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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 post-

modernity (p. 3)an odd conflation of termshas not flattened out those features

of the cultural landscape that make Latin America fundamentally different (pp. 3-

4) 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 the-oretical 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 under-

stand 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 decep-

tive: 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 inLatin 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 innumer-

able cultural-studies conferences in the United States and elsewhere. Many recent

scholarly monographs in English have applied cultural-studies approaches and the-

ories to the study of Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, the U.S.-Mexican border region,

andto a lesser extent, perhapsthe rest of Latin America. Latin American schol-

ars 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 helpingto define what has become nearly a canon of research practices and practitioners:

one thinks, here, of William Beezley, William French, and Cheryl MartinsRitualsof Rule, Rituals of Resistance, Gil Joseph and Daniel Nugents Everyday Forms ofState Formation, Gil Joseph, Catherine Leogrande and Richard Salvatores CloseEncounters of Empire, John King and Ana LpezsMediating Two Worlds, and JohnBeverly, Jos Oviedo, and Michael Aronnas The Postmodern Debate in LatinAmerica, among others. Imagination Beyond Nation, then, enters into a lively andrelatively 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 inImagination Beyond Nationand even one or two of the less convincingpiecesdeserve 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 theConfession compares a series of mediated political spectacles (protests against

planned Miami performances by a Havana film star, Herbert Padillos self-accusa-

tion in a Cuban courtroom, and so on) to the Toms Gutirrez Alea film Fresa ychocolate, Guillermo Cabrera Infantes collection of autobiographical essays MeaCuba, and the Alejandro Carpentier novel El harpa y la sombra. Pancrazio seesthese 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 com-

parison, 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 com-

munities 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 aroundLatin American nations are not fixed or stable spatially.

Similarly, Eva Buenos fascinating article, Caipira Culture: The Politics ofNation 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 defi-

ance 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 argu-ment 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: Rep-

resentations of the Malandro and the Pachuco, juxtaposes bad-boy imagery fromAfro-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 crit-

ics 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 . . . patho-

logical 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 styl-

ish, 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 Suitwith 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 particularlyunfortunate because, if he had filled them in, he would also have addressed the cen-tral 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 ofImagination Beyond Nation. Is there such a thing as Latin American cul-ture, 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? Howcan 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 afew others here at least suggest interesting approaches to them, through cross-

border comparisons, comparisons among different cultural forms, and connectionsbetween processes of cultural production and cultural consumption. Such thought-

ful 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 ANNE RUBENSTEINMeadville, Pennsylvania

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