Cynthia Tompkins

No apocalypse, no integration : modernism and postmodernism in Latin America

Winner of the Premio Iberoamericano Book Award in 1997 (Spanish Edition) What form does the crisis of modernity take in Latin America when societies are politically demobilized and there is no revolutionary agenda in sight? How does postmodern criticism reflect on enlightenment and utopia in a region marked by incomplete modernization, new waves of privatization, great masses of excluded peoples, and profound sociocultural heterogeneity? In No Apocalypse, No Integration Martin Hopenhayn examines the social and philosophical implications of the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of leftist and state-sponsored social planning in Latin America. With the failure of utopian movements that promised social change, the rupture of the link between the production of knowledge and practical intervention, and the defeat of modernization and development policy established after World War II, Latin American intellectuals and militants have been left at an impasse without a vital program of action. Hopenhayn analyzes these crises from a theoretical perspective and calls upon Latin American intellectuals to reevaluate their objects of study, their political reality, and their society’s cultural production, as well as to seek within their own history the elements for a new collective discourse. Challenging the notion that strict adherence to a single paradigm of action can rescue intellectual and cultural movements, Hopenhayn advocates a course of epistemological pluralism, arguing that such an approach values respect for difference and for cultural and theoretical diversity and heterodoxy. This essay collection will appeal to readers of sociology, public policy, philosophy, cultural theory, and Latin American history and culture, as well as to those with an interest in Latin America’s current transition.

Inscription and Subversion of the Road Movie in Inés de Oliveira Cézar’s Cassandra (2012)

This chapter claims that Ines de Oliveira Cezar’s Cassandra (Argentina, 2012) inscribes and subverts the generic conventions of the road movie, the female Bildungsroman, and even neorealism. While the road trip favors character development and female independence, the protagonist, a journalist whose job is to denounce the deforestation that deprives indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands in the Argentine northeast, does not turn out to be a successful journalist, since she becomes extremely aware of the limitations of language and representation. In this film, cultural critique is represented narratively and the deictic pointers typical of neorealism are ambiguous. Instead of the expected overt political messages denouncing the plight of indigenous peoples, Cassandra makes us to reflect upon the limitations of objective representation as well as the unfeasibility of speaking for the subaltern.

Wild Naked Ladies: Shifting Paradigms

How do we speak about teaching gender through Hispanic texts in a world riveted by images, in the context of seemingly instant access to globalized mass media? How do we approach the issue of gender in a “post-feminist” era marked by discussions on “undoing gender” and post-humanist notions? Following Patti Lather’s (1991, 2001) seminal pedagogical strategy that consists of focusing on an event from different ideological standpoints so that students may become aware of the implications of each paradigm, this chapter offers a variety of feminist approaches to analyze Maria Victoria Menis’s (2008) Camara oscura [Camera Obscura], and Albertina Carri’s (2008) La rabia [Anger], underscoring the pedagogical implications of each standpoint (pp. 159–161).

El último malón de Alcides Greca: Repetición y cine de atracciones

Partiendo del eclecticismo de El último malón (1916) película dirigida Alcides Greca, el siguiente artículo sostiene que la repetición y las convenciones del cine de atracciones influyen sobre las presuntas características etnográficas de la cinta. A fin de demostrar dicha premisa, este artículo contextualiza la noción de los pueblos originarios en el imaginario argentino a través de un repaso panorámico de las continuadas políticas genocidas, reforzadas por la violencia epistémica y simbólica resultantes de la borradura de los aportes de los pueblos originarios a través de la reproducción ideológica, particularmente mediante el sistema educativo. La cuestión de la representación, anclada en las convenciones de las películas etnográficas y de los documentales, se apoya en fotografías de la época y fotogramas de la película.

Confronting our Canons: Spanish and Latin American Studies in the 21st Century (review)

Latin Americanist cultural and political thinking from Martí to Kusch and beyond. In other words, one has to wonder if Beasley-Murray’s starting point for politics is what it has always been for Latin Americanism: a subject position, only now no longer understood in national, regional, cultural, or racial terms but rather as “radically open” (234), all-inclusive, and heterogeneous—but a subject position nonetheless. Indeed, while Beasley-Murray acknowledges that the project of reorienting our understanding of power away from ideology and towards habit and affect involves reclaiming “subjectivity” (228), one has to wonder if subjectivity is ever something that has to be reclaimed for Latin American thinking, an intellectual tradition perhaps best understood as focused not on having the right beliefs but instead on having the right subject positions. To insist, in other words, that what matters “is how things present themselves to us, not what they may represent” (205), is to carry out a familiar Latin Americanist exchange—what seems true given who we are instead of what is true—that brings us back to the primacy of the subject. The question, in the end, is whether or not Beasley-Murray’s theorization of posthegemony duplicates, albeit in a radical and ethereal form, the crucial logic of Latin Americanist identitarianism. But this in no way changes the fact that Posthegemony is a book of major theoretical importance and profound political and disciplinary implications. It ranks high within the crowded field of recent work on the relationship between culture and politics in Latin America. Beasley-Murray’s book will be a main point of departure for our most important debates for many years to come.