John Beverley, "Cultural Studies" (Summary)

 Latin American literary criticism is in a critical moment, as the tradition of canonizing and privileging certain texts of official high culture as fundamental instruments in the creation of national identities has no meaning due to the effects of a transnational culture industry. The only road for renewal is for this criticism to constitute and recognize itself as a Latin American form of cultural studies. The social sciences side of Latin American studies is increasingly concerned with problems of identity and subjectivity, deterritorialization, multiple social logics, new social movements, critiques of modernization and development paradigms, and interfaces with advanced literary theory. The Rockefeller Foundation is planning an international congress of Latin American practitioners of Cultural Studies in Mexico City in 1993.

However, there are dangers along the way, such as the aesthetic utopianism in the celebration of popular culture or mass culture, which may involve a new variation of the ideology of the literary art. Cultural Studies was partly the consequence of the deconstructive impact of mass culture in the human sciences. The field aims to challenge the integrity of disciplinary boundaries and is being prepared as places for a redefinition of educational curricula and disciplinary structures in the coming period.

Cultural Studies is a field that aims to understand and address social issues and movements outside the university. It is concerned with the subalternity of social groups and movements and aims to avoid influencing Natural Sciences, technology, and professional schools. The key moves in this direction are to detach Cultural Studies from its connection to discourses like Marxism, feminism, and oppositional forms of poststructuralism. The code words of this project are "pluralism" and "interdisciplinarity," but the underlying effect will be depoliticization. The struggle to institutionalize Cultural Studies is ongoing, but it is likely to be naturalized in the curriculum as an "epistemological faculty club" rather than a solution to knowledge reform. Instead of seeing Cultural Studies as an automatic solution, it should be subject to the same critique as other disciplines.

Cultural Studies, a field of study that emerged in the 19th century, has been influenced by figures like Fernando Ortiz, Octavio Paz, Ezekiel Martínez Estrada, and Mariategui. Postmodernism, in its desire to be disruptive and new, is an extension of the very modernist ideology that it supposedly displaces. Some forms of postcolonial discourse, such as Homi Bhabha's modernist aesthetic program, make it the locus of "oppositional" political-cultural agency. Michael Taussig's appropriation of Walter Benjamin's aesthetics in his studies of Latin American shamanism involves a similar problem. The new canonic Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, illustrates the persistence of vanguardism in what seems to be a populist discourse of decanonization and multiculturalism. Transdisciplinarity, on the other hand, is aware of the status of knowledge and attempts to ask what constitutes knowledge, why, and how it is certified as knowledge. Cultural Studies is not simply pluralist, but rather a serious enterprise or project inscribed in the "political" aspect of the field.