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Hctor Hoyos, Marlia Librandi-Rocha

Revista de Estudios Hispnicos, Tomo XLVIII, Nmero 1, Marzo 2014,

pp. 97-103 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/rvs.2014.0018

For additional information about this article

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97

Shortened Title

HCTOR HOYOS AND MARLIA LIBRANDI-ROCHA

Introduction
The articles in this dossier originate in an international colloquium entitled What is the Contemporary? that took place at
Stanford University on May 2122, 2012.1 We had the good fortune of
having several distinguished speakers, some of them contributors here,
approach this question in broad terms and with a special interest in
Latin America. Our simple, yet compelling point of departure was the
observation that the contemporary, as a critical category and an object
of study, is often taken for granted or entirely omitted from academic
discussion. Courses are taught and books are edited with the modifier contemporary as an organizing principleas in Contemporary
Poetry from the Americas or Contemporary Brazilian Cinemabut
these coinages beg the question of what exactly the contemporary is.
Even at the most basic, etymological level, the idea of sharing the
times leads to asking when would that shared epoch begin, who shares
it and how, and so forth. Declaring by fiat that contemporary Latin
American literature, for instance, begins in key historical turning points
like 1898, 1945, 1989, or 2001 is easily suspect of arbitrariness. Similarly, equating contemporary with modern, although grammatically correct, eludes an investigation about the aesthetic values associated with
each of these evocative terms. Once we started to examine the matter
more closely, and to ponder on the specific ramifications of the problem
for Latin America, we found ourselves with a veritable field of inquiry.
It is high time to study the contemporary. Much scholarship assumes it is the purview of journalistic criticism, and waits for consensus
to arise before considering it a viable subject of analysis. Higher learning
favors the study of the past over the present, which adds institutional
blindness to the inherent difficulty of considering a changing object, as
the idiom goes, in real time. This is all the more pervasive in the case of
Latin American culture, which does not circulate in mainstream metropolitan humanistic discourse, and is thus relegated to an always-already
Revista de Estudios Hispnicos 48 (2014)

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Hctor Hoyos and Marlia Librandi-Rocha

past condition in many academic settings. Global English seems to be,

for all intents and purposes, the language of the contemporary. Translations from Spanish or Portuguese, the most influential languages spoken
in Latin America, hardly match translations into them. At the same
time, the rise of social media and other technologies has ambiguous effects: on the one hand, it holds the promise of immediate relevance, of
overcoming the obstacles to cultural exchange that hitherto existed; on
the other, they bring about a form of presentism that disperses attention
and forecloses historical depth.
Giorgio Agamben provides the articles in this collection with
a common, underlying critical strategy. Glossing Nietzsches Untimely
Meditations, the Italian thinker asserts that [t]hose who are truly
contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither
perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands (40).
Further emphasizing disjuncture, Agamben goes on to define the true
contemporary, in metaphoric terms, as someone who firmly holds his
gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness (44). Contributors have undertaken the task of being themselves
contemporaries in the latter sense. As a result, the essays presented here
not only reflect on the contemporary at a purely conceptual, abstract,
or theoretical level, they also expand on the implications of this asynchronic outlook for the practice of literary criticism, for the configuration of our field, and for the study of specific cultural products that may
respond to this model. The essays in this volume belong to each of these
strands of reflection.
Another important referent that is at the background of several
contributions is the work of Pascale Casanova. Influenced by Bourdieu,
Casanova famously speaks of a Greenwich meridian of world literature,
which makes it possible to estimate the relative aesthetic distance from
the center of the world of letters of all those who belong to it (World
Republic 88). Critics have bemoaned Casanovas alleged Eurocentrism,
in our opinion confusing the descriptive and the prescriptive aspects of
her argument.2 She describes how Paris, as a legacy of colonial power
but also as a reflection of its rich public sphere, has been, and in many
regards still is, at the center of world literature. This she considers to
be a matter of fact, given the dynamics of translation, representation,
and dissemination in a consolidated global literary market. Her prescriptive side is about empowering the disenfranchised of the literary

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99

world order, not about reifying theirour?condition. For Casanova,

synchronization can be a radical force of change: it is by attaining
newness that semi-peripheral authors can transform the power structure. Her chief example is Rubn Daros well-known appropriation
of French symbolism (Casanova, Literature 88). Here we arrive at
something of an aporia. Does Daro gain prominence by assimilating
Parisian culture, as Casanova claims, or does Casanova herself reconstitute French literary capital by ventriloquizing Daro? It is tempting,
following this train of thought, to estrange oneself from actual reading
communities. At the colloquium, and in the full-fledged, self-standing
contributions featured here, we actually engaged with French-based
scholars, from Universit Paris 8, in a conversation on Latin Americanism and theory. It became evident that perceiving the darkness of
the contemporary, to revisit Agambens words, is not something that
emanates from a center into the periphery, but the result of complex
transactions across several locales.
After Alberto Moreiras, one may characterize Latin Americanism as the sum total of academic discourse on Latin America
whether carried out in Latin America, the United States, in Europe,
or elsewhere (qtd. in Beverley 1). This compilation features practitioners from the three main realms Moreiras alludes to, in an effort to
investigate asynchronicity across their respective discursive communities. Although Spanish and English are their languages of trade, they
actively involve Portuguese and French in their work, sometimes as
native speakers. We find that this multilingual, multipolar approach
allows direct access to theory and primary sources, without the lag of
translation and transposition.
Idelber Avelar inaugurates this dossier with his essay, Contemporary Intersections of Ecology and Culture: On Amerindian
Perspectivism and the Critique of Anthropocentrism. In an effort to
characterize our epoch in broad, encompassing terms, he borrows from
Dipesh Chakrabartys notion of the Anthropocene, a new geological era
defined by the effects of mankind on the environment. In conversation
with the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castros notion
of the internalization of nature and the Argentinean philosopher Fabin Ludueas work on biopolitics, among other sources, Avelar shows
how Latin America, and the Amazon in particular, has become a major
terrain for rethinking the intersection between cultural history and

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Hctor Hoyos and Marlia Librandi-Rocha

natural history. The task for a truly contemporary mode of research in

the humanities would be the critique of anthropocentrisma default,
long-standing basis for our efforts that has become, as of late, untenable.
Meanwhile, Lionel Ruffel traces the trajectory of the term
contemporary, punctuated by its Latin American configurations.
His article, entitled What is the Contemporary? Brief Archeology of
a Question, offers a cultural history of the topic. Ruffels invaluable
documentation takes us from Rosario to Boston, the United Kingdom,
and Santiago, among other sites where the question has been asked.
The author considers several media, including the plastic arts, where
the term contemporary articulates cultural capital. By interrogating
the successive births of the contemporary, Ruffel delivers a compelling
Foucaultian reflection on the institutionalization and naturalization
of the investigation of the contemporary. In his words, he shows how
the contemporary acts as a symptom of current contradictions in our
disciplinary structure (139). Provocatively, he imagines an institutional
configuration where contemporary studies occupy, at least in part, the
space of cultural studies.
While the first two essays converse with Foucault on the biopolitical and the institutional aspects of his work, respectively, Valeria
de los Ros invokes the notion of cognitive map to remind us of the
spatial, not just temporal, attributes of the contemporary. Through insightful readings of Alejandro Zambra and Pola Olaixarac, De los Ros
identifies three traits of our shared times: an embodied experience that
combines local and global elements; the summoning of one or more
historical moments; and the presence of an audio/visual media archive.
These aspects would allow us to construct the memory of a subject that
often aspires to be confused with the authoras in the by now familiar
case of Belano/Bolaoor that uses the first person singular to project
a certain degree of intimacy or subjectivity in conflict. Such findings
are particularly relevant for the study of contemporary recreations of
the seventiesbeyond a politics of memory, what they mean for an
individuals sense of time.
Diego Vecchio takes a different route. In a fascinating reading
of Los muertos no mienten and La pregunta freudiana, published by Luis
Gusmn in 2009 and 2011, respectively, Vecchio compares the birth
of two parallel discourses at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth

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century: psychoanalysis and spiritism. The author ponders the striking

contemporaneity of these very different phenomena, particularly with
regard to their different views on the unconscious. Vecchio retraces this
under-examined history to illuminate the work of the Argentine writer,
demonstrating how Gusmn, himself a writer and a psychoanalyst,
reenacts the conflicts and the hidden affinities between the Freudian
unconscious and what he refers to as inconsciente bruto, gtico, or salvaje,
postulated by spiritualism. This allows Vecchio to draw implications
about how literature may reveal and estrange contemporaneity itself.
In her explorative essay, La villa: poltica contempornea y
esttica, Paola Corts-Rocca reexamines some of the tenets of cultural
studies in light of the dossiers theme. She evaluates the contemporary
vis--vis las palabras que definan el campo de lo latinoamericano
in the 1990s (18485), namely transculturation, national identity,
hybridity, and so forth. Corts-Rocca raises important questions, such
as: Cules son [las] palabras [que definen el campo de lo latinoamericano] hoy? and, decisively, Cules son los conceptos que articulan
hoy esttica y poltica? (185). She grounds her analysis on the narrative of Gabriela Cabezn Cmara and Ricardo Strafacce, in conversation with the filmic work of Federico Len and Marcos Martnez.
For the critic, todays political literature bears out the preeminence of
performativity over representation.
In the final contribution in the dossier, Contratiempos. Literatura y poca, Julio Premat offers a challenging view about the
contemporary as un tiempo que no es (214). For the author, the
contemporary is the present converted into concept and, at the same
time, the impossibility of capturing the elusive passage of time. To
think through this paradox, Premat associates the contemporary with
the psychoanalytical notion of the real, and the presence/absence of
time with the unconscious. As an Aleph, he suggests, the time of the
contemporary implies the multiplicity and the juxtaposition of different
times, without contradiction. It also implies a space presently marked
by global cultural mestizajes (211). The radical synchronicity of Premats
position calls for a profound methodological change and a revision of
our notions of time and space, thus reframing the question of how to
study the contemporary in literature?
Together, these six articles chart a new terrain for the study of
the contemporary in Latin Americanism. Crucially, they understand the
field as a subject of theory, as opposed to an object to theorize upon. If

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Hctor Hoyos and Marlia Librandi-Rocha

there is a Greenwich meridian for scholarship, and not just for fiction,
then this state-of-the art compilation seeks to claim it as its own. At the
same time, our goal is to open new roads for future research.
One possible route would be to extend an invitation to other
spaces that construct the contemporary, such as literary festivals. Some
are nonscholarly in nature, such as the various instantiations of Hay
Festival in Bogot and Cartagena, while others involve local scholars
alongside novelists, such as the Forum de Literatura Brasileira Contempornea at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. There is an
untapped potential of combining the efforts of art practitioners and
theorists, in the spirit of the workshop that Lionel Ruffel describes.
Such collaborations could give heft and critical import to Latin American locales within a world-system of literature, beyond merely promotional efforts to stimulate the rapid consumption of fictiona cycle
that leads to unassimilated overproduction and disperse cultural capital.
We must demand literature that plunges deeply into the present, and
provide the critical tools and the resounding chambers to make it matter. The transnational model advocated here may serve as an example.
We sought to build on the asymmetric collaboration of Hispanophone
and Lusophone elements, but always in the presence of a planetary
discursive community. We were reminded that in his 1897 LAction
restreinte, Stphane Mallarm suggested that one should not proclaim
ones own contemporaneity, for the present escapes apprehension: Mal
inform celui qui se crierait son propre contemporain (372). Be this
as it may, our finding is that writers, thinkers and artists do proclaim
their own contemporaneity, accepting to live in and to give form to its
untimelinessperhaps, a way to throw the dice again and again.
When it comes to the contemporary, as this Dilogo Crtico
of Revista de Estudios Hispnicos makes clear, questions matter as much
as, if not more than, answers. We hope to lend a fresh pair of eyes to
the study of present-day culture, elicit a reconsideration of our roles as
scholars, and ultimately encourage readers of this dossier to seize the
present moment and explore its perilous territory.
Stanford University

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NOTES
The event was organized by Cultural Synchronization and Disjuncture and Tangible Thoughts on Luso-Brazilian Literature, both Research Unit Working Groups
from the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University.
Additional support came from a Faculty Conference Grant from the Center for Latin
American Studies. Other co-sponsors were the Department of Iberian and Latin
American Cultures, the Department of French and Italian, the Europe Center, Modern Thought and Literature, and the Humanities Center. Universit Paris 8 also made
the event possible. Adam Morris, Caroline Egan, and Patricia Valderrama assisted in
the preparation of the Dilogo crtico manuscript. Our acknowledgement goes to all.

See, for instance, Snchez Prado, Ignacio M., ed. Amrica Latina en la Literatura
Mundial. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, Universidad de Pittsburgh, 2006. Print.

WORKS CITED
Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford UP,
2009: 4044. Print.
Beverley, John. Latinamericanism After 9/11. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.
Casanova, Pascale. Literature as a World. New Left Review 31 (2005): 7190. Print.
. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.
Mallarm, Stphane. Ouvres Compltes. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Print.