Latin Americanism by Román de la Campa

Review by: Gustavo Verdesio

MLN, Vol. 117, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 2002), pp. 509-511
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 MLN 509

this does necessarily mean moving into either a postnational or a postliterary

register; but it does mean rethinking what the nation and literature are and
what they can be in a new register."
El error tipografico, la ausencia del "no" que la frase que empieza "this
does ..." exige, le permite a Beverley habitar freudianamente y de lleno la
duda en que no s6lo su obra sino la de muchos de sus contemporaneos se ha
situado. En este espacio indeciso que marca probablemente una trans-
formaci6n epocal dificil aun de conceptualizar, en este espacio que quiere
ser literario y posliterario, politico y postpolitico, nacional y simultaneamente
postnacional, el libro de John Beverley se torna inmediatamente
imprescindible para cualquiera que intente comprender los iltimos veinte
anos de desarrollos y ansiedades disciplinarias y te6ricas en el Latino-
americanismo.
Universityof California-Santa Cruz JUAN POBLETE

Roman de la Campa, Latin Americanism.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. 223 pp.

In the Preface of this book, Roman de la Campa announces that he "attempts

to examine the main criteria at play in the reception and codification of
literary Latin Americanism today. It [the book] understands that field as a
community of discourses that has gained particular force during the past
decades, mainly in the United States, but also beyond" (vii). After reading
this declaration of intentions, one expects a comprehensive map of Latin
Americanism today. However, a careful reading of the book shows how much
is (and how many scholars are) left outside the portrayal of the Latin
Americanism he proposes. For example, there is not a single mention of
Antonio Cornejo Polar's very influential work or Martin Lienhard's book on
oral cultures in Latin America (a topic extensively treated by de la Campa in
this book). He does not discuss, either, the works by Sara Castro-Klaren and
only selectively discusses John Beverley (he does not mention Against
Literatureor any of the articles that ended up comprising his latest book,
Subalternityand Representation)and Walter Mignolo (whose articles on issues
such as postcolonial reason, postoccidentalism and the positionality of
scholars are not accounted for), who have all discussed in depth some of the
issues de la Campa considers crucial for understanding the field. Other
critics that are not mentioned in this book are Hugo Achugar and Alberto
Moreiras, arguably two of the most active participants in current Latin
Americanism's debates.
The reason for these absences is de la Campa's narrow view of Latin

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510 REVIEWS

Americanism: he views it as a field where most practitioners come from

deconstruction. That is why he is interested in producing a critique of the
legacy of deconstruction for Latin Americanism. That legacy is characterized
by what he calls "episthetics":"that uncertain interplay between epistemology
and aesthetics" (vii). The book is, apparently, "a critique of the preferred
epistheticmoves within literary Latin Americanist practices today" (vii).
Although he does not deliver the comprehensive map he promises, de la
Campa contributes a couple of important things to the ongoing discussion,
one of which is a critique of a series of scholars who have embraced
deconstruction as the privileged tool for the analysis of Latin American
literary production. One of the shortcomings of this kind of criticism, de la
Campa avers, is its complicity with a universalist pretense of free-floating
positionality (ix) that resonates with the cultural needs of global capital (xi).
In chapter 1, he chastises deconstruction as practiced by Djelal Kadir because
it "extols the semiological virtuosity implicit in Latin America's errant history
as a new master code for understanding Latin America" (19) and because it
limits itself to celebrating a discursive performance (19). Roberto Gonzalez
Echevarria is criticized, in turn, for basing his theoretical apparatus on a
textual determinism that takes the place of historical understanding (19-20).
Carlos Alonso's view of Latin American history is presented as wanting mostly
because of his perception of the historical continuum in terms of winners
and losers (22). In the work of some of these critics, de la Campa suggests,
there seems to be an assumption that needs revision: that literary post-
modernism can be considered the main tool for liberation (24). A serious
critique of this kind of approach can also be found in chapter 4, where de la
Campa compares Antonio Benitez Rojo's postmodernist views on the Carib-
bean to the more historically aware reading proposed by Edouard Glissant.
Although his critique of deconstruction-inspired scholars is sound, his claim
that their school is still the predominant one in Latin Americanism (129) is
arguable, to judge from the many other theoretical schools (subaltern
studies, cultural studies, cultural critique-critica cultural-and some of the
traditional ones) that proliferate today.
His other interesting contribution to ongoing debates is found in chap-
ter 3, where he attempts to salvage the critical tradition of transculturation
because it could help us obtain an "understanding of Latin American
modernity that is often flattened or erased by postmodern metanarrative
critiques" (65). There, he also discusses Nestor Garcia Canclini's hybridity as
an offspring or a mutation of Rama's interpretation of transculturation. His
contention is that both the transculturation and cultural hybridity models
have advantages over the postmodern paradigm based on deconstruction.
Two of those advantages are their concern for social reality and their
awareness of the changes that popular culture undergoes in its hybridization
with the market (70). This "going beyond" the text is what de la Campa finds
wanting in Latin Americanist deconstruction. Whether one agrees with his

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 M LN 511

evaluation of trasculturation and cultural hybridity or not, his argument

deserves attention.
In other chapters, the arguments are less solidly structured. For instance,
chapter 2, that deals with Borges and revolution (understood as text), fails to
develop a clear argument. His readings of Sandino, Borges, Galeano,
Cortazar and Joan Didion do not seem to lead to any conclusions-a
repeated pattern in this book, in which it is not rare to find sections that end
with questions and no responses (see, for example, pages 73 and 87). In the
chapter dedicated to Rama's lettered city, de la Campa makes, together with
reasonable statements, some that need revision. For example, he says Rama
attempts to create a countercanon that includes orality and graffiti, among
other cultural manifestations. However, he fails to notice what Guillermo
Mariaca (whom he thanks in the acknowledgments section but whose work is
not included in the Bibliography) had observed a few years ago: that Rama
never undertook the task of actually studying those counter cultural practices
(see p. 48 of Mariaca's El poderde la palabra: ensayossobrela modernidadde la
critica literaria hispanoamericana.La Habana: Casa de las Americas, 1993).
Another arguable statement is the following: he seems to believe that the
Rama's reading of Derrida was subtle and complex (139). Unfortunately, he
fails to notice that Rama believed that Derrida had something against
orality-as opposed to literacy-as a way of structuring culture (see his
comments on Sim6n Rodriguez and Derrida in La ciudad letrada,chapter 3),
which indicates a total misreading of the philosopher's ideas in Of
Grammatology-a book that says nothing about orality in the anthropological
sense given to the term by Rama and that proposes, instead, to study the
structure of phonocentrism in the framework of the history of European
thought.
In sum, this book does not deliver exactly what it promises: a map of Latin
Americanism today. In its stead, it offers a very reductionist view of the
theoretical foundations of most Latin Americanists by way of ignoring the
many theoretical corpuses other than deconstruction that inspire our work
today. However, it has two insightful chapters that are a contribution to the
understanding of the role of deconstruction in the state of affairs of the field.
It also offers a final chapter that is a grim but realistic picture of the economic
and political constraints that affect the practice of Latin Americanism.
University of Michigan GUSTAVO VERDESIO

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