WHAT’S LEFT OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA? THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF THE PRINTED WORD
The utopian vision of Latin America’s future, which has now all but disappeared, was sustained in large part by a literary intelligentsia whose medium was print culture. That intelligentsia is being displaced, and new hybrids of high and low culture may be forcing the invention of a new political symbolism.
By Jean Franco
Imanuel Wallerstein recently argued that we are now entering the Black Period “which can be said to have begun symbolically in 1989 … and will go on for at least 25 to 50 years.” A characteristic of this period is that there is no longer a common social discourse so that, in the immediate future, people “will be acting somewhat blindly.”‘ Wallerstein is by no means unique in finding the present confusing and the future impossible to predict. In Latin America, “sin futuro” is inscribed on the T-shirts of marginalized youth, and it could just as well be the slogan of the intelligentsia, many of whom are still mourning the end of utopia. If angst is particulary acute in the region, it is perhaps because, from the colonial period onwards, Latin America has been a chosen site for the practical realization of utopian projects–the foundation of Vera Paz by the Dominicans in the sixteenth century, the Tolstoyan back-to-the-land utopias of those who rejected European industrialization early in this century, and the political utopias of guerrilla movements in more recent years. The utopian vision of the future, however, has now vanished. If the future is imagined at all, it is as a city in ruins as in Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s The True Story of Alejandro Mayta, or at best in the modest social-democratic terms of Mexican political scientist Jorge Castañeda’s Utopia Unarmed.[2]
The utopian vision was sustained in large part by a literary intelligentsia whose medium was print culture. It was this intelligentsia who shaped the identity of nations. It was they who acted as the critical consciousness of society, as the voice of the oppressed, as the teachers of future generations. They were held–and held themselves–in high regard. Indeed, Cuban independence hero José Martí is still referred to as “the apostle,” the Mexican José Vasconcelos compared himself to Moses, and for Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, poets were “towers of God.” This prestige has to be understood in the context of societies with high levels of illiteracy. The intelligentsia were not only major actors in the public sphere, but also–at least in public perception–mediators for the popular classes and advocates of social change.
The Cuban revolution was an event of cultural as well as political significance for the Latin American intelligentsia. Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcfa Márquez, Julio Córtazar and Mario Vargas Llosa were among its earliest supporters. For over a decade, Cuba helped set the cultural politics of the hemisphere. By the late sixties, however, the definition of what constituted revolutionary writing had become more rigorous. With Cuba’s persecution of homosexuals, and the reprimand and later the imprisonment of the poet Heberto Padilla, writers became deeply divided between those, like Garcfa Mdrquez, who continued to support the revolution, and those, like Vargas Llosa, who became its critics.
Disillusionment with socialism, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, and the collapse of Communism do not, however, wholly account for the prevailing angst. Present-day writers in the Southern Cone and Central America have also inherited the traumatic aftermath of repressive military governments and civil war, followed by a new era of modernization under the aegis of neoliberalism that has mixed extreme poverty with rapid technological development. This modernization is nowhere more evident than in the dramatic changes in the shape of the city itself. The once familiar cityscapes–with their cafés, centrally located theaters and public spaces–have turned into urban nightmares. Cultural landmarks have been obliterated, and video viewing in the home is considered safer and more practical than journeys from the suburbs into dangerous city centers for evening entertainment,
Everywhere in contemporary Latin America, there is a sense of the literary intelligentsia’s diminishing importance and displacement from public discourse. This displacement is exacerbated by the growing privatization of culture. Increasingly, cultural institutions–galleries, music, and television channels–are managed by private enterprise. Even national universities, traditionally the focus of political activism, now compete with thousands of private universities, many of which are geared to business rather than culture. In Mexico, where state patronage of culture has traditionally been strong, Emilio Azcárraga, the televison magnate who markets soap operas as far afield as Russia an China, has become one of the leading actors in the art world. He was responsible for organizing “the Friends of the Arts of Mexico” (the sponsors of the Museum of Metropolitan Art exhibition, “Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries,” in New York) and for staging, in Mexico’s Museum of Modern Art, one of the most important exhibitions of Chinese art ever shown in the West.[3]
The shift in patronage is particularly striking in Mexico because of a tradition of cultural nationalism that dates back to the revolution. The recent national award of generous lifetime fellowships to Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Carlos Monsivais and Elena Poniatowska (to name only a few of the recipients) follows a tradition of protecting national culture. In the present context, however, it can be seen as a calculated effort to reassert the state’s support of high culture, at a time when mass culture is a growth industry and publishing is dominated by multinational concerns such as the Spanish-based publishing company Planeta, which now publishes in Mexico and Argentina.
The new technologies of communication have created a class of technocrats and new audiences for whom print culture has lost its luster and now competes with–and is often superseded by–visual and aural culture. This has been accompanied by the industrialization of “popular” arts, such as artisan products and regional Music, and the growth of a massive culture industry, especially television. The Argentine critic Nestor García Canclini describes this remapping of the cultural field as “reconversion.”[4] At the simplest level, reconversion refers to the retooling of culture in the age of high tech, so that a high level of literacy is no longer the inevitable stepladder to modernity. Music and the television image, rather than the printed word, have become the privileged vehicles for the exploration of Latin American identity and the nature of modernity.
Mexican critic Elena Poniatowska’s lament for the lost golden age of folk art in a recent issue of the magazine Nexos thus sounds anachronistic. “Nowadays they mass produce San Martín de Porras, all of them coming out of the same mold,” she writes. “The brush in his hand cannot sweep the vulgarity from our imagination. The Child Jesuses which are dressed by congregations, the little Babes, the Holy Child of Atocha–which used to have their own personalities–now all wear the same hat and sandals, and carry the same gourd and basket. Popular religious art is evil. Modernity is not creative.[5]
Although this fear of homogenization and massification has been a leitmotif of writers since the nineteenth century, nowadays postmodern culture critics are telling us to forget authenticity. The postmodernists contend that television, mass marketing and new technologies have democratized culture, breaking down the boundaries between “high” and “low,” and making possible hybrid combinations (salsa, for example) that enrich Latin American culture. Latin American culture, they argue, has always been heterogeneous and has always drawn on all kinds of repertoires, and can thus claim to be postmodern avant-la-lettre. Far from implying the death of local cultures, García Canclini argues, the market has stimulated the invention of new artisan designs, allowed culture to reach new publics, and forced people to invent a new political symbolism and new forms of social action. As an example of the latter, he cites the masked Superbarrio in Mexico City who dresses in a costume reminiscent both of Superman and the kitsch outfits of wrestlers, and negotiates on behalf of the marginalized sectors of the population. Equally promising, the video camera, electronic mail and tape recorders have made the absolute control of information increasingly difficult. One of the significant features of the Chiapas uprising was the way the rebels appropriated modern technology–particularly e-mail, fax and videorecorded messages–to transmit their demands.
Thus even though technology and information overwhelmingly flow from north to south, many critics now stress the fact that certain characteristics of postmodern culture–pastiche, citation, parody–have always been features of Latin American culture. What was once designated “cultural imperialism”–according to which Latin America was the passive recipient of Hollywood movies, Disney cartoons, and television serials–is now considered inventive cultural bricolage, whereby imported technologies and fashions are used to create new cultures. Nineteenth-century modernization, which drew a racially heterogeneous population into the big cities, not only stimulated modernism in the arts but helped to produce what are now considered to be distinctively “Latin” styles out the melange of African, European and indigenous influences. Tango, bolero and samba were invented in urban barrios, but were later appropriated by high culture as the epitome of “Latinity.”[6] Novels such as the Argentine Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango and the Puerto Rican Luis Rafael Sánchez’ The Importance of Being Daniel Santos, the essays of Carlos Monsivais on Agustín Lara in Lost Love, and films such as the Mexican Marla Novaro’s Danzón and the Argentine Fernando Solanas’ Tangos: The Exile of Gardel explore the ways that popular lyrics, dance and rhythms constitute a common “Latin” or regional language, cementing social groups and individual relations.
Rock music offers a striking example of this transculturation. Despite the fact that it emanated from the hegemonic centers of power, and was part of a transnational music industry, rock became a kind of vanguard of resistance to rigid moral and family codes. An early aficionado, the Mexican novelist José Agustín claimed that, for young people of his generation, rock represented an emancipation from the stuffy discipline of a middle-class childhood. “Without any intellectualism,” he writes, “rock gave me indescribable pleasures–I have had orgasms, experienced the undescribable sensation of coming out of nowhere, contortions, upturned whites of the eyes and the certainty of finding myself in regions where time no longer exists.”[7]
The military governments of the Southern Cone turned rock into resistance when they suppressed music magazines and arrested young people wearing the wrong style of clothes. All over Latin America, rock music threw into relief the authoritarianism of the older generation as well as the idealistic nostalgia of the Left. Yet as in the case of tango or samba, rock lends itself to many different kinds of appropriation. The very term “rock nacional,” used in Argentina, represented an attempt to rid the music of its “satanic” origins in the United States.[8] Yet, during the Malvinas-Falklands war, the military government tried to court young people’s support by holding a rock concert for National Solidarity. Likewise President Fernando Collor de Mello organized a massive rock concert to celebrate his neoliberal victory in Brazil. At the other extreme, punk and funk were appropriated by the most marginalized sectors of Latin American society.[9]
Popularity has close links to populism in Latin America. When Dominican Juan Luis Guerra sang in Lima, his concert was compared both to a soccer match and a visit by the Pope.[10] Like salsa singer Rubén Blades, Guerra has used his popularity to draw attention to poverty and other social ills. The titles of some of his songs speak for themselves: “El costo de la vida” (“The Cost of Living”), “Si saliera petróleo” (“If They Strike Oil”), and “Ojalá que llueva cafe” (“I Hope That It Rains Coffee”). He describes merengue as a rhythm for the feet and a message for the head, and claims that his lyrics speak of the suffering of the continent. Significantly, not only a writer like the neoliberal Vargas Llosa runs for president, but also the progressive musician Blades.
It is Cuban-American salsa singer Celia Cruz–not Rodó or Bolívar–who is the contemporary apostle of Latinity. In “Pasaporte latinoamericano,” she sings of “a single Latin American people” who communicate in the common language of samba, guaracha and salsa, a people who are driven by the work ethic and selfhelp: “Si no lo hacemos nosotros, entonces quien va a ayudarnos?” (“If we don’t do it ourselves, who will help us?”) It is celebrity singers like Rubén Blades, Brazilian Caetano Veloso and Juan Luis Guerra who take up the cause of social justice and–in the case of Veloso–explore the relations between consumer culture and “authenticity.”[11]
Music illustrates the fact that clearcut distinctions between tradition and modernity, native purity and degraded imports, have become tenuous. Music is integral to consumer culture, yet focuses desires and aspirations in unpredictable ways, ways that are not necessarily commumcable by the literary intelligentsia. Observing the marginalized punk aficionados in Mexico City as symptomatic of the society of the spectacle, Carlos Monsivais notes that they are indifferent to his applause or attention.[12] In this environment, the intellectual may feel estranged. Attending the funeral of the plena musician Cortijo, the Puerto Rican novelist Edgardo Rodríguez Julia describes his trip into the housing project where the musician was lying in state as if it were a journey to another planet, one whose strange language was “the measure of an unbridgable distance between my condition and theirs.”[13] Juan Flores’ witty account of the dismay expressed by the Puerto Rican intelligentsia when it was proposed that the Fine Arts Institute of Puerto Rico be named after Cortijo demonsrrates that in some circles at least there is a stake in maintaining high culture primarily because of its exclusionary elitism.[14]
The other powerful rival of print culture is, of course, television, which reaches audiences far larger than any book or periodical. Thus it is not surprising that many well-known writers–Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz and Juan Jose Arreola, among others–have hosted television programs with mixed success. In Chile, the playwright and novelist Antonio Skármeta “popularizes” literature through television. By virtue of numerous television appearances, Carlos Fuentes has become a spokesperson for Latin America within the United States.
The best-selling author in Latin America, García Márquez, is acutely conscious of the fact that the average telenovela (soap opera) reaches a public much vaster than the combined readership of all his novels. “In a single night, one television episode in Colombia alone can reach 10 or 15 million people,” he claims. “I still haven’t sold 10 or 15 million of all my books, so it’s natural that someone who wants to reach people will find soap operas attractive. …The medium is an invitation to the true mass dissemination of one’s ideas, and it has to be used. I’m absolutely sure that in a telenovela I can command the same signs as I command in literature, and as I’m trying to command in film.”[15] Brazilian producers often adapt novels for television. And melodrama, the mainstay of popular theater, has now been recycled, producing a type of television soap opera which outdoes U.S. products in the global market.[16]
Whereas print culture was once associated with modernity and the formation of national consciousness, television has now become the index ef contemporary globalized culture. As the Argentine political scientist Oscar Landi acknowledges, television has an ambiguous effect on the culture. It “colonizes and destroys our previous way of life,” but also “puts us in contact with the world and stimulates us to look for that which, without TV, we would never know about.” What used to be claimed for literature–that it offered insights into the deep undercurrents of history and into the nature of language–is now the province of television. According to Landi, “television could help us to live with the limitations of reason because it could constantly show us the conventional, ambiguous and slippery nature of language whatever its form–oral, written, printed or combined with the screen and with the everyday objects which some of us have in our hoines.”[17]
But television is too closely linked to its use by authoritarian and military governments in the recent past, and in some countries, too ideologically linked to the state for the literary intelligentsia to feel optimistic about its pedagogical potential. The Mexican performance artist Jesusa Rodríguez calls television a virus and a powerful–because unrecognized–form of censorship.[18] In a discussion between Carlos Monsivais and the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit, organized by the Mexican journal Debate feminista, both writers tried to grapple with the fact that, in apparently free societies, there was still much that could not be expressed.[19]
Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo observes that the public space once dominated by the intelligentsia has now been occupied by the media. Parameters of social debate in mass-mediatized society are limited by all kinds of implicit, rather than explicit rules. The Chilean critic Nelly Richard, who was involved with groups of oppositional artists during the Pinochet regime, has argued that with redemocratization, the culture of fear has been replaced by a culture of massification (the quantitative evaluation of popularity), monumentality (which does away with ambiguity), and pluralism (a range of viewpoints that are never allowed to come into conflict).[20]
Worse still, literature itself is now mass-mediatized. With the globalization of the book industry and the publication of translations and bestsellers, the stake in popularity and translatability has grown. The market is not tolerant of writing that is too experimental or “untranslatable.” Some writers now court rather than reject commercialism. For instance, there is little doubt that Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate was written to appeal to a broad market.[21] Even the older generation is not indifferent to marketability. It is interesting to compare, in this respect, Vargas Llosa’s gossipy A Fish in the Water (1993) with his deeply-layered political novel, Conversation in the Cathedral (1969); or the plain narrative style adopted by García Márquez in The General in his Labyrinth (1989) with the baroque and labyrinthine Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). It is little wonder that prize ceremonies organized by the Planeta publishing house resemble the Miss Universe contest and are designed to promote bestsellers. Experimental writing, which used to be encouraged by small publishing houses such as Joaquín Mortiz and Sudamericana, has fallen by the wayside.
Despite all this, literature–on the surface, at least–is flourishing. There is a plethora of new novelists, young poets and performers writing in every conceivable style and on every conceivable topic. Literary representation is still thought indispensable among those formerly excluded from citizenship in what Angel Rama called “the lettered city”–the indigenous, the black and mulatto populations, women and gays. Literature still confronts official versions of history, explores the meaning of exile and memory, and disrupts the taboos that have been placed on female sexuality and what Luisa Valenzuela calls “dirty words.”[22]
At a time when the boundaries between genres and the differences between high and low, fiction and reality, are blurred, what is more difficult to defend is the specificity of literature’s oppositional clout. In a last-ditch defense, Octavio Paz recently argued that poetry “has become an art on the margins of society. It is the other voice. It lives in the catacombs, but it won’t disappear.” For Paz, this marginal status allows “clandestine poetry” to act as a “critique of consumer society.”[23] It is ironic that Paz, whose respect for abstract freedom often puts him in the ranks of conservative libertarians, thus finds himself aligned with some younger critics in opposition to the culture industry and the marketplace. The lack of popular appeal, however, does not necessarily translate into a subversive language powerful enough to rock the capitalist boat.
What had, in the past, given literature its special claim to be resistant to consumer society had to do with the nature of reading. Avant-garde and modernist literature drew attention to language, invited slow and careful reading, and demanded the ability to decipher the code, to read between the lines. This was seen as a crucial counterforce to the cliches and fetishization of cultural artifacts in mass society. Avant-garde art and literature tried to stem commodification by focusing attention on means rather than ends, on language rather than plot or overt message. It was the “autonomy” of the literary text, its rejection of vulgar popularity, that gave credibility to the notion that it could stand in opposition to social conventions. In the sixties, it was still plausible to claim that literature was revolutionary and that the writer fought guerrilla battles with his pen.
What renders this problematic for contemporary writers is not simply the lure of popularity but the rapid appropriation and conversion of the formerly shocking or innovative into fashion or style. “Magical realism,” once taken as the index of Latin American originality, is now little more than a brand name for exoticism. No wonder that for critics on the left the explicitly political and ethical aspects of literature seem to have emigrated elsewhere, for example, into the “testimonial.”[24]
Perhaps the problem that most troubles critics, however, is that of value. In contemporary culture, discrimination between good and bad art seems to have flown the coop. In a discussion of art that could also be applied to literature, Beatriz Sarlo puts some of the blame for the prevalence of what she terms “cultural populism” on sociological criticism because it reduces all art to function. Thus, “in the name of the relativism of values and in the absence of other criteria of difference,” Sarlo writes, “the market is taken to be the ideal space of pluralism. Yet instead of remaining neutral, it could be argued that the market exercises powerful forms of intervention over the public and over artists. The market holds absolute sway, especially over those artistic productions connected to the culture industry and thus displaces the hierarchical authority of experts of the traditional type.” Overthrowing hierarchies is one thing but refusing to discriminate at all is, according to Sarlo, even worse since the failure to discuss values leads to passive collaboration with neoliberal democracy and wrests any oppositional function from art.[25]
It is no accident, then, that the appeal for a reassertion of the value of the aesthetic has been raised in the context of a redemocratization which has stratified social classes more than ever before and in ways that, for better or worse, bypass the lettered city. Mass culture and neoliberalism dilute the oppositional value of the aesthetic. On the other hand, Sarlo’s defense of aesthetic value cannot be disentangled as easily as she would wish from the exclusionary and elitist culture of modernism.
For literary practioners, as distinct from critics, the problem seems not so much discrimination, but rather the difficulty of disrupting the seductions of consumerism. Diamela Eltit, for example, who began writing during the Pinochet dictatorship, says that her task as a novelist is to “put into writing something that is refractory to commodities, to comfortable signs.”[26] This might sound like a rerun of the avant-garde program were it not for the fact that Eltit undertakes, in her novels, nothing less than the total restructuring of gender and sexuality–something which the avant-garde tended to take for granted. Like many of her contemporaries, Eltit works within a traditional genre–in this case the novel–while radically altering its syntax.[27]
Interestingly one literary genre that captures the mood of the times without being subservient to it is the “chronicle,” which seems to be able to duck and dart through the neoliberal net. Carlos Monsivais, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, and the Chilean Pedro Lemebel are among its most devastating practitioners. The essay too has changed its ways, springing loose from its pedantic moorings to encompass the fantastic. For example, in his book The Repeating Island the Cuban author Antonio Benítez Rojo uses chaos theory to make sense of the Caribbean, and in The Cage of Melancholy, the Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra playfully revises the whole discussion of Mexican national character in terms of the mysterious evolutionary freak, the axolotl.[28]
What these examples have in common is their refusal to respect boundaries of genre or the clear distinction between the fictional and the factual. At the same time, they stress performance as the central metaphor both for the artist and for the way that everyday life is lived. For Antonio Benítez Rojo, the Caribbean is less a fixed place than a mobile galaxy of the gestures and rhythms of its inhabitants who are inflections rather than stereotypes. Performance also exposes to parody and critique any notion of original essence–whether of nation, gender or ethnicity. Thus performance artists such as Jesusa Rodríguez in Mexico and Las Yeguas del Apocalípsis in Chile offer some of the most searching exposures of national myths and socially defined sex-gender norms.[29]
These are, of course, random examples, but they signal the tectonic shift from apostlehood to the nomadic margins–which is certainly appropriate in the era of Benetton internationalism and e-mail universalism. The conclusion is not as paradoxical as it seems. In the age of global flows and networks, the small scale and the local are the places of greatest intensity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jean Franco is at the Institute of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Columbia University. Her most recent book is Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (Columbia University Press, 1990).
NOTES
1. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Agonies of Liberalism: What Hopes of Progress?” New Left Review, 204 (March/April, 1994).
2. Jorge Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
3. Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bullfinch Press, 1991), p. ix. On the global reach of Televisa, see Fernando Mejia Barquera, “Ecos de los medios en 1993,” Revista Mexicana de Comiunicación, 33 (January-March, 1994).
4. Nestor García Canclini, Culturars hibridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico City Era, 1989).
5. Elena Poniatowska, “El otro gran arte,” Nexos, 183 (March, 1993), p 37.
6. For a fuller discussion of literature and mass culture, see William Rowe and Vivien Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London: Verse, 1991).
7. José Agustín, Contra la corriente (Mexico: Diana, 1991).
8. Alfredo Beltran Fuentes, La ideología antiautoritaria del rock nacional (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina, 1989).
9. John Beverley, ” Postmodern Music and Left Politics, ” Against Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp 124-141.
10. Juan Luis Guerra, “Sentir al son del pueblo,” La tortuga (Lima),
47 (1992), pp, 57-60.
11. Veloso’s music has gone through many phases. See Charles A. Perrone, Masters of the Contemporary Brazilian Song MPB 1965-1985 (Austin, Texas University of Texas Press, 1989). In a television interview for The Americas series, Veloso said that he walks a tightrope between folk tradition and the international music industry.
12. Carlos Monsivais, Escenas de pudor y liviandad (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1981), p. 299.
13. Eduardo Rodríguez Juliá, El entierro de Cortijo, Rio Piedras, Huracan, 1983.
14. Juan Flares, “Conlin’s Revenge: New Mappings of Puerto Rican Culture,” in Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican identity (Houston Ante Publico Press, 1993), pp. 92-107.
15. “Of love and levitation,” interview with Patricia Castaño and Holly Aylett, Times Literary Supplement, No. 4516 (October 20-26, 1989), p. 1152.
16. Jesus Martin-Barbeo, De los medios a las meditaciones: Comunicacíon, cultura y hegemonía (Barcelona: Ediciones G. Gili, 1987), For Brazil, see Renato Ortíz et al., Telenovela: Historia e Producão, (São Paulo: Edfora Brasiliense, 1989).
17. Oscar Landi, Devórame Otra Vez. Que hizo la televisión con la gente. Que hace la gente con la televisión (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1992), p. 192.
18. “A Touch of Evil: Jesusa Rodríguez’s Subversive Church,” interview with Jean Franco, T.D.R, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 1992).
19. Diamela Eltit and Carlos Monsivais, “Un diálogo (ó dos monólogos?) sobre la censura,” Debate feminista, Year 5, Vol. 9 (March, 1994).
20. Nelly Richard, Masculino/feminino: Prácticas de la diferencia y cultura democrática (Santiago, Chile: Francisco Zeghers, 1993), pp 13-14.
21. See Antonio Marquet, “¿Como escribir un best-seller? La receta de Laura Esquivel,” Plural, 237 (June, 1991), pp. 58-67.
22. Examples of historical novels are too numerous to mention but an exception should be made for Roa Bastos whose Yo el supremo (1974) explores the nature of historical writing, national consciousness and subjectivity.
23. Quoted in the New York Times, June 11, 1994.
24. John Beverley, Against Literature, p. 22.
25. Beatriz Sarlo, “El relativismo absoluto o como el mercado y la sociología reflexionan sobre estética, ” Punto de vista (Buenos Aires), No. 48 (April, 1994).
26. Diamela Eltit, “Errante, errática,” in Juan Carlos Letora, ed., Una política de literatura menor: La narrativa de Diamela Eltit (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio), p 21.
27. Diamela Eltit’s novels are not yet translated but it is worth mentioning the staging of gender and marginality in her first novel, Lumpérica (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones del Ornitorrinco, 1983) and the exploration of socially constituted sex and gender in El cuarto mundo (Santiago, Chile: Planeta, 1988).
28. Antonio Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1992). Roger Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía: Identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1987).
29. Performances are difficult to discuss because of their particularly ephemeral nature. Jesusa Rodríguez, however, contributes regularly to Debate feminista, published in Mexico, and Pedro Lemebel is about to publish his chronicles of Santiago, Ojo grótico: Ciudad paranoia, with the Cuarto Propio publishing house.
