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

post what?! (not) an abbreviated introduction 33
exercise of trying to discover the true Latin America. A text’s genre or intellectual
tradition might be worth noting in that it can shed insight on the
distinct discursive communities to which its authors belong, or to whom
it is directed. But to argue, as modernists are wont to do, that one fi eld of
production, such as literature or history, is better equipped to reveal truth,
is an untenable proposition. Likewise, to argue that certain forms of socalled
high culture (like poetry) possess greater capacity to reveal the truth
than “low” culture (like pop fi ction or fi lm) also lacks credibility. Drawing
on Barthes’ theory of the death of the author, every writer is subject to discourse
and every text is part of a collective expression of discursive production.
We are in pursuit of those discourses.
Another Form of Imperialism? Latin America
and Cultural Studies
The exercise of interpreting modern Latin America from a cultural theory
perspective does not lend itself to scholarly consensus. Modernists reject
it out of hand, and even cultural theorists disagree as to how it should be
conducted. For instance, within the broad community of Latin American
scholars, a sort of division exists as to which theoretical traditions are best
suited to interpreting Latin American identity. A group of these scholars,
many of whom are either from Latin America or work there, suggests that
the contributions to cultural studies from U.S. and European academic institutions
might have limited applicability for Latin America.
The scholars in this group are far from homogeneous in their approaches,
and they are not necessarily organized. Their work has been published
throughout Latin America, and little of it has been translated into English,
so it remains relatively unknown to U.S. and European scholars—although
anthologies published in 2001 and 2004 promise to give it wider exposure. 31
What unites these scholars is a shared belief in the existence of a distinct
Anglo/North American variant of cultural studies, often referred to simply
as U.S. cultural studies, and in the idea that this so-called school has failed
to incorporate intellectual traditions from Latin America.
This claim might seem surprising, given that an important impetus behind
the development of cultural studies in U.S. and European intellectual
circles was the insistence that modernist scholarship was too limited in
focus and needed to include more and differing perspectives. Nevertheless,
Neil Larsen, one of these scholars, puts the issue in the form of a question:
“Do the various critical theories often termed ‘postmodern’ enable us to
make better sense of contemporary Latin American reality, or do they merely