Cultural criticism is an ambiguous and heterogeneous practice, defiant of disciplinary location and elusive of precise definition. As such, perhaps the most effective way of explaining what cultural criticism is, is by looking closely at what a cultural critic does. Critical Passions—a collection of 32 essays authored by Jean Franco over the past three decades—stands as an impressive chronicle of the work of one of the foremost critics of Latin American literature and culture in the United States. Pratt and Newman’s compilation of Franco’s essays, gathered from numerous academic journals, edited volumes and magazines (including NACLA) from the United States, Europe and Latin America, offers a unique insight into the craft of a pioneering feminist critic whose commitment to social justice and uncompromising insistence on the historical and political dimensions of aesthetics and culture have come to define the practice of cultural criticism for several generations of scholars both in the United States and in Latin America.
What is most notable about this volume is that it renders visible a remarkable consistency in Franco’s critical strategies over time. The “texts” she reads vary tremendously, from Mario Vargas Llosa’s “conversations” to homosexual performance art, from narratives of state terror to Celia Cruz lyrics, from the persecution of seventeenth-century ilusas—women considered “deluded” by the Inquisition in colonial Latin America—to contemporary rumors of organ theft, from magical realism to the Pope’s attacks on reproductive rights. Yet Franco’s essays forge a particular style of criticism, a feminist way of doing, which positions the critic in tension with the multiple narratives, historical processes and theoretical frameworks that she convenes in her writing. In her work, power is never beyond the horizons of interpretation, but constantly foregrounded in both its microscopic and its globalized intentions.
At the heart of Franco’s strategies lies her insistence on reading multiple texts simultaneously and bringing these multiple interpretations to bear on the texts in question. This enables her to move beyond the specific protocols of any one text—be it a novel or a telenovela—and construct a referential landscape within which these can be properly analyzed. Her 1981 essay on the work of Jorge Luis Borges illustrates this strategy well. She situates her reading of Borges’ “fictions” in the context of questions regarding their enigmatic appeal for audiences as diverse as French philosophers, U.S. academics and leaders of military regimes in the Southern Cone. This allows her to interrogate the author’s narrative themes and strategies in terms of the politics of their reception rather than simply on their own terms.
Franco is able to assemble these referential landscapes through her particular expository style, characterized by a constant movement between historical conjunctures, socio-cultural processes and narrative particulars. This is seen clearly in her reading of the writings of early nineteenth-century British travelers in Latin America. In this 1979 essay, she moves seamlessly between historiography, political economy, textual exegesis and feminist critique, constructing a interpretive geography that not only accounts for the informal colonization taking place at the time, but also for the crucial role that gender—marked on the bodies of both European and “native” women—played in that particular colonial enterprise. In a similar fashion, her essays on mass and popular culture, written between 1981 and 1996, also rely on these reading strategies. Deploying a sophisticated understanding of both economic and academic globalization, Franco insists that “the popular” must be understood in the context of its mass mediations and argues adamantly against metropolitan intellectuals who displace their own desires for authenticity and redemption onto their vision of Latin American popular culture. These essays offer important reflections on the fate of “the popular” in the context of late capitalist globalization as well as key insights into the “struggles for interpretive power” which these transformations have unleashed.
These strategies have allowed Jean Franco to intervene in many of the important theoretical polemics and political debates of the past three decades. The essays in Critical Passions establish dialogues with numerous interlocutors across multiple borders. It is these dialogues that make this collection required reading not only for those who study Latin American history and culture, but for anyone interested in the histories and prehistories of what are now known as gender studies and cultural studies.
