ction
and nonfi ction in our interpretation of texts. Regardless of the intellectual
tradition from which it originates, whether it be fi ction, drama, poetry,
history, sociology, politics, or some other genre, almost every text produced
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries participates in the modernist