What's Left of the Intelligentsia? The Uncertain Future of the Printed Word
Franco, Jean
The new technologies of communication have created a class of technocrats and new audiences for whom the printed word has lost its luster and now competes with-and is often superseded bymusic...
...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...
...At the same time, they stress performance as the central metaphor both for the artist and for the way that everyday life is lived...
...cionados in Mexico City as symptomatic of the society of the spectacle, Carlos Not only a writer like Monsivais notes that they are the neoliberal indifferent to his applause or at- Vargas Llosa runs for tention.1 2 In this president, but also environment, the intellectual may the progressive feel estranged...
...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...
...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...
...John Beverley, Against Literature, p. 22...
...This prestige has to be understood in the context of societies with high levels of illiteracy...
...Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez, Julio C6rtazar and Mario Vargas Llosa were among its earliest supporters...
...2 9 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...
...Carlos Monsivais, Escenas de pudory liviandad (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1981), p. 299...
...Tango, bolero and samba were invented in urban barrios, but were later appropriated by high culture as the epitome of "Latinity...
...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...
...sobre la censura," Debate feminista, Year 5, Vol...
...It was they who acted as the critical consciousness of society, as the voice of the oppressed, as the teachers of future generations...
...2 7 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...
...The medium is an invitation to the true mass dissemination of one's ideas, and it has to be used...
...Thus it is not surprising that many well-known writers-Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz and Juan Jos6 Arreola, among others-have hosted television programs with mixed success...
...Experimental writing, which used to be encouraged by small publishing houses such as Joaqufn Mortiz and Sudamericana, has fallen by the wayside...
...Diamela Eltit and Carlos Monsivais, "Un dialogo (6 dos mon6logos...
...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...
...Examples of historical novels are too numerous to mention but an exception should be made for Roa Bastos whose Yo elsupremo (1974) explores the nature of historical writing, national consciousness and subjectivity...
...Rock music offers a striking example of this transculturation...
...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...
...It lives in the catacombs, but it won't disappear...
...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...
...Performance also exposes to parody and critique any notion of original essence-whether of nation, gender or ethnicity...
...The utopian vision of the future, however, has now vanished...
...The Mexican performance artist Jesusa Rodrfguez calls television a virus and a powerful-because unrecognized-form of censorship.' 8 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...
...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...
...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 quin va a ayudarnos...
...Magical realism," once taken as the index of Latin American originality, is now little more than a brand name for exoticism...
...1 6 Whereas print culture was once associated with modernity and the formation of national consciousness, television has now become the index of contemporary globalized culture...
...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: Verso, 1991...
...In contemporary culture, discrimination between good and bad art seems to have flown the coop...
...Her most recent book is Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (Columbia University Press, 1990...
...The conclusion is not as paradoxical as it seems...
...36, No...
...In Mexico, where state patronage of culture has traditionally been strong, Emilio Azcirraga, the televison magnate who markets soap operas as far afield as Russia and China, has become one of the leading actors in the art world...
...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...
...Of love and levitation," interview with Patricia Castano and Holly Aylett, Times Literary Supplement, No...
...Despite all this, literature-on the surface, at least-is flourishing...
...This displacement is exacerbated by A writer's study in Havana,Cuba...
...Carlos Monsivais, Edgardo Rodriguez Julia, and the Chilean Pedro Lemebel are among its most devastating practitioners...
...5. Elena Poniatowska, "El otro gran arte," Nexos, 183 (March, 1993), p. 37...
...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...
...For instance, there is little doubt that Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate was written to appeal to a broad market...
...Significantly, not only a writer like the neoliberal Vargas Llosa runs for president, but also the progressive musician Blades...
...Yet as in the case of tango or samba, rock lends itself to many different kinds of appropriation...
...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...
...2 8 What these examples have in common is their refusal to respect boundaries of genre or the clear distinction between the fictional and the factual...
...4. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Culturas hibridas: Estrategias para entrar ysalir de la modernidad (Mexico City: Era, 1989...
...Immanuel 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...
...2 (Summer, 1992...
...Performances are difficult to discuss because of their particularly ephemeral nature...
...2 6 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 avantgarde tended to take for granted...
...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...
...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...
...Diamela Eltit's novels are not yet translated but it is worth mentioning the staging of gender and marginality in her first novel, Lumpirica (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones del Ornitorrinco, 1983) and the exploration of socially constituted sex and gender in El cuarto mundo (Santiago, Chile: Planeta, 1988...
...7. Jose Agustin, Contra la corriente (Mexico: Diana, 1991...
...At the other extreme, punk and funk were appropriated by the most marginalized sectors of Latin American society...
...As an example of the latter, he cites the masked Superbarrio in Mexico City who dresses in a costume 17REPORT ON CULTURE reminiscent both of Superman and the kitsch outfits of wrestlers, and negotiates on behalf of the marginalized sectors of the population...
...Indeed, Cuban independence hero Jos6 Marti is still referred to as "the apostle," the Mexican Jos6 Vasconcelos compared himself to Moses, and for Nicaraguan poet Rub6n Darfo, poets were "towers of God...
...Roger Bartra, Lajaula de la melancolia: Identidady metamorfosis del mexicano (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1987...
...2 5 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...
...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...
...Nowadays they mass produce San Martin de Porras, all of them coming out of the same mold," she writes...
...It was this intelligentsia who shaped the identity of nations...
...16REPORT ON CULTURE more evident than in the dramatic changes in the shape of the city itself...
...For Antonio Benitez 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...
...9 (March, 1994...
...Veloso's music has gone through many phases...
...When Dominican Juan Luis Guerra sang in Lima, his concert was compared both to a soccer match and a visit by the Pope...
...92-107...
...3. Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bullfinch Press, 1991), p. ix...
...2 4 Perhaps the problem that most troubles critics, however, is that of value...
...They were heldand held themselves-in high regard...
...It is the other voice...
...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 Castafieda's Utopia Unarmed...
...6 Novels such as the Argentine Manuel Puig's Heartbreak Tango and the Puerto Rican Luis Rafael Sdnchez' The Importance of Being Daniel Santos, the essays of Carlos Monsivais on Agustfn Lara in Lost Love, and films such as the Mexican Marla Novaro's Danzdn 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...
...tus allows "clandestine poetry" to act as a "critique of consumer society...
...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...
...According to Landi, "television 19 "ItREPORT ON CULTURE 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 homes...
...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...
...The intelligentsia were not only major actors in the public sphere, but alsoat least in public perception-mediators for the popular classes and advocates of social change...
...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 Garcia Mdrquez, who continued to support the revolution, and those, like Vargas Llosa, who became its critics...
...What had, in the past, given literature its special claim to be resistant to consumer society had to do with the nature of reading...
...All over Latin America, rock music threw into relief the authoritarianism of the older generation as well as the idealistic nostalgia of the Left...
...2 1 Even the older generation is not indifferent to marketability...
...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...
...The titles of some of his songs speak for themselves: "El costo de la vida" ("The Cost of Living"), "Si saliera petr6leo" ("If They Strike Oil"), and "Ojald que llueva caff" ("I Hope That It Rains Coffee...
...The new technologies of communication have created a class of technocrats and new audiences for whom the printed word has lost its luster and now competes with-and is often superseded bymusic and the images of television...
...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...
...The new technologies of communication have creatSed 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 nm n, VOL XXVIII, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1994 culture...
...13-14...
...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...
...By the late sixties, however, the definition of what constituted revolutionary writing had become more rigorous...
...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...
...1 0 Like salsa singer Rub6n Blades, Guerra has used his popularity to draw attention to poverty and other social ills...
...New Left Review, 204 (March/April, 1994...
...Beatriz Sarlo, "El relativismo absoluto o como el mercado y la sociologia reflexionan sobre estetica," Punto de vista (Buenos Aires), No...
...products in the global market...
...Quoted in the New York Times, June 11, 1994...
...The Cuban revolution was an event of cultural as well as political significance for the Latin American intelligentsia...
...Mass culture and neoliberalism dilute the oppositional value of the aesthetic...
...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...
...Some writers now court rather than reject commercialism...
...In a television interview for The Americas series, Veloso said that he walks a tightrope between folk tradition and the international music industry...
...Parameters of social debate in mass-mediatized society are limited by all kinds of implicit, rather than explicit rules...
...The recent national award of generous lifetime fellowships to Carlos SFuentes, Octavio Paz, Carlos Monsivais and Elena Poniatowska (to name only a few of the recipients) fol- "< lows a tradition of protecting national culture...
...There is a plethora of new novelists, young poets and performers writing in every conceivable style and on every conceivable topic...
...As the Argentine political scientist Oscar Landi acknowledges, television has an ambiguous effect on the culture...
...What's Left of the Intelligentsia...
...cultural bricolage, whereby imported technologies and fashions are used to create new cultures...
...Music illustrates the fact that clearcut distinctions between tradition and modernity, native purity and degraded imports, have become tenuous...
...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...
...ties-now all wear the same hat and sandals, and carry the same gourd and basket...
...With the globalization of the book industry and the publication of translations and bestsellers, the stake in popularity and translatability has grown...
...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...
...or the plain narrative style adopted by Garcfa Mdrquez in The General in his Labyrinth (1989) with the baroque and labyrinthine Autumn of the Patriarch (1975...
...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...
...8. Alfredo Beltran Fuentes, La ideologia antiautoritaria del rock nacional (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina, 1989...
...For Brazil, see Renato Ortiz et al., Telenovela: Historia e Producbo (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1989...
...1 7 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...
...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...
...Likewise President Fernando Collor de Mello organized a massive rock concert to celebrate his neoliberal victory in Brazil...
...Diamela Eltit, "Errante, erratica," in Juan Carlos Letora, ed , Una poetica de literatura menor: La narrativa de Diamela Eltit (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio), p. 21...
...The Child Jesuses which are dressed by congregations, the little Babes, the Holy Child of Atocha-which used to have their g people line up outside a disco in San own personali- Puerto Rico...
...In a single night, one television episode in Colombia alone can reach 10 or 15 million people," he claims...
...For Paz, this marginal staGarcia M&rquez is acutely concious of the fact that the average soap opera reaches publics much vaster than those of his own novels...
...An early aficionado, the Mexican novelist Jos6 Agustifn claimed that, for young people of his generation, rock represented an emancipation from the stuffy discipline of a middle-class childhood...
...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...
...Music is integral to consumer culture, yet focuses desires and aspirations in unpredictable ways, ways that are not necessarily communicable by the literary intelligentsia...
...Like many of her contemporaries, Eltit works within a traditional genre-in this case the novel-while radically altering its syntax...
...La receta de Laura Esquivel," Plural, 237 (June, 1991), pp...
...the growing privatization of culture...
...For example, in his book The Repeating Island the Cuban author Antonio Benitez 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...
...15 Brazilian producers often adapt novels for television...
...If the 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...
...Increasingly, cultural institutions-galleries, music, and television channels-are managed by private enterprise...
...In the age of global flows and networks, the small scale and the local are the places of greatest intensity...
...9. John Beverley, "Postmodern Music and Left Politics," Against Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp...
...2 3 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...
...On the global reach of Televisa, see Fernando Mejia Barquera, "Ecos de los medios en 1993," Revista Mexicana de Comunicaci6n, 33 (January-March, 1994...
...Edgardo Rodriguez Julia, El entierro de Cortijo, Rio Piedras, Huracan, 1983...
...The Argentine critic Nestor Garcia Canclini describes this remapping of the cultural field as "reconversion...
...18 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18REPORT ON CULTURE It is Cuban-American salsa singer Celia Cruz-not Rod6 or Bolivar--who is the contemporary apostle of Latinity...
...A Touch of Evil: Jesusa Rodriguez's Subversive Church," interview with Jean Franco, T.D.R., Vol...
...Disillusionment with socialism, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, and the collapse of Communism do not, however, wholly account for the prevailing angst...
...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 pubb lishing is dominated by multinational concerns such as the Spanish-based publishing company Planeta, which now publishes in Mexico and Argentina...
...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...
...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...
...In the sixNACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 20REPORT ON CULTURE ties, it was still plausible to claim that literature was revolutionary and that the writer fought guerrilla battles with his pen...
...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...
...4516 (October 2026, 1989), p. 1152...
...In a last-ditch defense, Octavio Paz recently argued that poetry "has become an art on the margins of society...
...124-141...
...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...
...57-60...
...The once familiar cityscapes-with their caf6s, centrally located theaters and public spaces-have turned into urban nightmares...
...9 Popularity has close links to populism in Latin America...
...Popular religious art is evil...
...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...
...Jesus Martin-Barbeo, De los medios alas mediaciones: Comunicaci6n, cultura y hegemonia (Barcelona: Ediciones G. Gili, 1987...
...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...
...Presidentialcan Observing the marginalized punk afi- campaign trail...
...l 3 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 demonstrates that in some circles at least there is a stake in maintaining high culture primarily because of its exclusionary elitism.14 VOL XXVIII, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1994 he other powerful rival of print culture is, of course, television, which reaches audiences far larger than any book or periodical...
...Everywhere in contemporary Latin America, there is a sense of the literary intelligentsia's diminishing importance and displacement from public discourse...
...3 The shift in patronage is particularly striking in SMexico because of a tradition of cultural nationalism That dates back to the revolution...
...58-67...
...For literary practioners, as distinct from critics, the problem seems not so much discrimination, but rather the difficulty of disrupting the seductions of consumerism...
...48 (April, 1994...
...This modernization is nowhere NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Jean Franco is at the Institute of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Columbia University...
...If we don't do it ourselves, who will help us...
...And melodrama, the mainstay of popular theater, has now been recycled, producing a type of television soap opera which outdoes U.S...
...See Antonio Marquet, "LComo escribir un best-seller...
...What was once designated "cultural imperialism"-according to which Latin America was the passive recipient of Hollywood movies, Has Cuban-American salsa Disney cartoons, and singer Celia Cruz (right) television serials-is replaced Simon Bolivar (above) as the contemporary "apostle now considered inventive of Latinity...
...Que hace la gente con la television (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1992), p. 192...
...It is little wonder that prize ceremonies organized by the Planeta publishing house resemble the Miss Universe contest and are designed to promote bestsellers...
...No wonder that for critics on the left the explicitly political and ethical aspects of literature seem to Natalia Esper6n and Flavio Cesar, stars of have emigrated the Mexican telenovela Agujetas de color elsewhere, for de Rosa...
...Nelly Richard, Masculino/femenino: Practicas de la diferencia y cultura democratic (Santiago, Chile: Francisco Zeghers, 1993), pp...
...In Chile, the playwright and novelist Antonio Skirmeta "popularizes" literature through television...
...Modernity is not creative...
...What used to be claimed for literaturethat it offered insights into the deep undercurrents of history and into the nature of language-is now the province of television...
...See Charles A. Perrone, Masters of the Contemporary Brazilian Song MPB 1965-1985 (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1989...
...2. Jorge Castaneda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993...
...The lack of popular appeal, however, does not necessarily translate into a subversive language powerful enough to rock the capitalist boat...
...The very term "rock nacional," used in Argentina, represented an attempt to rid the music of its "satanic" origins in the United States...
...He was responsible for organizing "the YOL Friends of the Arts of Mexico" (the sponsors of Jua 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...
...Wallerstein is by no means unique in finding the present confusing and the future impossible to predict...
...By virtue of numerous television appearances, Carlos Fuentes has become a spokesperson for Latin America within the United States...
...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-lalettre...
...plena musician Cortijo, the Puerto Rican novelist Edgardo Rodrfguez Julid 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...
...For over a decade, Cuba helped set the cultural politics of the hemisphere...
...The market is not tolerant of writing that is too experimental or "untranslatable...
...2 The utopian vision was sustained in large part by a literary intelligentsia whose medium was print culture...
...Antonio Benitez Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1992...
...The best-selling author in Latin America, Garcia Mirquez, is acutely conscious of the fact that the didate Rubdn Blades on the average telenovela (soap opera) reaches a public much vaster than the combined readership of all his novels...
...2 0 Worse still, literature itself is now mass-mediatized...
...Oscar Landi, Dev6rame Otra Vez: Que hizo la television con la gente...
...2 2 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...
...The essay too has changed its ways, springing loose from its pedantic moorings to encompass the fantastic...
...Thus performance artists such as Jesusa Rodriguez in Mexico and Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis in Chile offer some of the most searching exposures of national myths and socially defined sex-gender norms...
...salsa singer Attending the ala singer funeral of the Rub6n Blades...
...Far from implying the death of local cultures, Garcia 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...
...19 Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo observes that the public space once dominated by the intelligentsia has now been occupied by the media...
...1. Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Agonies of Liberalism: What Hopes of Progress...
...It is celebrity singers like Rub6n 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...
...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...
...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...
...The brush in his hand cannot sweep the vulgarity from our imagination...
...Juan Flores, "Cortijo's Revenge: New Mappings of Puerto Rican Culture," in Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1993), pp...
...Juan Luis Guerra, "Sentir al son del pueblo," La tortuga (Lima), 47 (1992), pp...
...Jesusa Rodriguez, however, contributes regularly to Debate feminista, published in Mexico,.and Pedro Lemebel is about to publish his chronicles of Santiago, Ojo g6tico: Ciudad paranoia, with the Cuarto Propio publishing house...
...This was seen as a crucial counterforce to the cliches and fetishization of cultural artifacts in mass society...
...Equally promising, the video camera, electronic mail and tape recorders have made the absolute control of information increasingly difficult...
...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...
...Yet instead of remaining neutral, it could be argued that the market exercises powerful forms of intervention over the public and over artists...
...example, into the "testimonial...
...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...
Vol. 28 • September 1994 • No. 2
