Book Reviews

Beverley, John. (2011) Latinamericanism after 9/11, Duke University Press (Durham,NC), + 176 pp. £62.00 hbk, £15.99 pbk.

John Beverley is without doubt one of the most influential scholars in the field ofLatin American literary and cultural studies of the last quarter-century. His previouswork has challenged and transformed the field of Spanish in the United States, andplayed a significant role in promoting new theoretical and critical perspectives andmethodologies associated with subaltern studies and cultural studies throughout theAmericas. His latest book continues provoking controversy, addressing major issues forthe contemporary field of Latin American cultural studies.

Rather than summarise the book’s content, my goal here is to analyse the histor-ical conditions from which it comes, locating it within the contemporary landscapeof Latin American cultural studies, for Beverley’s arguments focus on a new intel-lectual and political landscape in the Americas since 2000. While Latin America’srevolutionary armed struggles have all but ended as neoliberal policies and practices,along with an increasing penetration of global mass media and capital, have deeplytransformed Latin American economies, a recent marea rosada (pink tide) and rise ofnew social movements have simultaneously challenged deeply rooted class hierarchiesand US authority. These changes have altered the position of politically committed

© 2014 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2014 Society for Latin American StudiesBulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 33, No. 2 253

Book Reviews

artists and critics, both in Latin America and abroad. Beverley evokes a simplertime, when armed revolutionary movements, artists (‘boom’ novelists, popular the-atre troupes, militant poets, folk musicians) and politically committed scholars (in theLatin American academy or abroad) formed alliances against repressive governmentsand US interventionism. Both the political and the academic scenes have changed,with old alliances being ruptured by: the rise of ‘studies’ (subaltern and cultural, inparticular), which privilege popular forms of cultural production, as well as culturalconsumption, over elite genres such as literature and fine arts; the political victoriesof leftist or populist social movements that likewise privilege subaltern knowledgeand leadership over interventions by elite scholars, artists or activists; and a nativistacademic politics that actively resists the cultural dominance of the metropolitan (espe-cially US) academy and marginalisation of home-grown Latin American intellectualproduction.

Beverley’s observations – on tensions between US- and Latin America-based schol-ars, elite and non-elite cultural genres, right and left, ‘neoconservative’ and ‘neoliberal’critical approaches, the academy and subalternist social movements – through closecritical readings of the work of Beatriz Sarlo, Alberto Moreiras, Alvaro García Linera,Mario Roberto Morales and Mabel Morana, to name a few, are timely and astute.However, he does not ultimately resolve these tensions or lay out a clear ethical posi-tion for contemporary Latin Americanists (the fact that this book is US-published inEnglish directs it especially toward US-based Latin Americanists), perhaps an impossibleendeavour given the complex problems raised through the interventions of cultural andsubaltern studies.

The book’s main shortcoming, however, lies elsewhere. While Beverley productivelylays out the terms of debate following 9/11 (2001), he fails to account for thedynamic trajectory of cultural studies in Latin America over the past five years.He is on target in identifying ‘the essential (deconstructive?) impulse behind bothsubaltern and cultural studies as the displacement of the hermeneutic authority ofthe ‘‘traditional intellectual’’ (in Gramsci’s sense of the term) and what traditionalintellectuals consider authoritative cultural forms and practices, including writtenliterature and critique’ (p. 54); however, his view that ‘cultural studies simply transfersthe dynamic of modernisation from the sphere of modernist high culture and thestate ideological apparatuses to mass culture’ fails to capture the breadth of thecontemporary configuration of the field in Latin America. What Beverley leaves outof his analysis is the embrace and appropriation of cultural studies from within theLatin American academy, as in the flurry of activity in the field in recent years inColombia, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Costa Rica, for example.New graduate programmes have been founded recently in all these countries, attractinglarge numbers and establishing a broad regional focus, well beyond media studies (seethe special issue of Cultural Studies, 2012). Meanwhile, cultural studies in the UnitedStates has failed to take a strong institutional foothold. While I do not believe itpossible to articulate a single politics of Latin American cultural studies (particularlyas, despite the trend towards leftist-oriented presidencies in some countries, politicallandscapes vary significantly), nor even a dominant disciplinary orientation (someprogrammes are deeply rooted in social sciences, others in humanities) from withinLatin America’s dynamic new cultural studies programmes, several of the polemicsoutlined by Beverley, most notably Latin America’s rejection of cultural studies as anAnglophone imposition, are outdated. Nonetheless, this book is a ‘must read’ for its

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Book Reviews

astute evaluation of paradigmatic shifts experienced in the field at the turn of the newmillennium.

Robert McKee IrwinUniversity of California, Davis

Reference

Cultural Studies. (2012) ‘The Academic Institutionalisation of Cultural Studies in LatinAmerica’. Cultural Studies (special issue) 26(2).

© 2014 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2014 Society for Latin American StudiesBulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 33, No. 2 255