Imagination Beyond Nation: Latin American Popular Culture (review)

Anne Rubenstein

The Americas, Volume 57, Number 2, October 2000, pp. 306-308 (Article)

Published by The Academy of American Franciscan History DOI: 10.1353/tam.2000.0016

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Imagination Beyond Nation: Latin American Popular Culture. Edited by Eva P. Bueno and Terry Caesar. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. Pp. vii, 314. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $50.00 cloth; $22.95 paper. This essay collection arrives at an interesting moment. Just as popular protests against economic and cultural globalization are gathering force in the United States, this book makes the claim that fears of cultural homogenization may be overblown. The editors write that the phenomenon they call globalization or postmodernity (p. 3)an odd conflation of termshas not flattened out those features of the cultural landscape that make Latin America fundamentally different (pp. 34) from any other part of the world. The contributors to this volume, nearly all of whom are professors of literature, sometimes disagree with each other in their theoretical approaches or methodologies, as editors Eva Bueno and Terry Caesar point out in the tightly-written introduction, but they are all engaged in attempts to understand the place of Latin American popular culture in a world whose cultures may or may not be increasingly homogenized. Thus, the books title may be slightly deceptive: these literary critics aim to revindicate the importance of the local in Latin American cultural studies, rather than cheerlead for some new global utopia (a word whose literal meaning, of course, is no-place). Imagination Beyond Nation arrives, too, at a moment of intense productivity in Latin American cultural studies in English. The past few years has witnessed the advent of a new journal for Latin American cultural studies in Britain and innumerable cultural-studies conferences in the United States and elsewhere. Many recent scholarly monographs in English have applied cultural-studies approaches and theories to the study of Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, the U.S.-Mexican border region, andto a lesser extent, perhapsthe rest of Latin America. Latin American scholars of mass media, popular culture, and related topics, like Carlos Monsivis, Nestor Garca Canclini, and Roberto Schwartz, have had their work translated into English and, perhaps coincidentally, seen their influence spread rapidly among younger scholars in the United States. And a number of recent essay collections on Latin

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American popular culture have added increased visibility to the field while helping to define what has become nearly a canon of research practices and practitioners: one thinks, here, of William Beezley, William French, and Cheryl Martins Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance, Gil Joseph and Daniel Nugents Everyday Forms of State Formation, Gil Joseph, Catherine Leogrande and Richard Salvatores Close Encounters of Empire, John King and Ana Lpezs Mediating Two Worlds, and John Beverly, Jos Oviedo, and Michael Aronnas The Postmodern Debate in Latin America, among others. Imagination Beyond Nation, then, enters into a lively and relatively young field of study, but also one which has already produced some very distinguished work. Does this anthology add much to this crowded field? The articles quality is wildly uneven. The less interesting essays here can be ignored, as they do little to illuminate the art forms or media products which they discuss and in some cases do not seem to bear a very close relation to the theme of the anthology. But the better essays in Imagination Beyond Nationand even one or two of the less convincing piecesdeserve and repay attention. These articles suggest new directions in the study of some regions, as well as new methods and sources for conducting cultural studies more generally. For example, James J. Pancrazios essay Youre All Guilty: Lo Cubano in the Confession compares a series of mediated political spectacles (protests against planned Miami performances by a Havana film star, Herbert Padillos self-accusation in a Cuban courtroom, and so on) to the Toms Gutirrez Alea film Fresa y chocolate, Guillermo Cabrera Infantes collection of autobiographical essays Mea Cuba, and the Alejandro Carpentier novel El harpa y la sombra. Pancrazio sees these events and texts as linked by the theme of confession, or more particularly confession as an especially Cuban form of political speech. By making this comparison, he illuminates both the events and the texts under discussion in his article; at the same time, he makes a cogent case for viewing Cuban culture in the context of what we might call greater Cuba, that is, the Cuba which exists among the communities of Cubans in the United States, Europe, and Latin America as well as on the island itself. It is this second point that contributes to the wider argument of Imagination Beyond Nation by demonstrating that the cultural boundaries around Latin American nations are not fixed or stable spatially. Similarly, Eva Buenos fascinating article, Caipira Culture: The Politics of Nation in Mazzaropis Films, supports the anthologys argument most clearly in a secondary point of the articles analysis of the Brazilian comedian/filmmaker. The central project of Buenos article is unpacking the Brazilian-ness of Mazzaropis art. But, in the course of making this argument, she points to the contradiction between his enormous popularity within Brazil and the way that his work has been denied serious critical consideration (p. 41) in Brazil. She adds to this disparity the contradiction between Mazzaropis fame within his country and complete anonymity outside of it. Thus, Bueno sees a popular Brazil defining itself in defiance of the elite (p. 41) Brazil (with elite Brazil supported, in turn, by a global

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elite) who would prefer to define the nation in terms of Cinema Novo. This argument does not hold up well when it points to transnational cultural politicsits hard to believe that any global elite would be quite so engaged with Cinema Novo but is quite illuminating when it comes to understanding class and regional tensions within Brazil. One of the more problematic contributions to this volume is also one of the most suggestive and interesting. Simon Webbs article Masculinities at the Margins: Representations of the Malandro and the Pachuco, juxtaposes bad-boy imagery from Afro-Brazilian and Mexican American popular culture (p. 227) while doing a poor job of framing its argument. Taking up the question of masculinity in Latin America puts Webb into the middle of a debate among anthropologists, historians, literary critics and others, in which Eduardo Archetti, James Green, Steve Stern, Don Kulick, Matthew Guttman, Roger Lancaster, Annick Prieur, and Joseph Carrier are some of the most important recent participants. But Webb ignores all previous work on the subject except that of Octavio Paz, commenting incorrectly that references to Latin American masculinity invariably dismiss it sweepingly as machismo, a . . . pathological and essential masculinity (p. 228). This lack of a theoretical frame echoes the essays lack of geographical grounding. As Webb points out, the figure of the stylish, scary young man who represents an oppressed group is hardly unique to Brazil and North America in the twentieth century; Webb seems to have picked these two masculine images because they give him the chance to compare the film and play Zoot Suit with the film and play pera do Malandro (which he does to great effect) and in one short article Webb could hardly have looked at more than two of these imaginary masculine images. Still, the article never clarifies why Webb picked these particular masculine archetypes to analyze, rather than the Jamaican rudie, the Cuban curro, and others (p. 264). These gaps in Webbs argument are particularly unfortunate because, if he had filled them in, he would also have addressed the central concerns of the edited volume directly rather than by implication. As it stands, Masculinities at the Margins still raises questions that lie at the heart of Imagination Beyond Nation. Is there such a thing as Latin American culture, and how is it gendered? How can a cultural form which represents an oppressed group within a nation (such as the pachuco, the malandro, the rude boy and the curro) also represent the nation in the transnational cultural context? How can oppressed people make use of national cultures, which so often are used as tools of oppression? These puzzles may be insolublecertainly none of the contributors to Imagination Beyond Nation solves thembut Pancrazio, Bueno, Webb, and a few others here at least suggest interesting approaches to them, through crossborder comparisons, comparisons among different cultural forms, and connections between processes of cultural production and cultural consumption. Such thoughtful attempts to work through these difficult questions can bring us closer to a new and more profound understanding of the twentieth century in Latin America. Allegheny College Meadville, Pennsylvania ANNE RUBENSTEIN