How meaningful is it to think of Cesar Vallejo as a representative of a non-Western tradition, a tradition opposed to the Western tradition and certainly to Western modernity? Two subsidiary questions immediately arise: what do we... more
How meaningful is it to think of Cesar Vallejo as a representative of a non-Western tradition, a tradition opposed to the Western tradition and certainly to Western modernity? Two subsidiary questions immediately arise: what do we understand by the phrase non-Western and what would it mean here to be a “representative”? I shall approach these questions by drawing in turn on two traditions of criticism that have acquired prominence in the Western academy in recent decades and at the heart of which lies an overt political concern to redress the intellectual as much as political misrepresentation of those areas of the globe that fall outside the main Western powerbloc. The respective traditions are those of postcolonial theory and Latin American cultural studies.
Research Interests: History, Politics, Modernity, Redress, Criticism, and 5 moreEurocentrism, Misrepresentation, Globe, Phrase, and Western Thought
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Borges wrote repeatedly—obsessively—about the stubborn contradiction between conventional linear time and the (Greek) time of eternity.1 The present chapter relates this “habit” to the broader question of Borges’s understanding of... more
Borges wrote repeatedly—obsessively—about the stubborn contradiction between conventional linear time and the (Greek) time of eternity.1 The present chapter relates this “habit” to the broader question of Borges’s understanding of tradition and modernity. Or, rather, traditions and modernities. For in Borges, both tradition and modernity may be taken in two main ways. Tradition is the popular cultural forms, figures, and social relations of the nineteenth-century Southern Cone, but also the order of revealed knowledge about the world that held sway before the advent of secular modernity. Modernity is the (problematic) name given to a historical phase of socioeconomic development, but also an aesthetico-philosophical condition characterized by a questioning of received knowledge and authority, and by the production of novelty. The interest of the relationship between tradition and modernity, and between eternal and linear time, lies in their messy entanglement, not in their separateness. Modernity may be dominated by el tiempo que pasa, but it is not reducible to it; tradition may have been dominated by la identidad que perdura, but is not oblivious to the river of successive time.2 In Borges, the time of eternity is one “habit” among many used to criticize modernity and affirm tradition, even if, as Pierre Menard came to understand, the direct recitation of fragments of tradition necessarily alters it.
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Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
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Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
... For, in addition to temporal criteria, a no less defining element of postcolonialism is an attitude of 'contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism',7 illustrated in ... As time passes, and we keep... more
... For, in addition to temporal criteria, a no less defining element of postcolonialism is an attitude of 'contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism',7 illustrated in ... As time passes, and we keep re-reading Fanon, perhaps the similarities between American ...
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William Rowe’s Hacia una poetica radical: Ensayos de hermeneutica cultural is a book that, as Rowe is fond of saying about cultural fields, radiates ideas.1 In an era obsessed with programmatic—that is, assessable—research, it calls for... more
William Rowe’s Hacia una poetica radical: Ensayos de hermeneutica cultural is a book that, as Rowe is fond of saying about cultural fields, radiates ideas.1 In an era obsessed with programmatic—that is, assessable—research, it calls for “intellectual adventure,” while unable itself, not surprisingly and perhaps by virtue of an essay format that rehearses similar arguments in relation to different case-studies, to escape a certain programmaticity.2 The book deals with literature produced in Peru, Paraguay, and the Southern Cone of Latin America against a backdrop of undeclared civil wars and other less apparent, more symbolic forms of violence. Announcing itself as a work of cultural studies, it is a cultural studies grafted onto an avant-garde literary-critical project. What is unusual about the book is that it deploys insights derived from a post-quantum theoretical field in the service of a “cultural hermeneutics.” In short, the most radical twentieth-century thought is enlisted to renew one of the most traditional theoretical legacies. Rowe’s otherwise unique work is paradigmatic of contemporary cultural studies’ central mission, which is to understand the power relations that structure a cultural context. These power relations are articulated through a diverse range of cultural materials.
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... By contrast, Valle-Castillo claims, the Sandinistas popularized the poet by trans-forming him into "carne viva" [living flesh], a characterization that ... The conflict between these classes informed... more
... By contrast, Valle-Castillo claims, the Sandinistas popularized the poet by trans-forming him into "carne viva" [living flesh], a characterization that ... The conflict between these classes informed new albeit shifting cul-tural boundaries, or what Adam Sharman calls "una cultura de ...
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... I am indebted to Alejandro Riberi and Trevor Stack for their constructive comments on certain chapters, and above all to Guillenno Olivera for generously sharing with me his pro-found knowledge of Latin American cultural studies. ...
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... I am indebted to Alejandro Riberi and Trevor Stack for their constructive comments on certain chapters, and above all to Guillenno Olivera for generously sharing with me his pro-found knowledge of Latin American cultural studies. ...
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Nestor Garcia Canclini’s Culturas hibridas is a violent book. Even if it does not thematize violence, and even if it is written in order to open up a cultural field hitherto considered restricted and undemocratic, Culturas hibridas is a... more
Nestor Garcia Canclini’s Culturas hibridas is a violent book. Even if it does not thematize violence, and even if it is written in order to open up a cultural field hitherto considered restricted and undemocratic, Culturas hibridas is a violent book. It confronts instances of a “modern” culture deemed violent in its elitism and meets their violence with a violence of its own, refusing to judge thein on their own terms, assessing them according to the dictates of a “scientific” sociology of culture, and moving on apace. Much of the book’s suasive force, but also its violence, derives from this pace, the sense that a critical eye is ranging rapidly over objects from all walks of life in a ceaseless mapping of the materials that form the hybrid cultures of Latin America in the late 1980s. A decrease in speed, or at least a gesture in the direction of a decrease in speed, together with a less hostile view of high culture, may be observed in La globalizacion imaginada. 2 Suffice it to indicate for the moment that the question of speed in that book is closely related to the question of democracy and the public sphere; to the possibility that what he conies to call the “slow” economy of high-artistic production might better serve the democratic interests of the public sphere than the fast culture that more generally circulates there.
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A time and a place: the turn of the nineteenth century in Spanish America. Together this time and place comprise a context. A context, no doubt, of “deficient” socioeconomic modernization, but also, of books and ideas and other things... more
A time and a place: the turn of the nineteenth century in Spanish America. Together this time and place comprise a context. A context, no doubt, of “deficient” socioeconomic modernization, but also, of books and ideas and other things besides (such as a political and economic model) that do not originate from that time and that place. A context is always an intricate weave, not just a scenic “background” to be taken as read. In that dense context of turn-of-the-century Spanish America, what has come to be known as modernismo, the first (relatively) autonomous artistic movement of any note to take hold in the subcontinent, makes two of the founding moves of European modernity. First, it navies itself (the Enlightenment was the first to do this); and second, in naming itself as modern it insists on the break that it represents in relation to the past, which it desires to wipe out. “Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.” The quotation is from Paul de Man’s exemplary essay, “Literary History and Literary Modernity”, in which he steers a course through Nietzsche’s primarily philosophico-aesthetic concept of modernity, or what Nietzsche called “life.”
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Research Interests: History and Dictatorship
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The essays in the volume deal with different case studies belonging to the fields of media, law, historiography, literature, art, photography, theatre, etc.; and they address the predicaments of quite diverse post-conflict cultures, from... more
The essays in the volume deal with different case studies belonging to the fields of media, law, historiography, literature, art, photography, theatre, etc.; and they address the predicaments of quite diverse post-conflict cultures, from that of Portugal and Angola after the fall of the Empire, to Chile and Argentina post-dictatorship; from the role of gender and identity, to that of education and human rights organizations. Given the broad spectrum of the objects they investigate, and the multidisciplinary perspective they effectively put to work, to divide them into neat and well- defined sections based on a category, a genre, a topic, or geographies has proved to be a difficult task. Hence, albeit grouped in six sections (Media and Law, Histories, Visual and Performance Cultures, Genres of Testimonies/ Genres of Reconstruction, Portugal and its lost Empire, Post- dictatorship times and archives in Argentina and Chile), their sequencing mainly reflects the order in which they have...
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Research Interests: Art History and Art
The chapter examines eighteenth-century European philosophical histories of America’s supposed backwardness and Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero’s brilliant refutation. Sharman identifies in them a materialist stadial theory of... more
The chapter examines eighteenth-century European philosophical histories of America’s supposed backwardness and Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero’s brilliant refutation. Sharman identifies in them a materialist stadial theory of civilisation and sees Montesquieu’s doux commerce harden into an entire, advanced “stage” of humanity called commercial society. The chapter shows that the key point for Montesquieu is, in fact, spirit rather than a society’s material development, Christian-Enlightenment morality marking the dividing line between moderns and ancients. Sharman suggests provocatively that a certain postmodernism is the heir to Enlightenment moeurs. Using deconstruction, he also exemplifies, however, how commerce both facilitates the step up to modernity and, through its selfish calculating spirit, negates the step up, such that commerce simultaneously affirms and negates the would-be straight line of civilisation.
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Borges wrote repeatedly—obsessively—about the stubborn contradiction between conventional linear time and the (Greek) time of eternity.1 The present chapter relates this “habit” to the broader question of Borges’s understanding of... more
Borges wrote repeatedly—obsessively—about the stubborn contradiction between conventional linear time and the (Greek) time of eternity.1 The present chapter relates this “habit” to the broader question of Borges’s understanding of tradition and modernity. Or, rather, traditions and modernities. For in Borges, both tradition and modernity may be taken in two main ways. Tradition is the popular cultural forms, figures, and social relations of the nineteenth-century Southern Cone, but also the order of revealed knowledge about the world that held sway before the advent of secular modernity. Modernity is the (problematic) name given to a historical phase of socioeconomic development, but also an aesthetico-philosophical condition characterized by a questioning of received knowledge and authority, and by the production of novelty. The interest of the relationship between tradition and modernity, and between eternal and linear time, lies in their messy entanglement, not in their separateness. Modernity may be dominated by el tiempo que pasa, but it is not reducible to it; tradition may have been dominated by la identidad que perdura, but is not oblivious to the river of successive time.2 In Borges, the time of eternity is one “habit” among many used to criticize modernity and affirm tradition, even if, as Pierre Menard came to understand, the direct recitation of fragments of tradition necessarily alters it.
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According to conventional understanding, modernity is the name given to an epoch of European history that marks the passage from the age of revelation, where to produce means to discover or reveal the already given, to the age of... more
According to conventional understanding, modernity is the name given to an epoch of European history that marks the passage from the age of revelation, where to produce means to discover or reveal the already given, to the age of production, understood as the techno-scientific invention of something hitherto unknown, an age bound up with the new value placed on humanitas. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether such a definition is or is not Eurocentric, recent work on Latin American modernity done under the aegis of cultural studies defines modernity differently.1 This definition has not been sufficiently discussed. In contrast to the idea of European modernity as an epoch beginning sometime around the year 1500, Latin American cultural studies holds that modernity arrives in the region not before the end of the nineteenth century and possibly as late as the 1920s and 1930s (Sarlo, Martin-Barbero) or even the 1950s (Garcia Canclini, Brunner).2 In short, Latin American modernity is a child of the Second Industrial Revolution.
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A time and a place: the turn of the nineteenth century in Spanish America. Together this time and place comprise a context. A context, no doubt, of “deficient” socioeconomic modernization, but also, of books and ideas and other things... more
A time and a place: the turn of the nineteenth century in Spanish America. Together this time and place comprise a context. A context, no doubt, of “deficient” socioeconomic modernization, but also, of books and ideas and other things besides (such as a political and economic model) that do not originate from that time and that place. A context is always an intricate weave, not just a scenic “background” to be taken as read. In that dense context of turn-of-the-century Spanish America, what has come to be known as modernismo, the first (relatively) autonomous artistic movement of any note to take hold in the subcontinent, makes two of the founding moves of European modernity. First, it navies itself (the Enlightenment was the first to do this); and second, in naming itself as modern it insists on the break that it represents in relation to the past, which it desires to wipe out. “Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at l...
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
How meaningful is it to think of Cesar Vallejo as a representative of a non-Western tradition, a tradition opposed to the Western tradition and certainly to Western modernity? Two subsidiary questions immediately arise: what do we... more
How meaningful is it to think of Cesar Vallejo as a representative of a non-Western tradition, a tradition opposed to the Western tradition and certainly to Western modernity? Two subsidiary questions immediately arise: what do we understand by the phrase non-Western and what would it mean here to be a “representative”? I shall approach these questions by drawing in turn on two traditions of criticism that have acquired prominence in the Western academy in recent decades and at the heart of which lies an overt political concern to redress the intellectual as much as political misrepresentation of those areas of the globe that fall outside the main Western powerbloc. The respective traditions are those of postcolonial theory and Latin American cultural studies.
William Rowe’s Hacia una poetica radical: Ensayos de hermeneutica cultural is a book that, as Rowe is fond of saying about cultural fields, radiates ideas.1 In an era obsessed with programmatic—that is, assessable—research, it calls for... more
William Rowe’s Hacia una poetica radical: Ensayos de hermeneutica cultural is a book that, as Rowe is fond of saying about cultural fields, radiates ideas.1 In an era obsessed with programmatic—that is, assessable—research, it calls for “intellectual adventure,” while unable itself, not surprisingly and perhaps by virtue of an essay format that rehearses similar arguments in relation to different case-studies, to escape a certain programmaticity.2 The book deals with literature produced in Peru, Paraguay, and the Southern Cone of Latin America against a backdrop of undeclared civil wars and other less apparent, more symbolic forms of violence. Announcing itself as a work of cultural studies, it is a cultural studies grafted onto an avant-garde literary-critical project. What is unusual about the book is that it deploys insights derived from a post-quantum theoretical field in the service of a “cultural hermeneutics.” In short, the most radical twentieth-century thought is enlisted to renew one of the most traditional theoretical legacies. Rowe’s otherwise unique work is paradigmatic of contemporary cultural studies’ central mission, which is to understand the power relations that structure a cultural context. These power relations are articulated through a diverse range of cultural materials.
Research Interests:
The chapter examines the idea of the individual as the normative subject of modernity, in a reading of Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento (1816). It traces the novel’s invention of the Mexican individual to Rousseau’s view of the mind and... more
The chapter examines the idea of the individual as the normative subject of modernity, in a reading of Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento (1816). It traces the novel’s invention of the Mexican individual to Rousseau’s view of the mind and education, but more radically to Christianity and monarchical absolutism. Sharman highlights Lizardi’s picaresque critique of the idle noble as a cypher for the Hispanic world’s failures of political economy. He identifies as the pivotal egalitarian gesture the shift in understanding from nobility as birth to nobility as quality. This permits the novel’s revalorisation of Indians, foreigners, slaves, and the mechanical trades. Sharman shows that, even if individual equality is trumped by the “natural” hierarchies demanded by political economy, the Hispanic Enlightenment’s “moderate” reforms are haunted by “radical” philosophy.
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Nestor Garcia Canclini’s Culturas hibridas is a violent book. Even if it does not thematize violence, and even if it is written in order to open up a cultural field hitherto considered restricted and undemocratic, Culturas hibridas is a... more
Nestor Garcia Canclini’s Culturas hibridas is a violent book. Even if it does not thematize violence, and even if it is written in order to open up a cultural field hitherto considered restricted and undemocratic, Culturas hibridas is a violent book. It confronts instances of a “modern” culture deemed violent in its elitism and meets their violence with a violence of its own, refusing to judge thein on their own terms, assessing them according to the dictates of a “scientific” sociology of culture, and moving on apace. Much of the book’s suasive force, but also its violence, derives from this pace, the sense that a critical eye is ranging rapidly over objects from all walks of life in a ceaseless mapping of the materials that form the hybrid cultures of Latin America in the late 1980s. A decrease in speed, or at least a gesture in the direction of a decrease in speed, together with a less hostile view of high culture, may be observed in La globalizacion imaginada. 2 Suffice it to indicate for the moment that the question of speed in that book is closely related to the question of democracy and the public sphere; to the possibility that what he conies to call the “slow” economy of high-artistic production might better serve the democratic interests of the public sphere than the fast culture that more generally circulates there.
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The question of tradition has been at the heart of recent debates on the cultural production of Juan Rulfo, most notably the debate stemming from Angel Rama’s work on transculturation.1 Rama’s thesis concerning transculturation is that,... more
The question of tradition has been at the heart of recent debates on the cultural production of Juan Rulfo, most notably the debate stemming from Angel Rama’s work on transculturation.1 Rama’s thesis concerning transculturation is that, in the wake of processes of modernization in Latin America, there emerges a new generation of writers rooted in a rural environment but receptive to modern artistic developments. It takes this new generation to do artistic justice to the traditional cultures of Latin America. The transculturators, as Rama puts it in the original 1974 essay, “built the bridges necessary to recover the cultures of the regions […] by making use of the artistic potential of modernity in an unprecedented and original way. ”2 Aside from myth, the principal material with which the transculturators worked was language. Regional speech was no longer relegated to the margins of a text, but instead woven into the main narrative voice through a process of “unificacion textual.” Transculturation is not confined to the question of language, since at stake are culture and anthropos. “Fidelity to the environment culminated in a fidelity to […] the cosmology which held together the elements of a culture” (Rama, “Processes,” p. 67). This is the real prize. Not just fidelity to rural speech, but faithfulness to an entire cosmovision—that of the marginalized and the oppressed.
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The thesis begins by examining the philosophical underpinnings of Foucault's 'constitutionalist' methodology. It argues that the archaeological method of The Order of Things derives principally neither from phenomenology nor... more
The thesis begins by examining the philosophical underpinnings of Foucault's 'constitutionalist' methodology. It argues that the archaeological method of The Order of Things derives principally neither from phenomenology nor structuralism, but from a philosophical and scholarly tradition (that of Kant, Cassirer, Duhem, Koyre) in which mathematics, the scientific revolution of Galileo et al, and an a priori conceptualism are paramount. It suggests that the rigid gathering of conceptual energies into the notion of episteme finds an echo in the subsequent genealogical work on prisons. The thesis challenges the widely-held view that Foucault is a Nietzschean thinker, maintaining that his overstatement of the constitutionalist powers of 'discipline' is conditioned as much by a strong Cartesianism as by his residual structuralism. The thesis shows how the Classical theme of order informs Foucault's attempt to develop a modern theory of the constitution of the subject in discourse. It postulates that the much-traduced first volume on sexuality, which introduces time into his theory and embraces many of the truisms of twentieth-century theoretical science, exhibits a less rigid understanding of constitutionalist powers. The penultimate chapter addresses, in the context of accusations of Eurocentrism levelled at Foucault's work, some of the shortcomings of theoretico-political work which fails to think through the 'deconstitution' of power, the play between order and disorder. Finally, a profound continuity is posited between the archaeological method of The Order of Things and his treatment of sexuality. Rejecting the suggestion of an epistemological break, the thesis discovers the strategic invocation, in the final two volumes, of a very traditional understanding of reason. Diverging from those critics who only hear in Foucault the insistent theme of specificity and the persistent denunciation of reason and (technological) rationality, the thesis maintains that his writings effect a constant appeal to logos as order and reason.