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

post what?! (not) an abbreviated introduction 37
empirical defenses they have, such as nation or class, against the raw economic
and military power of the developed world.
This debate has pushed them to propose a sort of third way that avoids
unbridled decentering but remains attentive to the problems of essentialism.
This theoretical position has revolved around terms like hybridity and
locality, or local knowledge, and is commonly associated with García Canclini
and the Argentine Walter Mignolo, among others. 38 Its basic premise
is that intellectual traditions have to allow room for local conditions, or
concrete local interests, to make an impact; people on the margins or the
periphery have to be able to talk back to the metropolis and its globally oriented
propositions. Ideally, a sort of constant dialogue would occur between
local and global in which, at the very least, Latin American theorists could
explain why certain aspects of U.S. cultural studies strike them as unproductive,
if not threatening, and more a defense of U.S. and European power
than a constant state of criticism.
The Latin American scholars advocating this third way fi nd common
cause with a sector inside the European and U.S. cultural studies tradition.
One scholar to whom they often refer is Stuart Hall. In particular, they identify
with Hall’s arguments about establishing a place from which to begin
any discussion and analysis. Hall contends that people, be they as individuals
or in groups, have to acknowledge that they come from some place, even
an intellectual tradition or cultural background, which makes them who
they are. As long as they do not essentialize it, Hall argues that they need
to use that place as their entry into the sea of discourse and shifting identities.
Once they have this point of departure, they are ready to move onto the
next temporary place. Without some place, Hall argues, people will be talking
from nowhere. More recently, the Ghanaian-born philosopher K. A. Appiah
has been advocating an approach to identity similar to Stuart Hall’s. 39
A similar idea is also found in the excerpt in Chapter 7 from David Parker,
who examines the issue of class. In describing class identity as a social construct,
Parker approaches language from the perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin
(1895–1975), the Russian theorist who argued that language is neither an
entirely closed system that controls its human interlocutors nor an entirely
open one that is subject to human whim. In other words, every aspect of
language arrives with a history, or comes from some place that limits human
ability to dictate its meaning at will. But human beings are not simply
at the mercy of language and convention; they are capable of affecting and
infl uencing them both. Thus, according to Bakhtin, language is a two-way
street between its own history and the desires of its contemporary interlocutors.
In adopting this approach, Parker stakes out a middle position