Comparative Literature

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... Marquez, Cortazar, and other authors served me as introductions not only to Latin Americanliterature but to ... vague set of tropicalized images first conveyed, in my case, by mass culture (for example ... as I am able to reconstruct it, a public education in the North American mid-west ...

Dos cosas me impulsaron a pensar en la coyuntura postulada en el titulo de este trabajol. Una fue una reunion que tuve hace alguin tiempo con un sociologo brasilenlo que se encontraba de investigador visitante en una universidad en el airea de Boston y que queria compi- ...

La mitologia del concepto es siempre expresion intelectual del hecho de que los hombres no han conseguido captar un dato basico de su existencia, de cuyas consecuencias no pueden defenderse. Georg Lukacs, Historia y consciencia de clase El reciente clamor acerca de lo "postcolonial" ha provocado un tipo de "post"-reaccion ya acostumbrada: el uso del propio termino se vuelve m's ymas inevitable al mismo tiempo que deja sospechas acerca de su real substancia-si es que la hay-intelectual y politica. Sin embargo, uno de los efectos laterales indudablemente beneficiosos del fenomeno ha sido la atenci6n renovada que el postcolonialismo ha puesto en generaciones anteriores y no-academicas de intelectuales y te6ricos anti-coloniales, aun si solo Parainventargenealogias heroicas retroactivas para campeones ma's equivocos, del rango de Said, Spivak, Bhabha, etc. Es el nombre de Frantz Fanon que salta inmediatamente a Ia vista aqui, pero hay otros, largamente olvidados o ignorados fuera de los circulos mas estrechos de interes historico o regional. Entre ellos estl el nombre de Jose Carlos Mariategui, el gran critico, ensayista y pensador marxista peruano de las primeras decadas del siglo. ZEra-o es-Mariategui un teorico "postcolonial"? Formulada de tal manera, la cuestion ya es demasiado tendenciosa para que intentemos una respuesta. Pero en la medida en que el discurso del "latinoamericanismo" continua el proceso ya bien avanzado de asimilar las (dtimas vanguardias de la academia metropolitana, es obvio que a Mariategui se le va a re-interpretar y a criticar desde esta perspectiva.'I Lo que si importa es determinar Lhe agradezco a mi colega Roger Zapata su colaboracion en la lectura critica y en la traduccion al castellano de este trabajo. 'Ver, por ejemplo, el articulo de Walter D. Mignolo, "Afterword: Human Understanding and (Latin) American Interests-The Politics and Sensibilities of Geocultural Locations" Poetics Today 16/1 (Spring, 1995) 171-214. Aqui Mignolo , al equiparar la perspectiva de Mariategui respecto a Ia "dualidad de raza y espiritu" del Peru a la de Fernando Ortiz, epitomizada esta en el concepto de la "transculturacion" (18 1-182), efectivamente pasa por encima de la fuerte critica que hace Mariategui a la idea del mestizaje como sintesis cultural, por l o menos en el caso del Peru. Pero por todas sus limitaciones en cuanto a Ia teoria de "razas", el pensamiento de Mariategui va mucho mals allyt de la teoria de Ia transculturacion, una categoria Nasicamente descriptiva y formal que no contribuye a profundizar el problema de la cultura nacional en Ia esfera

102 we see João, the "fazendeiro matrimonial", in the company of his mistress Mme. Rocambolah, the Uruguayan Banguirre y Menudo, a nameless Syrian, and the oligarchical backing and good name of "o Britinho", embarked on the career of a "Grande Industriai' as chief stockholder in the "Piaçaguera Lightning and Famous Company Pictures of São Paulo and Around." By clip 120 ("Ultimo Film") the enterprise has collapsed in bankruptcy, meaning, for the would-be industrialist João, a loss of the considerable family fortune into which he has married.

Intellectual and aesthetic historiography record only a relatively brief interlude during which Marxism and Surrealism could regard each other as political allies. Assuming its Parisian epicenter, we might date this period roughly from 1925, the year in which the Surrealists joined with the French Communist Party in opposing French imperialist repression of the Riff rebellion in Morocco, to 1935, when, now excluded from all PCF organizations, Breton, in his written address to the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture, defended Surrealism's Marxist (or, at any rate, Communist) credentials for one last time, not only against the Zhadanovite line of socialist realism newly adopted by the Third International, but against a broader wave of sympathy for realism as such1. This latter trend is best embodied in Lukács' polemical essays of the time and reflects the new political realities that would launch the Popular Front Against Fascism. Written in 1929, the most critically optimistic assessment of it possibilities-Walter Benjamin's essay "Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia"-argues for a Marxist/Surrealist alliance founded on an organization of "pessimism" that "expel[s] moral metaphor from politics and...discover[s] in political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images."2 But in view of how little this left-wing politics of images was to bear on subsequent historical events-or how readily fascism usurped and mastered such a politics-it is hard to read Benjamin's essay now except in a pessimistic, not to say an elegiac spirit. By the time of Adorno's "Looking Back on Surrealism" ["Rückblickend auf den Surrealismus" Noten zur literatur I] (1956) the Marxian elegy for Surrealism has become a veritable eulogy, i.e., last words of praise for something irrevocably dead and buried. Adorno concedes that after the "European catastrophe...Surrealist shocks [had] lost their force," but now finds even its seeming

What follows is a rough and condensed sketch of the central argument in a larger work-in-progress that goes for now under the probably grandiose title of "Principles of Immanent Critique." My most immediately practical aim in writing such a work is to make available to the public, and especially to students, the outline of a proposed method for critical theory in the humanities and "cultural studies" generally, and, more particularly, in relation to literature as a possible critical-theoretical object. The preliminary thinking behind this project is the result of roughly ten years of teaching critical theory in both graduate and undergraduate classrooms. During this time, I came to distrust and finally to reject the now-standard, eclectic pedagogy, reflected in most "theory" primers and introductions, in which the various schools of "theory" as conventionally identified-from feminism to poststructuralism to Marxism and psychoanalysis-are explicated one by one. Of course, students, especially those looking for academic work, need to know these things, but the intellectual result of presenting critical or "literary" theory as, say, all that fits between the covers of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism is, whatever else it may be, antithetical to the very concept of theory itself, which must insist, as a methodological postulate, on its own universality and exclusivity in relation to its object. Teaching the various schools "critically"-say, from the standpoint of Marxism or feminism, however either of these standpoints is to be defined-can, in principle, avoid this pitfall, and this has, de facto, been my own practice in the "theory" classroom. But to practice even this critical, metatheoretical method in a consistent and rigorous way will still require advancing not only what amounts to a critical theory of "theory" itself (something I'm also working up as a kind of companion piece to "Principles of Immanent

The significant turn over the last decade or so from a tacitly nation-centered to a "postnational" literary and cultural studies is a fact as pointless to ignore or dismiss as it is easy to convert into a mythology. The upsurge of critical discourse on questions of hybridity, migrancy, borders-as well as diaspora-does not warrant, as is sometimes thoughtlessly claimed, the summary disposal of the national as a critical, or literaryhistorical category. And the "theoretical" extravagances often uttered in the same breath that evokes the postnational-especially the mock-radical cult of the exile or migrant-as-a priori-subversive-are almost a reasonable excuse for taking one's intellectual exit cue at the first hint of the jargons in which they are advertised. But worse than investing utopian energies in an imagined politics of the "in-between" would be to throw out, along with postnationalism's prevalent, mystificatory forms of self-understanding, the historical and more immediately conjunctural and political changes expressed in this trend as such. For while the realities of migrancy and diaspora are not new-indeed, what could be older?-the pervasive sense that, jargons notwithstanding, these realities have come more and more to typify the contemporary experience even of dominant "nationalities" themselves is of a recent-and material-genealogy. My view, as expounded in an earlier essay1, is that this sudden and seemingly ontological collapse of nation-centeredness possesses a universal and perfectly discreet historical foreground in the collapse of the anti-colonial, national liberation movements that decisively shaped the epoch-the so-called "Bandung era"-stretching from the end of