Francine Masiello

The art of transition : Latin American culture and neoliberal crisis

The Art of Transition addresses the problems defined by writers and artists during the postdictatorship years in Argentina and Chile, years in which both countries aggressively adopted neoliberal market-driven economies. Delving into the conflicting efforts of intellectuals to name and speak to what is real, Francine Masiello interprets the culture of this period as an art of transition, referring to both the political transition to democracy and the formal strategies of wrestling with this change that are found in the aesthetic realm. Masiello views representation as both a political and artistic device, concerned with the tensions between truth and lies, experience and language, and intellectuals and the marginal subjects they study and claim to defend. These often contentious negotiations, she argues, are most provocatively displayed through the spectacle of difference, which constantly crosses the literary stage, the market, and the North/South divide. While forcefully defending the ability of literature and art to advance ethical positions and to foster a critical view of neoliberalism, Masiello especially shows how issues of gender and sexuality function as integrating threads throughout this cultural project. Through discussions of visual art as well as literary work by prominent novelists and poets, Masiello sketches a broad landscape of vivid intellectual debate in the Southern Cone of Latin America. The Art of Transition will interest Latin Americanists,literary and political theorists, art critics and historians, and those involved with the study of postmodernism and globalization.

Scribbling on the Wreck

On the way to Cafayate, somewhere north of Tucuman, the ruined citadel of the Quilmes Indians allows me the leisure of pausing. Perched on the pinnacle of what was once the fortress of a mighty nation, I admire the heights that I have scaled; I stretch my gaze over the horizon; I try to imagine life as it might have been before time swept it all away. Nonetheless, these are not free thoughts, unshackled from any earlier logic. After all, the guidebook has intervened far before my arrival, alerting me to the story of the rise and fall of this once flourishing culture. The largest settlement in Argentina before the Conquest, the Quilmes first resisted the Inca empire and then, for 130 years, opposed the power of Spanish invaders. We know from the tour books that the Spaniards dragged the last Quilmes survivors on foot to Buenos Aires. Most perished in the march. We are also told that the ruins were rehabilitated during Videla’s military dictatorship (1976–1983). Who then can escape the irony of the junta’s gesture, staged in 1978, possibly its cruelest moment, of remembering its native peoples who, much like 30,000 citizens under military rule, had also been disappeared? This is an all-too familiar narrative that runs from Wounded Knee to Tierra del Fuego: first we kill indigenous peoples and later we return as tourists to celebrate their achievements.

Reading for the People and Getting There First

It is 5 a.m. and the airport van scoops me up from my Berkeley doorstep. Listless, I prepare for yet one more transcontinental trip, papers in order, flash drive tucked in, tomatoes from my garden for those porteno friends long stuck in the gloom of winter. I am exhausted by the prospect of travel even as I leave my house. Nonetheless, the sociology of criticism kicks in, a motor without a mind, while the van meanders through the local streets toward the freeway and then the airport. I see one, two, eight homeless men pushing shopping carts in these predawn hours. Beating the municipal garbage collectors by an easy stretch, they forage for that scrap of glass or cardboard that will claim some redemptive value. I have scarcely paid them heed over time, but today they claim my attention. After all, I’m en route to Buenos Aires to see the cartoneros [garbage pickers]. Slumped on the bus, I can’t help asking about the irony of my tourist-like gesture. Clearly, I have my own cartoneros, my homeless neighbors at home. What allows me to think that the Argentine condition will solicit something different? I also remind myself that if I’m in a quandary, my middle-class Argentine colleagues haven’t managed this problem much better.