The Failures of Latin America and Criticism on Latin America: Reading John Beverley (with a Detour through Antonio Cornejo Polar)

Hegel famously wrote that “Minerva’s owl flies only at dusk.” As everyone knows, Hegel meant by this that only in retrospect can one begin to truly understand an event or topic. As we will see, the idea of knowledge as crepuscular is relevant to an understanding of The Failure of Latin America: Postcolonialism in Bad Times (2019). ¹ John Beverley’s authorship gives The Failure of Latin America added relevance: he has played a major role in (U.S.) academic criticism about Latin America during the last forty or so years. The Failure of Latin America is thus presented as a kind of intellectual testament that sums up Beverley’s political and theoretical evolution, together with that of the region as a civilizational location for social hopes from the revolutionary 1960s to our post-utopian present.

For heuristic purposes I propose here to read Beverley’s meditations on the end of Latin America or, more accurately, of a version of Latin America, together with an earlier Latin American—rather than Latin Americanist ² —jeremiad: Antonio Cornejo Polar’s 1997 critical testament “Mestizaje e hibridez: los riesgos de las metáforas. Apuntes” [“Mestizaje and Hybridity: The Risk of Metaphors—Notes”]. ³ I believe it is possible to see the analysis of Latin American literature—as well as of the process of hope and despair regarding the region—documented in Beverley’s book as being implicitly in counterpoint to the putative end of the Latin American critical tradition lamented by Cornejo Polar in this, his last text.

The Failure of Latin America

Latin America

The title of Beverley’s book—The Failure of Latin America—is significant. First it includes the name Latin America, a concept that because of use is often seen as much less problematic than it actually is. As many know, the term “Latin America” has “imperialist” origins. Although it was first coined by the Chilean radical Francisco Bilbao in 1863, who was living in Paris, it was taken up by French intellectuals, like Michel Chevalier, and used by those supporting French intervention in the region as a way of hiding its true imperial nature. ⁴ That said, there is no reason why a term might not accrue or be given different denotations and connotations through time. A phrase that might implicitly support imperialism in, let’s say, 1862, can be used in anti-imperialist discourse in 1962, not to say 2022 or 2062. However, Latin America is crisscrossed by fault lines so severe that put into question its putative unity. The most obvious division is that between Spanish America and Brazil. This is a division that is both linguistic and cultural. ⁵ Furthermore, the idea of a unity between both regions has always been seen as more questionable from the Portuguese speaking side. Thus, in 2019, only 4.2% of Brazilians considered themselves primarily Latin American. ⁶ In contrast, for instance, in Chile, 38% saw themselves as primarily Latin American, and in Colombia, 59%. ⁷ Even if one wishes the poll had actually asked about Latin America as a secondary rather than primary identity—in other words, as an identity held in addition to one’s nationality—many Brazilian intellectuals have also questioned the idea of Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present. ⁸

As is implicit in the use of “Latin” to describe the region, indigenous cultures and populations, as well as Afro-descendant individuals and communities, are marginalized if not excluded from the concept of Latin America. Many indigenous scholars and activists have, therefore, embraced Abya Yala as an alternative name for the region. However, the use of Abya Yala, while expressive of the need of organized indigenous movements for a name for the region distinct from Latin or Spanish America, is not unproblematically inclusive. It is difficult, for instance, to categorize writers such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, or Roberto Bolaño, as belonging to Abya Yala. However, one must note that even within Spanish-speaking Latin America there are significant cultural and regional differences. Apart from language and perhaps Catholic heritage, what connects Meso-America with the Andean region or with the Southern Cone? Needless to say, Beverley is fully aware of these divisions, even quoting well-known texts critical of the “idea” of Latin America by such diverse authors such as Walter Mignolo and Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo. ⁹

Failure

Underlying Beverley’s embrace of the idea of Latin America is his belief that the region is a distinct civilization or, perhaps more accurately, that it has or has had the possibility of becoming one. Already in the introduction to The Failure of Latin America, developing Samuel Huntington’s idea of Latin America as a civilization different from that of the United States, Beverley notes: “To recall Samuel Huntington’s idea, it has not emerged as a ‘civilization’ yet . . . by contrast, [with] China and India, which also entered the race of modern capitalism late but quickly surpassed even advanced Latin American countries like Brazil. Latin American modernity has been a failure because Latin America, even as it has embraced its own internal diversity and heterogeneity, has remained ‘dependent’” (xviii). ¹⁰ “Dependency” implies being subordinated economically to the United States. Notoriously Huntington used this view of Latin America as a distinct and, therefore, inassimilable culture, as an excuse for arguing for restrictions on immigration from the region. ¹¹ Obviously, Beverley assigns a different connotation to the idea of Latin America as a civilization, even if a failed one. Given that both China and India are in the grips of repressive governments—even if nominally of different political stripes—and are characterized by extremely unequal distributions of income, it is clear that the notion of success is based on a very basic view of the economy. 

Looking at another paratext helps further explain what is seen as having failed with Latin America’s search for “independence,” as well as the connotations Beverley associates with “Latin America.” I am referring to the cover, which shows the sculpture of the dead Simón Bolívar in Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino. Since Beverley is one of the editors of the series in which the book was published, it is difficult not to see him as (at a minimum) approving the cover. The representation of a dead Bolívar can, therefore, be seen as commenting on the title and the content of the study.

One could, perhaps, argue that making Bolívar into a representative of the totality of Latin America is not without difficulties: he played no role, obviously, in Brazilian history; neither is he a significant part of that of Argentina, Chile, Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, or the countries of Central America. Even among those countries he helped liberate, such as Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, his role is far from uniformly celebrated. Not only did he found the conservative party of Colombia—which, at least in principle, would associate him with values far from progressive—but his role in Peruvian history has also frequently been questioned, such as, for instance, by liberal writer Ricardo Palma. ¹²

Be that as it may, Bolívar has long been seen as synonymous with Latin America’s progressive movements, due to his belief in the need for regional alliances and his putative opposition to U.S. imperialism. For instance, Cuban songwriter Pablo Milanés in “Canción por la unidad latinoamericana” (1976) sang: “Bolivar hurled a star / that shone next to Martí / Fidel dignified it / for it to travel through these lands. ¹³" The idea of Bolívar as the founder of a radical Latin American tradition is also present in Hugo Chávez’s calling his government the “Bolivarian Revolution,” and naming his alternative to the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana Para Los Pueblos de Nuestra América). Indeed, the name of ALBA brings together both Bolívar (Bolivariana) and Cuban José Martí, who proposed the name “Nuestra América” (Our America) as a substitute for Spanish America or Latin America.

In fact, the failure of this version of “progressive” Latin America is one of the book’s underlying motifs. As Beverley notes,

I can add that at the time of writing this article, whatever progressive hopes remained for Venezuela seem to be gone, as the regime attempts to hold on to power despite President Nicolás Maduro’s apparent loss during the 2024 elections. Moreover, one could even argue that, unfortunately, rightwing dictators and presidents, such as Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Augusto Pinochet (Chile), Jorge Rafael Videla and now democratically elected president Javier Milei (Argentina), are as Latin American as the Cuban Revolution and the Pink Tide. Pace Milanés, one could imagine a rightwing stone becoming an abominable star. ¹⁴

Postcolonialism

More surprising than the notion of Latin America’s failure—regardless of one’s politics, very few, if any, would see in the region a success—the second part of the title—“Postcolonialism in Bad Times”—is the one that truly catches the reader’s attention. While we always live in “bad times”—and, given the second election of Trump, the rise of neo-fascism, and the climate emergency, the “times” have gotten much worse since 2019 when Beverley’s book was published—the surprising word is “postcolonialism.” After all, as José Antonio Mazzotti notes, “one needs always to keep in mind that the concept of postcolonial was originally applied to the situation of the former French and British colonies in Africa and Asia. ¹⁵ While the use of “postcolonial” for an analysis of Latin American literature, culture, and society, reflects a laudable desire to stress the commonalities of the “Global South,” it can also be seen as erasing Latin American difference.

One must add that, as Nicholas Dirks argues, “postcoloniality is related to current developments in identity politics, multiculturalism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. ¹⁶" Thus, even if the notion of the postcolonial famously arose out of the writings of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha—that is, out of the scholarship of a Palestinian and two Indian scholars—the fact is that it can be seen “as strongly influenced by the poststructualist thought of Jacques Derrida and, in the fields of psychoanalysis, that of Jacques Lacan. ¹⁷" One can argue that, regardless of its utility and insight, postcolonialism is imbricated with Western academic thought of the 1970s and 1980s and that, furthermore, it is, in principle, based on the marginalization, if not exclusion, of Latin American scholarship and the region’s multiple histories.

These issues are addressed in The Failure of Latin America. According to Beverley,

In other words, the turn to what used to be called poststructuralist theory and the turn to postcolonial theory are presented as part of the same intellectual movement. ¹⁸ Others have proposed a roughly similar genealogy for postcolonial theory, often critically, such as Aijaz Ahmad, who chastised its lack of concern with issues of revolution under the guise of a criticism of nationalism. ¹⁹ The most extreme version of this imbrication of postcolonialism and poststructuralism is Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001). ²⁰ After listing concepts; describing anti-colonial movements; and analyzing thinkers (including Marx and Marxists, such as José Carlos Mariátegui), postcolonial scholars (such as Edward Said), and “theorists” (such as Michel Foucault), the book concludes with a paean addressed directly to Derrida. In it Young presents the works and person of the author of Of Grammatology as the culmination of anti-colonial and post-colonial thinking and activism. ²¹

In addition to celebrating the founders of postcolonial theory, Beverley will also highlight the importance of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. This group, which also included such noted figures as Ileana Rodríguez, Alberto Moreiras, Mignolo, and Javier Sanjinés, was inspired by Indian subaltern studies that paid attention to groups, movements, and individuals excluded from mainstream historiography, whether liberal or Marxist. Beverley compares The Failure of Latin America with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2002 Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies: “These are also essays in the wake of subaltern studies, but sixteen years after Chakrabarty’s” (x). However, it is clear that subaltern studies are presented as a development within postcolonial thought rather than a break from it. As we saw, Young presents Latin American anti-colonial thought—from Martí to Che Guevara—as somehow concluding in Derridean deconstruction. In contrast, as we will see, Beverley considers the Latin American critical tradition as, at best, flawed, in comparison with that of India and other regions of the global South seen as reflecting progressive ideas.

Antonio Cornejo Polar: The Frayed and Not-Very-Honorable Ending of Hispano-Americanism

Cornejo Polar and Beverley

This may very well be as good as any a moment to bring into this discussion of The Failure of Latin America Antonio Cornejo Polar’s testamentary essay, “Mestizaje e hibridez: Los riesgos de las metáforas. Apuntes” [“Mestizaje and Hybridity: The Risks of Metaphors—Notes”]. This brief text was originally read at the LASA congress of April 1997 because the Peruvian scholar was too ill to attend. He would die in May the same year. While there is no reference to “Mestizaje e hibridez” in The Failure of Latin America, Cornejo Polar shows up briefly on two occasions. The first is during Beverley’s discussion of Lurgio Gavilán’s (self) testimonial text Memorias del soldado desconocido (2012) (translated as When Rains Became Floods). As Beverley notes in a passage analyzing how Gavilán compares his writing to activities to the activities of Andean peasants,

The second mention is, in my opinion, more relevant to a discussion of “Mestizaje e hibridez.” Beverly first quotes anthropologist, historian, and educational entrepreneur Jorge Klor de Alva’s statement in “Colonialism and (Post) Colonialism as Latin American Mirages” (1992) that “[t]he close identification of post-independence national cultures with their European templates makes it evident that the Americas, in contrast to many Asian and African societies, did not experience decolonization in the course of their assumed postcoloniality. ²²" 

Beverley adds: “it was greeted with alarm and skepticism in Latin American studies. I remember my colleague Antonio Cornejo Polar—my senior in every way—asking me anxiously if I thought it could be true. Today it seems more like common sense” (128). “Mestizaje e hibridez” can be read as Cornejo Polar’s response to Klor’s comments and their ensuing transformation into “common sense.”

Cornejo Polar as a Critic of Latin American Thought

Leaving aside the dramatic personal context of the text’s writing, “Mestizaje e hibridez” is explicitly a criticism of Latin American critical thought in terms that are not completely out of line with Beverley’s negative evaluation of the region’s intellectual production. Cornejo Polar’s very brief essay begins with a review of key Latin American concepts such as mestizaje—sexual and cultural contact giving rise to distinct Latin American cultures —and the related notion of hybridity, which he associates with the writings of Néstor García Canclini, then at the height of his influence. ²³  According to the Peruvian scholar, “[i]t is evident that categories like mestizaje and hybridity basically stem from biology and other disciplines unrelated to cultural and literary analysis, with the aggravating factor—in the case of mestizaje—that it is an extremely ideological concept. ²⁴" And:

It is worth remembering that mestizaje—or different versions of this idea—has long been used in Latin America as a way of imagining distinct national cultures, despite the multicultural and multiethnic realities created by histories of conquest, exploitation, and conflict. 

Cornejo Polar continues his negative review of Latin American concepts used in the study of the region’s culture and history by looking at the notion of transculturation. First proposed by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, it was later brought into literary studies by Ángel Rama: “I add—despite my unrestricted respect for Ángel Rama—that the idea of transculturation has more and more become the most sophisticated disguise of the category of mestizaje. ²⁶"

These are criticisms shared to a great degree by Beverley, even if he adds an interesting wrinkle. After noting that transculturation, as “cultural creolization,” always takes place whenever cultures come into contact, he argues:

While Cornejo Polar is concerned with how mestizaje, hybridity, and transculturation, can be used to hide the actual cultural, ethnic, and other tensions that cut through Latin American societies, Beverley sees in transculturation a Eurocentric quest for modernization. Moreover, it is one that is led by the elites, rather than the subalterns. If Cornejo Polar is critical of the idea of a national identity capable of erasing cultural tensions, Beverley adds the notion’s imitative Eurocentrism and its elite nature. However, Cornejo Polar’s criticisms of the region’s intellectual tradition can also be seen as responding in partial agreement to Klor de Alva’s comments noted above.

Jeremiad

Despite these criticisms, Cornejo Polar’s essay is, as previously mentioned, a jeremiad against the end of a criticism based in Latin America, and, therefore, an argument for writing the experience of Latin America not only in Spanish, but also, at least in principle, in Portuguese, and, potentially, indigenous languages. The Peruvian critic notes “the difficult coexistence of texts and discourses in Spanish and Portuguese (and eventually in Amerindian languages) with the uncontainable dissemination of critical texts in English (or in other European languages). ²⁷" He also argues that this dissemination leads to a linguistic hierarchy in which English is implicitly seen as superior to Spanish and Portuguese: “[t]he massive use of a foreign language for the study of Hispano-American literature is generating—even though perhaps nobody wants it—a strange hierarchy in which texts written in a foreign language end up leading the common field of Hispano-American studies. ²⁸" Moreover, “[criticism] in English usually uses a bibliography in the same language and disregards, or does not mention, what has been done in Latin America with so much effort during so many years. Besides, its extreme preference for the narrow, theoretical postmodern canon is a compulsion that verges on the preposterous. ²⁹"

In direct response to Klor de Alva, Beverley, and the critical “common sense” that would basically throw Latin American intellectual production into the dustbin of history, Cornejo Polar adds the following: “cultural, postcolonial, and/or subaltern studies have not calibrated the implications of practicing these disciplines predominantly in English regardless of the language of the discourses under study. ³⁰" He even compares this English-only scholarship on Latin American culture as resembling a neocolonial economic relation that “seems to take Hispano-American literature as a raw material to be turned into sophisticated critical artifacts. ³¹" This linguistic hierarchy is not limited to texts, since “it is absolutely erroneous that the majority of professors of Hispano-American literature are proficient in English. ³²" For the Peruvian critic, scholarship written in the languages of Latin America and within Latin America has implicitly a kind of insider knowledge, regardless of its historical flaws. 

It is also worth remembering that the alarm expressed by the Peruvian critic is precisely the negative image of the celebration of writing in English expressed by many Latin Americanists at the time. According to Argentine-born Walter Mignolo, in his influential The Darker Side of the Renaissance, published, significantly, in 1995, “[w]riting in Spanish means . . . to remain at the margin of contemporary theoretical discussions. In the world in which scholarly publications are meaningful, there are more readers in English and French than in Spanish. ³³" While objectively true, it is impossible not to see Mignolo’s arguments as accepting and ultimately reinforcing the linguistic hierarchy that places English over Spanish. ³⁴ Moreover, given this logic, why not stop using Spanish altogether as a language of culture not only in “theoretical discussions” but also in creative work? Mutatis mutandis the same conditions of reception are to be found in the “world republic of letters.”

In addition to mentioning the destructive effect of the brutal Southern cone military dictatorships, Cornejo Polar notes the manner in which neoliberal policies—which led to the underfunding of education in Latin America and often opened book markets to foreign publishers—have played a role in depressing the intellectual production of the region: ³⁵ “the military dictatorships, through censorship or even more brutal methods, and afterward neoliberalism with its politics of depletion of public cultural institutions (universities, libraries, archives) have practically destroyed the material basis for the development of the discipline. ³⁶"

The conclusion of the essay makes clear the depth of Cornejo Polar’s pessimism: “I would not want my words to be considered now as a premonition, but instead as a distressed and cordial indication of what could be the frayed and not very honorable ending of Hispano-Americanism. ³⁷" After all, while he refuses to consider his article a premonition, he gives no reasons why this dishonorable ending would not take place.

Reading Cornejo Polar in the Twenty-First Century

Reading Cornejo Polar’s essay in 2025, one cannot avoid the conclusion that his belief in the end of hispanoamericanismo—understood as a tradition of critical writing—was mostly wrong. Despite the continuous downgrading of higher education—under the impact of dictatorship, neoliberalism, and now neo-fascism—Spanish language critics have continued publishing major works. In fact, around the time “Mestizaje e hibridez” came out, Nelly Richard’s La insubordinación de los signos [The Insubordination of Signs] (1994); Beatriz Sarlo’s Borges, un escritor en las orillas [Borges: A Writer on the Edge] (1993) and Escenas de la vida postmoderna [Scenes from Postmodern Life](1994); and, from a younger generation, Christopher Domínguez Michael’s La utopía de la hospitalidad [The Utopia of Hospitality] (1993) and Tiros en el concierto [Gunshots at the Concert] (1997) were all published. Obviously, major critical work has continued to the present. ³⁸ 

However, unlike Rama, García Canclini, and Roberto Fernández Retamar, to limit ourselves to the authors mentioned by Cornejo Polar, these, as well as others, mostly reflect on national literatures rather than Spanish America or Latin America. In that sense, the Peruvian critic who, after all, founded and led the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana in 1975, ³⁹ and who precisely during that period wrote several programmatic articles for a regional literary criticism, ⁴⁰ could be seen as lamenting the end of a Spanish-language and implicitly Portuguese-language scholarship that not only was written by authors who lived in the region and were impacted by this experience, but also one that analyzed the region as a whole. Even though one could very well argue that criticism in Spanish is alive and well, it reflects different concerns than those that guided Cornejo Polar in this essay. That said, despite his stress on the need for a criticism focused on the specificity of Latin America’s literatures, looking back on Cornejo Polar’s writings as a whole, one would classify him primarily as a scholar of Peruvian and Andean literatures and cultures. Not only are his key concepts, such as la totalidad contradictoria (contradictory totality) or la heterogeneidad (heterogeneity) the product of his study of Peru’s cultural tensions, so are his major studies, such as Vigencia y universalidad de José María Arguedas [Continued Relevance and Universality of José María Arguedas] (1984) and Escribir en el aire. Ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural en las literaturas andinas [Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures] (1994).

Furthermore, as Cornejo Polar predicted, since the 1990s, a clearly distinct Anglophone Latin Americanism has developed; one which understandably responds to its own logic and fads: going from postcolonial to subaltern studies to gender theory to affect theory to sound studies to an approach based on world literature to eco-criticism, etc. However, there are many connections between, English and Spanish language scholarship. Not only are there U.S.-based Latin American scholars who publish in Latin American presses, such as Mariano Siskind or Efraín Kristal, but many Latin American scholars writing in Spanish and publishing primarily in the region trained in the U.S. Finally, many of the trends that developed in the U.S. have resonated in the region. One can single out the previously-mentioned approaches centered on gender studies, world literature, and eco-criticism as dealing with topics of urgent global relevance and not only Latin American or U.S. American relevance.

Rejecting The Lettered City

Transculturation

Beverley’s antipathy towards the Boom is, arguably, the major divergence between his own and Latin Americanism’s Anglophone trajectory. For many in Latin American Studies and beyond, the embrace of the Boom and that of theory coincided not only chronologically—Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, originally published in 1967, came out in English translation as One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1971—but was also seen as reflecting many of the same critical concerns. For instance, in 1992, Lucille Kerr reminisced about an unnamed scholar in French literature, who once remarked, “The Spanish Americans are actually doing what the French are only talking about. ⁴¹" Kerr lucidly analyzes the possible implications of this putative relationship between Latin American literature and French theory: whether it implied subordination or superiority of either theory or the Boom. However, what should be clear is that the novelty of the Boom—as a break with a previous Latin American literature often caricaturized as simplistic rural narrative if not simplistic socialist realism—was one of the central views held at the time not only by U.S. academics, but also by Latin American scholars, such as Emir Rodríguez-Monegal, ⁴² and even writers, such as future Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. ⁴³ Moreover, as insinuated by Kerr, while Latin American literature was seen as having theoretical import, a similar interest was not expressed in the region’s scholarship. 

Beverley rejected the Boom as a product of what, borrowing from Ángel Rama, he calls the “lettered city,” that is, the intellectuals and the cultural institutions that, in the first instance, were the intellectual substratum that made possible Spain’s colonial rule, and later justified the neocolonial structures of independent Latin America. However, he also sees it as an example of Rama’s other major theoretical concept: transculturation. Following Rama, Beverley defines transculturation as “the possibility that the diverse cultural and linguistic forms involved in Latin America would, in their process of interaction, come together in a new, ‘national’ synthesis, including both European and non-Western indigenous, African, and Asian elements” (12). After distinguishing between transculturation as “a process of cultural creolization that . . . takes place in all multicultural societies and transculturation as a specific cultural program . . . related to ‘development’ and the achievement of a Latin American form of modernity” (12), Beverley then identifies the Boom with this modernizing version of transculturation: “[o]ne of the models Rama suggested for transculturation was the novel of the Latin American Boom: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and so on” (12). 

However, while Beverley is correct in noting that transculturation privileges the intellectual, he doesn’t take into account, at least in this specific text, that one of the keys of Transculturación narrativa en América Latina [Writing Across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America] (1982) is that rather than being primarily a celebration of elite writers, Rama highlights the work of regionalist writers and how they appropriate “modern” tools to update their works and, therefore, renew their local culture: “a strengthening of what we can call the continent’s hinterland cultures, not to the degree that they held rigidly to their old traditions but to the degree that they transculturated without giving up their souls, as Arguedas would have said. ⁴⁴" This passage from Transculturación narrativa also shows that Cornejo Polar is simplifying Rama’s actual position. This is something that the Peruvian scholar may be acknowledging by noting that "transculturation has more and more become the most sophisticated disguise of the category of mestizaje," that is, that Rama’s proposal has been simplified in its use by other authors. However, Cornejo Polar clearly insinuates that this simplification is made possible by flaws present in the notion of transculturation.

The mention of José María Arguedas reminds us that, among other things, Transculturación narrativa is a study of the Peruvian indigenista’s masterpiece Los ríos profundos [Deep Rivers] (1958). ⁴⁵ To complicate things further, Arguedas was seen by Cortázar and progressively by Vargas Llosa as precisely an intellectual and cultural rival, if not enemy. ⁴⁶ In fact, of the Boom authors, only García Márquez was seen by Rama as being a transculturator, but of a different kind from Arguedas or Juan Rulfo. Rama writes of “the particular cultural situation into which Rulfo tried to insert the mediating function. In its drama and frustration, Rulfo’s work can be linked to that of Arguedas, but it differs from the solutions reached by Guimarães Rosa and García Márquez. ⁴⁷

The Lettered City

As Beverley notes, the “intelligentsia is also a new ruling class, or a key part of it, which persists into modernity—this is the core argument of Ángel Rama’s La ciudad letrada” (67). However, it is not clear to me how Rama’s seamless view of the “lettered city” as always imbricated with colonialism and neocolonialism relates to his earlier views expressed in Transculturación narrativa. Jose Eduardo González convincingly notes that “Rama had already begun to doubt his own view of literature as a democratizing tool, and of literature as a ‘weapon’ . . . and I believe this is evident in his pessimistic view of Latin America’s past and future in his posthumously published The Lettered City. ⁴⁸" However, the fact that La ciudad letrada [The Lettered City] is posthumous, and, to a degree, unfinished, undermines any definite conclusion about how Rama saw the relation between the ideas expressed in these two texts that, it must be remembered, were only published two years apart: Transculturación narrativa (1982) and La ciudad letrada (1984). Even if González is right and Rama had changed his position regarding the role of the intellectual and the effects of literature on society, we as readers are obviously free to use the Uruguayan critic’s insights in these two classic texts as makes sense to us, regardless of the author’s intention.

The seamless nature of the “lettered city” is clearly a problematic aspect of Rama’s posthumous work. As Fernanda Beigel writes, “[i]n this text, Rama left no cracks in his characterization of the literary system and ended up stigmatizing Latin American intellectuals under the sign of the collusion of writing with power. ⁴⁹" However, if we see La ciudad letrada and Transculturación narrativa as complementary rather than opposed texts, one could view the “republic of letters” as composed of hierarchically different and culturally divergent “lettered spaces.” One is tempted to use Cornejo Polar’s term and talk about heterogeneity, though, of course, within Spanish and Portuguese literatures, rather than cultures, races, and languages.

The Subaltern

Beverley’s rejection of Latin American thought, as being always already neocolonial, and his rejection of the Boom as being imbricated with the nation, seen as an elite project, are complementary. After all, Boom writers and Latin American scholars would belong to the same lettered city. However, the popularity of the Boom and especially Cien años de soledad, often seen as a key to understanding Latin American history and reality. had been partly a response to the curiosity raised about the region by the Cuban revolution. ⁵⁰ In the case of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia [I, Rigoberta Menchú] (1983), a similar interest in the then-ongoing revolutionary uprising in Central America, as well as the overlap of this particular text with questions about indigeneity and ethnic identity that were beginning to become central for U.S. progressives, helped create its canonicity. As Beverley notes about the indigenous activism depicted in Menchú’s testimonio, “[t]hey were struggling to limit their subjection to capitalist modernization of agriculture and forced acculturation” (9). The celebration of Menchú’s testimonio by Beverley and others thus continued the interest in Latin America as the space of radical politics that had underlaid the growth of academic interest in the region during the 1970s, as well as connecting it with the rise of issues of gender, culture, and ethnicity as the bases of progressive action.

Given Beverley’s rejection of the mainstream of Latin American literature and culture, it is not surprising that The Failure of Latin America looks at works that are described as being produced outside the lettered city, that is, outside the world of literature and of high culture, or, at least, that present subaltern views, such as Lurgio Gavilán’s (self) testimonio, Memorias del soldado desconocido, and Víctor Gaviria’s films Rodrigo D. No futuro [Rodrigo D: No Future] (1990) and La vendedora de rosas [The Rose Seller] (1994). As Beverley notes, he reflects on these “subaltern” works—as well as Gayatri Spivak’s classic essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and, surprisingly, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666—in order to examine “the way a subaltern ‘life’ can (or cannot) be represented adequately as subaltern within the framework of the dominant culture without becoming itself part of that culture” (107).

For Beverly, Gavilán’s (self) testimonio is of particular importance. As he notes, “One Hundred Years of Solitude was the novel that best represented the moment of the Latin American Boom in the 1960s and ’70s; in a similar way, Memorias de un soldado desconocido is (in my view) the book that best represents the present moment in Latin America, its affective charge, its struggle to find a new style and form, its political limits and possibilities” (121). A difficulty raised by Memorias de un soldado desconocido is that while the text began as a testimonio, Gavilán—whose extraordinary life trajectory took him from rural Quechua youth to Shining Path militant to soldier to priest to anthropologist—is today a “traditional intellectual” (121). He is now an “explicator of his own text” (121), even if his text is marked by “the deep experience of Quechua culture and language, of peasant and subproletarian life” (122). This is why for Beverley, without denying Gavilán’s current role as a “traditional intellectual,” Gavilán exemplifies a “kind of balancing point” between subaltern voice and lettered intellectual (122). One can add that according to Ulíses Zevallos Aguilar, Memorias de un soldado desconocido is proof that “in the twenty-first century, bilingual Quechua, with college education or political power, have written their own memoirs, or changed the title of the testimonio and diminished the presence of the gestor [interviewer]. ⁵¹" As this critic argues, Gavilán’s text reflects the genre’s trajectory from representation to self-representation. ⁵² 

In Lieu of Conclusion: About Endings and Failures.

In The Failure of Latin America, Beverley rues, 

This passage echoes Cornejo Polar’s concerns about the effects of neoliberalism and dictatorship on Spanish-American cultural production. According to Beverley, twenty years later similar forces—radical free market policies and extreme rightwing movements and the cultural values these promote—are undermining not only humanistic scholarship, but the impact and relevance of literature itself in the United States. Accepting Beverley’s and Huntington’s notion of multiple civilizations, one could posit that the economic, social, and cultural forces that threatened Latin American culture were in themselves a precedent for a more general (pan) civilizational failure. But of course, one could also argue that what this proves is that even if uneven, we are dealing with one civilization rather than many. ⁵³ 

Beverley finds a justification for his turn towards postcolonial theory in the putative failure of hispanoamericanismo, or, better said latinoamericanismo, to face its colonial heritage. However, for Beverley, the failure of Latin America also has an economic basis:

This is the kind of reasoning that, taken to its extreme, has led some U.S.-based Latin Americanists to celebrate Russia, China, India, and even Turkey, despite the repressive nature of those “civilizations.” One should question whether GDP should constitute the ultimate measure of civilizational success. If we did so, wouldn’t the fact that India is today a rightwing semi-fascist regime under Modi undermine the country’s claim to civilizational success? Wouldn’t the past and, at the time of writing, even more aggressive success of Trump and the semi-fascist politics he represents undermine similar claims to the success of U.S. civilization?

For his part, Beverley does not take to celebrating Russia, China, or India, but instead concludes that “Latin America . . . precisely in its failure carries the possibility of another form of modernity that points beyond the logic and current ubiquity of market capitalism” (139). Economic failure would thus present an opportunity for the return of progressive politics. However, the ubiquity of market capitalism, alas, also characterizes Latin America. In fact, one could argue that in many countries—in particular, Peru, Ecuador, and now Argentina—neoliberalism reigns supreme, though now associated with right wing governments growing ever more repressive. Latin American and Latin Americanist criticism must deal with the ever tighter embrace between fascism and neoliberal policies, which is a relationship that clearly feeds on economic failure. Instead of holding on to the idea of distinct civilizations, the participation of Latin America (however we define it) in this ever more rightwing global reality has to be a starting point for thinking about the region. As Korean film director Bong Joon-ho has argued: “maybe there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called capitalism. ⁵⁴" And as the encroaching climate apocalypse proves, this global capitalist civilization is also headed for failure, if it hasn’t already failed.

Juan De Castro is Professor of Literature and Critical Analysis and Co-Chair of Literary Studies in the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. He has written widely on Latin American literature, including his books Borges and Kafka, Bolaño and Bloom: Latin American Authors and the Western Canon (2022), Bread and Beauty: The Cultural Politics of José Carlos Mariátegui (2021), and Writing Revolution in Latin American: From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño (2019). He is editor or co-editor of numerous edited volumes including The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel (2023), Roberto Bolaño as World Literature (2017), and Critical Insights: Mario Vargas Llosa (2014).