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

36 reframing latin america
Americanist at the University of Houston, has promoted this argument,
contending that “European theory has brought key perspectives to a table
Latin Americans helped build.” Zimmerman uses the example of Stuart
Hall, long-time director of the Birmingham school, as an example. Hall, who
is Jamaican-born, drew upon the work of Ernesto Laclau, an Argentine, to
revise the renowned theoretical premises of Antonio Gramsci, a Sardinian/
Italian. Zimmerman questions how this could be defi ned as an Anglo or
U.S. intellectual tradition. 37 Zimmerman’s critics would argue that Hall is
an exception to the norm.
In addition to issues of academic tradition and institutionalized power
relationships, there is also a serious intellectual aspect to the debate. The
Latin American school accuses its U.S. counterparts of subscribing to a
more extremist version of cultural theory, in which most everything is decentered
and seen as discursively constituted, whereas Latin Americans advocate
for retaining more empirical standards and centered identities.
A comparison to feminist criticism in the United States and Europe
might help clarify the nature of the debate. On the one hand, feminist critics
played a key role in the development of cultural studies and postmodern
theory in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps not surprisingly, this coincided with
the civil rights movement and expanding opportunities for women and minorities.
Women were participating in the making of history to an unprecedented
degree, thereby moving them from the periphery to the center. In
theoretical terms, they were becoming “centered” or were able for the fi rst
time to claim identity as Cartesian subjects. But some feminist theorists
noted the distressing coincidence that just as women were making these
momentous gains, cultural theory came along and decentered the self and
turned the subject into a discourse. The goals that women’s rights activists
had struggled to achieve for so long seemed to be vanishing into the thin
air of discourse. Feminist criticism has remained a central part of cultural
studies, but this issue provided an opportunity for cultural theorists to act
on their own words and recognize that every new position, no matter how
progressive it might seem, has the potential to mask hierarchical power
relations, regardless of the conscious intent of its authors.
Latin American critics of U.S. cultural studies have confronted a similar
problem. Their homelands are still struggling to achieve developmental
parity with the United States and Europe. They ask to what extent it is
possible to be postmodern and to decenter all the old modernist identities
without having had the chance to be fully modern. Just as feminists were
concerned about the decentered self, some Latin American scholars are
concerned that a rampant embrace of cultural theory would erode the few