Doris Sommer

Cultural Agency in the Americas

“Cultural agency” refers to a range of creative activities that contribute to society, including pedagogy, research, activism, and the arts. Focusing on the connections between creativity and social change in the Americas, this collection encourages scholars to become cultural agents by reflecting on exemplary cases and thereby making them available as inspirations for more constructive theory and more innovative practice. Creativity supports democracy because artistic, administrative, and interpretive experiments need margins of freedom that defy monolithic or authoritarian regimes. The ingenious ways in which people pry open dead-ends of even apparently intractable structures suggest that cultural studies as we know it has too often gotten stuck in critique. Intellectual responsibility can get beyond denunciation by acknowledging and nurturing the resourcefulness of common and uncommon agents. Based in North and South America, scholars from fields including anthropology, performance studies, history, literature, and communications studies explore specific variations of cultural agency across Latin America. Contributors reflect, for example, on the paradoxical programming and reception of a state-controlled Cuban radio station that connects listeners at home and abroad; on the intricacies of indigenous protests in Brazil; and the formulation of cultural policies in cosmopolitan Mexico City. One contributor notes that trauma theory targets individual victims when it should address collective memory as it is worked through in performance and ritual; another examines how Mapuche leaders in Argentina perceived the pitfalls of ethnic essentialism and developed new ways to intervene in local government. Whether suggesting modes of cultural agency, tracking exemplary instances of it, or cautioning against potential missteps, the essays in this book encourage attentiveness to, and the multiplication of, the many extraordinary instantiations of cultural resourcefulness and creativity throughout Latin America and beyond. Contributors. Arturo Arias, Claudia Briones, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Denise Corte, Juan Carlos Godenzzi, Charles R. Hale, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Claudio Lomnitz, Jesus Martin Barbero, J. Lorand Matory, Rosamel Millaman, Diane M. Nelson, Mary Louise Pratt, Alcida Rita Ramos, Doris Sommer, Diana Taylor, Santiago Villaveces

Allegory and Dialectics: A Match Made in Romance

Since Paul de Mans widely influential writings on allegory, we tend to approach this double figure at its inviolably empty core, that irreducible distance across which language seems to strain toward unachievable meaning. The distance is what keeps words and their referents in a parallel, allegorical suspension. In early essays and especially in the later Allegories of Reading,1 de Man made no secret of his principal debt to Nietzsche for this formulation, but some of his readers probably found him rather less generous with respect to a closer and more immediately relevant master, Walter Benjamin. Who but Benjamin had bothered to dust off the notion of allegory and deploy it for modern criticism?2 For those of us who might

El mal de María: (Con)fusión en un romance nacional

Maria (1867), de Jorge Isaacs, es la novela nacional de Colombia,1 y probablemente la de mayor popularidad en toda Hispanoamerica hasta hace muy poco. Ha sido mas leida y mas imitada que ninguna otra novela, y tambien ha sido tema de peliculas, tanto antiguas como recientes.2 Mas su abrumadora acogida y su consagracion canonica son sorprendentes, casi perversas, ya que Maria dista mucho de la literatura comprometida de la epoca hecha en Colombia y en el resto de America Latina.3 Una novela como Man-

Supplying demand: Walt Whitman as the liberal self

(1986). Supplying demand: Walt Whitman as the liberal self. New Political Science: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 39-61.

Schiller and Company, or How Habermas Incites Us to Play

and reasonable principle, indifferent to human passions and material needs, do violence to the very humanity they would set free. Schil lers remedy for revolution is an aesthetic education that includes both playing with existing materials and appreciating the artworks that issue from it, because play exercises our human faculties in ways that embrace antagonism and contain it. To be moved by an aesthetically pleasing effect is to acknowledge, for a moment or for as long as the experience lasts, a success in wrestling material into new forms, repairing the damage that flesh and spirit do to one another. At precarious peace in the world, an artist or an admirer?both count as active citizens for Schiller, though real fans play at being artists?achieves freedom and invites others to share and to cultivate the experience. And, since wrestling with matter and circumstance takes discipline and training, Schiller offers his series of letters as encouragement and advice to develop the Spieltrieb.

The Art of Analgesia: A Pilot Study of Art Museum Tours to Decrease Pain and Social Disconnection Among Individuals with Chronic Pain.

Objective. This mixed‐methods study examines the feasibility of art museum tours (Art Rx) as an intervention for individuals with chronic pain. Methods. Art Rx provided 1‐hour docent‐led tours in an art museum to individuals with chronic pain. Survey data were collected pre‐tour, immediately post‐tour, and at three weeks post‐tour. Pain intensity and unpleasantness were measured with a 0–10 numerical rating scale. Social disconnection was measured with a 12‐item social disconnection scale. Participants also reported percent pain relief during the tour and program satisfaction in the post‐tour survey. Change in pain and social disconnection was analyzed with paired t tests, bias‐corrected and accelerated bootstrap confidence intervals (BCa CIs), and Cohens d. Thematic analysis of semistructured interviews with participants explored the feasibility and perceived impact of the program. Results. Fifty‐four individuals participated in this study (mean age [SD] = 59 [14.5] years, 64.8% female), and 14 were interviewed. Fifty‐seven percent of participants reported pain relief during the tour, with an average pain relief (SD) of 47% (34.61%). Participants reported decreased social disconnection and pain unpleasantness pre‐ to post‐tour (3.65, BCa 95% CI = 1.70–5.73, P < 0.001, d = 0.37; and 0.49, BCa 95% CI = 0.06–0.90, P = 0.016, d = 0.20, respectively). Participants indicated high satisfaction with the program. Interviewees remarked on the isolating impact of chronic pain and how negative experiences with the health care system often compounded this sense of isolation. Participants experienced Art Rx as a positive and inclusive experience, with potential lasting benefit. Conclusions. Art museum tours for individuals with chronic pain are feasible, and participants reported positive effects on perceived social disconnection and pain.

White-Out: Erasing Sab from her Life's Work

Abstract The former slave who prefers not to be free of his beloved mistress and whose mixed colour and noble manner frustrate facile identifications, is an almost autobiographical literary vehicle for his author, the Cuban-Spanish young woman who refused to abide by established roles. Through Sab, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda turns a tired and deterritorialized inherited language into a field of struggle for new meanings and local uses.

Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas (review)

Hinojosa’s Klail City narratives to the bestsellers of Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, offering some Canadian examples as well. The different political valence of these narratives, Adams argues, ‘‘shows the tenacity of nationalism within a transnational literary form’’ (216). Finally, in Chapter Six, Adams compellingly argues that the influx of Latin American exiles into Canada from the 1980s onward has produced literary theorizations of migration and assimilation that both echo and deviate from better-known mejicano examples. Her reading of stories and plays by the Argentinian–Canadian Guillermo Verdecchia shows convincingly that the ‘‘northern borderlands’’ must be considered in any broad conception of what Juan Poblete calls Latin@America: they require both an amplification of the category ‘‘Latino’’ and a rethinking of models of border subjectivity that derive from it. The book feels a little rushed as it moves toward these final two chapters, which seek to show ‘‘how a genre travels and the fascinating things it can reveal as it is absorbed into a new context’’ (216): both are noticeably shorter than the others. In the end, the only weakness of Divided Continents may lie in its very honesty about the conceptual limitations of the North American idea. Readers will almost inevitably want to pitch in materials that might challenge this frame: what happens when we consider the construct of North America from Mexico’s border with Guatemala, for instance, or when we introduce a different geographical fiction like Mesoamerica into the discussion of transnational indigeneity? But these are the very sorts of questions and quibbles that this generous book encourages. While the primary audience it addresses may be US Americanists, it has much to offer anyone seeking to understand the peculiar cultural formation called into being by the name of NAFTA. With demand for courses in Latina/o and border studies increasing day by day, Latin Americanists will continue seeking points of dialogue with their counterparts in English departments who are attempting to meet this need within the limitations of their own training. An institutional encuentro between colleagues in different departments could do much worse than to assign this book as required reading.Preface Introduction: Misplaced Objects and Subject Matters Part I: The Object as Specimen 1. Misplaced Objects from the Americas and the Emergence of the European Wunderkammern 2. Transatlantic Subject Matters and Big Bones: The Real Gabinete de Historia Natural de Madrid 3. Writing the Natural History of Our Destruction: From P. T. Barnums National Histrionics to Contemporary, Post-Apocalyptic Wunderkammern Part II: Migrating Icons and Sacred Geographies in the Americas 4. GuadalupeNation: Disappearing Objects, National Narratives 5. Guadalupes Wheels: Runaway Image, Undocumented Border Crosser, Miracle Worker 6. The New Mexico/New Mestizo Effect: Enchanted and Otherwise Enacted Spaces Part III: Found Objects and Re-Collecting Subjects 7. Re-Collecting the Past: Latinidads Found Objects, Photographs, and Home Altars 8. Sandra Ramos and the Cuban Diaspora: La vida no cabe en una maleta Epilogue Notes Works Cited Index

Ethical Asymmetries: Learning to Love a Loss

A few years ago, I wrote a sober “Advertencia/Warning” to preface Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (1999). That book offered provisional names and examples of bilingual and other tropes that maneuver in the asymmetries that classical rhetoric doesn’t consider, because the classics count on cultural continuity between orator and public. The new tropes call attention to the culturally coded unevenness of information and power, especially when minority artists play to mixed audiences. Moves can hold out a chance for authorial intimacy with the reader and then hold back. “Slaps and embraces” Toni Morrison called the syncopated rhythm of minority performances, calibrated to whet desire and then to leave a lover unsatisfied. Why should a reader presume to get satisfaction or to achieve reciprocity when the decks of power are unevenly stacked? Unevenness is the point in minority writing that refuses to pander to power. Should we miss the point, trying harder to level the playing field by leveling the opposition? That would be to cultivate misrecognition, not improved reading habits.