Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies and Cultural Autonomy

Since the 1920s, when scholars first began to specialize in Latin American writing, the subject of Latin American literary studies has grown from a small subset of Spanish and Portuguese literary research and teaching to become the largest field within Hispanism and a significant presence in comparative literature. The expansion of their place in the academic world has often prompted students of Latin American literature to wonder whether, in being swept into the mainstream, their field has not left out of account the historical situations of Latin American nations. These reflections lead critics back to a problem that has troubled Latin American thinkers since Independence: the achievement, or erosion, of cultural autonomy. Though undeniably close to major powers, the Latin American nations are unequal partners in trade and cultural exchange. Corresponding to their uneven and shifting relations with Europe and later the United States, their cultural life evolves following a distinctive historical dynamic. This article considers recent efforts by scholars and essayists to characterize the features that distinguish Latin America from more politically and economically advantaged nations. Special attention goes to those scholars who, drawing on anthropological research, examine communicative and expressive practices of indigenous origin, and those who borrow from economic theory to view Latin America as shaped by its history of dependence on more powerful nations and regions. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol19/iss2/5 Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies and Cultural Autonomy' Naomi Lindstrom University of Texas at Austin During the twentieth century, and with accelerated speed in recent decades, Latin American literary studies have undergone transformations that have changed the issues that practitioners face. At the century's outset, the prevailing Latin American modernista movement provoked polemics. The discussion, however, took place in cafes, newspapers, and magazines. The academic research and teaching of literature of the early 1900s afforded little space to Latin American literature, considered, if at all, as an extension of the study of Spanish and Portuguese letters. The twentieth-century drive to study Latin American kiting is inseparable from the broader issue of Latin America's search for cultural autonomy. Advocates of Latin American literary studies needed to argue that their subject was not only significant, but different from literary scholarship on Iberian topics. One ofthe first intellectuals to make his name (in the I 920s) as a student of Latin American letters, Pedro Henriquez Urefla, pursued both issues. He promoted university research into and teaching of Latin American literature, and worked to develop a canon. His research specialty was the search for a Latin American identity in intellectual and artistic work, and his outstanding book is Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresion (Six Essays in Search of our Expression, 1928; rev. 1952), on Latin American intellectuals' often tortuous quest to distinguish their cultures from those of the old colonial powers. As the century progressed, and especially from the 1960s onwards, critics of Latin American literature could devote less time to justifying their subject as an academic field or capturing turf from peninsular Spanish and Portuguese studies. Surer of their place, they turned to the more reflective task of considering where their field was heading. This 1 Lindstrom: Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies and Cultural Au Published by New Prairie Press 208 STCL, Volume 19, No. 2 (Summer, 1995) evolution appears clearly in the twentieth-anniversary issue (1992) of Latin American Literary Review Educated Guesses: Personal Reflections on the Future of Latin American Literary Studies (Carlos J. Alonso, ed.). Some contributors evince amazement at the rapidity with which Latin American literature has spread through academia-especially U.S. universities, where the essayists, whatever their origins, are based. Gustavo Pell& sums up: "Three decades ago, few Hispanists would have believed that Latin American literature could challenge the predominance of Peninsular literature in the colleges of the United States. Today, student enrollments, publications, and hiring practices attest to this major rearrangement of Hispanism" (80). Though the 1920s held out few offerings and the 1990s a cornucopia, there is still concern that studies of Latin American literature leave out of account the region's distinct cultural evolution. The observers in Educated Guesses are aware that critics worldwide did not turn to Latin American writing simply because of its merit. Rather, this literature came to their attention via the Boom of the 1960s. That was when the international limelight was on new Latin American fiction, often with a fantastic strain, constructed along typically twentiethcentury lines of experimentation with time, space, and narrative voice. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, recalling that "the study of Latin American litetature was a marginal sub-field . .. in the late sixties," specifies "The Boom of the Latin American novel changed all that" (51). Pell& unhesitatingly attributes the growth of Latin American literary studies to "the popularity and prestige of the novels of the Boom" (80). Boom, an English word for prosperity, is a reminder that Latin American literature spread via the marketing of writing that could sell to foreign publics. Novels successful in translation, such as Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, appealed to connoisseurs of twentieth-century narrative innovation; they required little knowledge of Latin America or its literary history. Pell& notes with unease "the effects of the Boom on the canon and on literary history" (80). A preoccupation common to several responses is that Latin American literature is being used by critics whose focus is not on the historical culture of Latin America, but rather some major theme in twentiethcentury literary studies, defined in European-U.S. terms. Neil Larsen and John Beverley question Anglo-U.S.-style cultural studies on Latin American topics. Both express concern lest English-language academics shape Latinamericanist cultural studies to help resolve their own 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 19, Iss. 2 [1995], Art. 5 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol19/iss2/5 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1371