Marc Zimmerman

Transnational Crossings and the Development of Latin American Cultural Studies

Marc Zimmerman Name-Dropping as Cultural Practice Many Latin American Studies specialists worry much today about the imposition of Europeanizing and occidental models with respect to our field. Some of us call it globalization; a persistent minority still prefers the term, cultural imperialism. But I concur with Ernesto Dussell and others who argue that the so-called third world is implicit in European modernism’s development, and those third world elements are always restructuring modernism, including radical, oppositional critiqueBand even modernism’s transnationalized and globalized monsteroffspring. All this might be cause for celebration; but postcolonial and subaltern deconstructions suggest that even a thousand Latin Americans producing general theory might not make that theory any less Euro-centric or colonial. Such questions and ironies mark this paper. At issue is the evolution of the literary/cultural left and its identification with counter-hegemonic forms of Marxism in the 1960s to cultural studies and now, in our globalized present, to a possible articulation with subaltern studies, and other dissident modes of critique into a working theoretical corpus that does indeed help us grasp Latin American and broader categories. Articulation is the key buzzword for this paper. And it’s tied to other words, like interpellation and appropriation. But to indicate what I mean by this constellation of words, let me do some name-dropping. And where better to start than with some French names? Paris the capital of nineteenth century high culture, and capital again in the 1920s, only regained its hegemony in the post-World War II period as part of a new worldwide division of intellectual, cultural and overall labor that can be related to the Marshall Plan, the Breton Woods

Sinatra: The voice in my life:

It all started with my sister, 10 years my senior, going to the Paramount Theater and coming back a new convert. My sister loved all the famous singers of the 1940s. But now she and her friends grewwild about Frankie—no one like Frankie!Whywere all these Jewish girls, just coming out of depression and war, just learning about the Holocaust, falling for this Italian boy from Hoboken who looked so innocent and sang of love when they knew he was up to no good with eros on the brain and larceny in his heart? The girls knew that Latins (and that meant Italians in those days) were lousy lovers. Sinatra could try a little tenderness, but he could be kinda tough when he had to be. The Jewish girls still dated the Jewish boys, but in their fantasy world they dreamed of others—of CornelWilde as Chopin, of Nelson Eddy in the desert, of Cary Grant wherever, and Frankie, wonderful Frankie. In my sister’s case, she wanted her brother, who had a nice voice, to sing like him. The first thing, even before foisting Frankie’s records on him, was to get him a bowtie. It had to be the right one, so we went to downtown Elizabeth, to Kaye’s Men’s Clothing Store and looked and looked till we came up with that special tie—not too wide, not too narrow, not too bright, not too dark—that would evoke but not imitate the ones of our hero. The only trouble was I was as fat as he was skinny. And I was a morose unhappy boy with the dread of Nazis staring out of my hazel eyes and a fear of losing my sister deep in my heart, while the bright light of an insane national myth shone in Sinatra’s eyes as deep as the Mediterranean off Genoa or Siracusa that not even Mussolini, the mafia, or the mean streets of Hoboken could completely dispel. I was no rapid nor rapt recruit. I hated those hokey songs on The Voice. I didn’t want to admit I needed someone to watch overme; I knew I stood less than a ghost of a chance with any girl I fell for; I knew trying a little tenderness just wouldn’t work for me. But what other options did I have? Perry Como could sing “Till the End of Time”, Dick Haymes could ask “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” but Sinatra was on the Hit Parade and sang everything. I heard him sing “Begin the Beguine,” “Soliloquy” from Carousel, “OldMan River”; I heard all the corn and the kitsch, all the bad, the good, and the best. Early on I heard him sing “Sweet Lorraine” with the Metronome All-Stars and “If You Were but a Dream.” And the best ballads—“I