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ONE-WAY THEORY: ON THE HISPANIC-ATLANTIC
INTERSECTION OF POSTCOLONIALITY AND POSTNATIONALISM AND ITS GLOBALIZING
EFFECTS
Joseba Gabilondo
University of Florida
E-mail - gabilond@rll.ufl.ed
This article is a first elaboration of two different political
and cultural problems I have encountered when mapping the globalization
of Spain from my position as Basque Hispanist and theorist of North
American film. I call the first one the "Antonio Banderas Effect"
and the second the "Like Water for Chocolate Effect" (or as I will
define it more precisely later on the "Like Blood for Chocolate
Effect"). As epidermic and frivolous as these labels might sound,
I think they compensate for the highly theoretical title of the
article. They are intended as a subtitle to a lecture that begins
with two "post-"s at the same time that they are meant to be a very
material and irreducible reference to otherwise-slippery categories
such as "postnational." These two problems or "effects" will also
help us locate the main issue that this article addresses: the one-directional
flow of knowledge, and more specifically academic theoretical production,
from the first world to the second and the third. In the case of
Spanish academic production, ironically enough, the unidirectional
character of knowledge is much more pronounced than in the Latin
American, although both cases end in what Alberto Moreiras calls
"historical Latin Americanism," and if we extend it to the Spanish
case, "historical Hispanism" tout court. "Historical Hispanism"
is a specific but telling case of the general problem of "area studies,"
one that requires what Joan Ramón Resina calls "Meta-Hispanism"
(127-28) as corrective of its own positionality.
This article thus will concentrate on the Atlantic and global aspects
of a putative Meta-Hispanism, so that if the resulting Meta-Hispanism
has a political unconscious is one defined by the explicit insertion
of these two new referents: global and Atlantic. The ultimate question
is, of course, whether a Meta-Hispanism is possible in an Atlantic
and global context. This article rather than affirming or denying
such possibility, will underscore the political and cultural importance
of thinking its impossibility. In other words, this article will
defend that the importance and necessity of a Meta-Hispanism relies
precisely in the awareness of its impossibility. From this awareness
I will define another Hispanic space: the "Hispanic-Atlantic intersection
of the postcolonial and the postnational." I will ultimately defend
that this relocation has important consequences for a global understanding
of both Latinamericanism and Hispanism.
THE BANDERAS EFFECT
Although the Banderas effect could be dated back to the European
formation of "donjuanismo" in the late Enlightenment, it would be
better situated chronologically by tracing it to 1994. That year,
the largest percentage of rentals for Hollywood films came from
the international rather than the domestic markets; that is, the
main engine of American mass culture began to rely on foreign markets
more than the domestic in order to secure its economic survival
(Balio 60). That very same year, Spanish actor Antonio Banderas
became popular in Hollywood. Although Banderas arrived to the United
States in 1992 (The Mambo Kings), he made his "official"
appearance in Hollywood in 1994, at the Oscar Awards ceremony. The
year after the release of Philadelphia, he was introduced
by Billy Crystal to the global viewership of the Oscars ceremony
as "the sexiest man alive." That same year he made his second important
film: Interview with the Vampire. After his North American
debut and throughout the 90s, Banderas has set the standard for
"sexualized" masculinity, as opposed to other forms of masculinity,
such as the sadistic--Swartzenneger--or the suave--Hugh Grant. In
short, the globalization of Hollywood coincides with the arrival
of a new sexualized Hispanic masculinity to the recently inaugurated
global arena of filmic mass culture.
What is most interesting about Banderas's arrival to the globalized
scene of Hollywood is his geo-sexual and -political deployment.
A heterosexual, Spanish actor, out of the movies of a gay
Spanish director, Pedro Almodóvar, comes to represent Latin
American, Latino, or gay characters in every mainstream film portraying
such identities. For example, in Philadelphia, he plays
Latino and gay at the same time. Thus, to the globalized filmic
showcase of Hollywood, a Spanish heterosexual actor is most suitable
to represent the Latino, Latin American, and gay reality. As a result,
the old empire, Spain, once again gains prominence when representing
a new "area" simultaneously defined as sexual and geopolitical.
I would call this area the "good" and "don't ask, don't tell" "neighbor"
area -- Latin America and homosexuality respectively--a "continuous
neighborhood" to the geopolitical imagination of the US.
In order to see the relevance of the Banderas effect in the discussion
of the Hispanic Atlantic and the unidirectional academic production,
allow me to move on to a discussion of Anglo-American postcolonial
theory. Spivak and Bhabha, theoreticians of Indian origin or descent,
have come to define the state of postcoloniality in the USA, and
only as a result of this new location, throughout the world as well.
This is a discourse that, alongside cultural studies and queer theory,
has revolutionized the Anglo-American academia of the 90s, although
the process already began in the 80s with feminism. In this respect,
and although I do not concur in the final criticism of his work,
I agree with Arif Dirlik when he states that "Postcolonialism begins
when intellectuals of the Third World arrive to the academia of
the first world" (xx), although I would add that they are intellectuals
of the area of the Third World emerging from British imperialism
. In order to grasp the historical importance of this organization
of knowledge in the first world, it is important to note that the
arrival of postcolonial theory, as well as cultural and queer studies,
coincides with the decline of the hegemony of poststructuralism
and, thus, French and European modernity and knowledge-production.
Theory has moved from French to English, and thanks to postcolonialism,
cultural studies, and queer theory, now has been made to coincide
with the postcolonial axis of British imperialism--India-United
Kingdom-USA--as well as its language: English. Consequently, French
language and French poststructuralism move to a position similar
to that occupied by German idealism and phenomenology--from Hegel
to Husserl--for the former European continental organization of
knowledge. Although I will come back to this issue, it is important
to note that this shift has not been registered and accounted for
in Spanish Peninsular academic knowledge production and thus the
latter remains attached to the older European continental axis centered
on France and Germany (and England as a peripheral extension to
the continent). Of course, the exceptions are many and changes do
occur fast, so I am aware that my geo-epistemological narrative
could soon become dated or anachronistic. In this respect, the new
wave of Hispanists located in the United States who, nevertheless,
publish in Spanish, such as Angel Loueiro, Teresa Vilarós,
or Isolina Ballesteros, constitutes an avant-garde in this shift
of geo-epistemology.
At this point I would like to compare the Hispanic postcolonial
axis of mass-culture discourse, organized around Banderas, and the
British postcolonial axis of academic theoretical discourse, organized
around Bhabha and Spivak (and to a lesser extent Said, Stuart Hall
and cultural studies). Although such comparison might sound far-fetched
at first, I believe it reflects the true spirit of what "global
cultural studies" should be. Thus, if postcolonial knowledge is
geopolitically situated, it appears that the postcolonial theorists
of the bygone British empire serve as the new voices of cultural
difference for the North American organization and deployment of
the global power/knowledge order. In turn, it seems that the subject
of a bygone empire, Banderas as Spanish, serves as the new representation
and body of postcolonial cultural difference--the Latin American/Latino--for
the same global order. In other words, in the case of postcolonial
theory, a surrogate postcolonial Indian subject produces theory
for the New American order of knowledge, whereas in the case of
mass culture, a surrogate imperial Spanish subject produces a postcolonial
representation for this same global organization of culture. In
short, in the first case a postcolonial subject moves to the North
American center of global culture and knowledge, whereas in the
second case the same movement is effected by a postimperial subject.
Although in both cases the mobilization responds to a surrogate
postcolonia/imperialist maneuver, the object and relation represented
are the opposite: the British and the Latin Americans.
Needless to say, in the two above cases, the North American discursive
machine is vicariously living its own neocolonial and global order
and psychodrama through two cases of European, modern imperialism--the
British and the Spanish--but the geographies and subjects mobilized
are the opposite. However, this mobilization coincides with the
distribution of knowledge/power between first, second, and third
worlds: the first world (the British) and its ex-colonies (third)
produce knowledge whereas the second (the Spanish) and its ex-colonies
(third) embody and represent knowledge. Thus one could conclude
that if the British-Indian theorization of the global order for
the US is "postcolonialism," then the Spanish-Latin American embodiment
of the same order is "reversed postcolonialism:" it is
the postimperial Spanish subject that reverses its position and
becomes "a postcolonial representation" for the new North American
deployment of global power/knowledge.
I will come back to the issue of "postcolonialism/reverse postcolonialism,"
but before I proceed, I would like to stress the geopolitical consequences
of the Banderas effect for a globalized Spain. It follows from this
effect that the main function of Spanish discourses and bodies,
in the new globalized geoculture regulated by North America, is
to represent Latino/Latin America, not the other way around--as
in the case of postcolonial theory and British imperialism. Thus,
if the Banderas effect is accepted in its geopolitical discursive
implications, one must conclude that nowadays, for the global production
and consumption of power/knowledge, both mass-oriented and academic,
Spanish culture is a subset of Latin America, or to put it boldly:
culturally speaking Spain is a region of Latin America.
Spain is part of the Latin American area of studies.
On an academic level, I do not need to remind any North American
"Hispanist" that, over the last twenty years or so, the American
interest in Spain and more specifically Golden-Age studies has declined
as the attention given to Latin America has risen, so that Peninsular
studies have begun to undergo a "Latin American conversion." I believe
that in order to articulate a global Meta-Hispanism, this effect
must be accounted for as one of its central components.
As Elena Delgado points out, the introduction of North American
academic knowledge still goes unnoticed in Spain among its intellectuals,
and conversely, the narcissistic involvement with national identity,
as derived from a primary European narcissism that excludes the
periphery, still dictates the intellectual discourse in Spain. Delgado
notes:
repasemos por un momento algunos de los títulos publicados
en los últimos 5 años sobre la identidad cultural
española o sobre la idea de nación en España:
Si España cae…asalto nacionalista al Estado
(César Alonso de los Rios, 1994) Nacionalismos: el laberinto
de la hispanidad (Xabier Rubert de Ventós, 1994); España,
una angustia nacional (Javier Tussell 1999); La novela
de España: los intelectuales y el problema español
(Javier Varela 1999); Tragedia y razón: Europa en el
pensamiento español del siglo XX (José María
Beneyto 1999). La ironía de estos títulos es que apuntan
precisamente a lo que su contenido insite en negar: que la idea
de la nación española o de su identidad cultural sea
problemática, siendo significativo que la retórica
utilizada para describir el "no-problema" enfatice los mismos términos
que según Subirats habían sido desplazados: laberintos,
tragedias, angustias y desvividurías. Naturalmente que podría
arguirse, con razón, que todos estos libros lo que hacen
es una revisión de unos fenómenos pasados;
pero es significativo que todos ellos dediquen prácticamente
la totalidad de sus páginas a analizar un problema supuestamente
superado, para relegar a unas cuantas páginas finales "a
modo de epílogo" a la realidad europea y "normalizada" de
España.
Thus, my new cultural relocation of Spain within the North American
global order already hints at a new Atlantic geography as well as
a new postcolonial discourse, in which both the effects of European
modernity and North American postmodernity are simultaneously registered.
Coming back to the issue of "postcolonialism/reverse postcolonialism,"
I would like to discuss the other main consequence of the Banderas
effect in the global deployment of geopolitical knowledge/power
in Anglo-American postcolonialism. If the Banderas effect points
to a new type of "Hispanic postcolonial reason," in its reversed
condition vis-à-vis the Anglo-American, then the Hispanic
asserts its own difference, its own locus of enunciation to borrow
Walter Mignolo's term, vis-à-vis both North America and Spain.
At the same, time this putative "Hispanic postcolonial theory" relocates
its Anglo-American counterpart in its specific situation, or to
use Bhabha's term, location: Anglo-American postcolonial discourse
no longer is "Postcolonial discourse" but "Anglo-American-postcolonial-discourse-of-North-American-postcoloniality."
In this way, Hispanist and Latinamericanist postcolonial discourse
breaks away from the epistemological flow of what I denominated
one-way theory, which still reduces Latino / Latin America to a
subset, a derived case, of Anglo-American postcolonial theory. At
the same time, postcolonial discourses, in their new plurality,
encounter each other in an Atlantic space while further complicating
and, yet, rendering more precise, the location of postcolonial theories,
Hispanic and Anglo-American alike.
THE LIKE BLOOD FOR CHOCOLATE EFFECT
One could look at the problem of "reverse postcolonialism" from
the other end; that is, one could examine it under the "Like Water
for Chocolate effect"--or as I will rename it later the "Like Blood
for Chocolate effect."
In his essay on testimonio literature, John Beverley,
among others, summarizes the state of Latin Americanist studies,
and more specifically the production of theory over the last twenty
years, as different discursive and political changes have occurred
in Latin America. When he recaps the aftermath of the Chilean coup
of 1973--as the socialist utopia opened up by the Cuban revolution
fades away--he centers the changes in literary and discursive production
around the shift from magic realism to testimonio:
Testimonio began as an adjunct to armed liberation struggle in
Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World in the sixties. But
its canonization was tied even more, perhaps, to the military, political,
and economic force of counterrevolution in the years after 1973.
It was the Real, the voice of the body in pain, of the disappeared,
of the losers in the rush to marketize, that demystified the false
utopian discourse of neoliberalism, its claims to have finally reconciled
history and society. At the same time, testimonio relativized the
more liberal or even progressive claim of the high-culture writers
and artists of the book to speak for the majority of Latin Americans.
It marked a new site of discursive authority, which challenged the
authority of the "great writer" to establish the reality principle
of Latin American culture and development. (281)
Ironically enough when most academics in North America were concerned
with the political and epistemological implications of testimonio,
as discourse and theory of politics, North America turned around
and consumed a Latin American product that, in its hybridity, seems
to condense both, magic realism and testimonio, in one single discourse.
I am referring to the foreign film with the highest box-office returns
in North American history: Like Water for Chocolate (1992).
Even at the level of production, the literary "testimonio of a Mexican
writer," her "true and real" literary production, was transcribed
and put down on film for worldwide consumption by a director familiar
with Hollywood. Alfonso Arau, the director of the film, was better
known before for his representations of Mexicans in films such as
The Wild Bunch. I am tempted to define this "filmic transcription"
the visualization and massification of testimonio via magic realism;
"two discourses for the price of one."
As a result, Like Water for Chocolate was consumed as
a national product from Mexico. This foreign product represented
a national Mexican reality, as defined by its historical
setting during the revolution of 1917. The film also revolved around
a commodity, food, which could be consumed in the domestic space,
that is, outside any geopolitics, and thus was "safe" for North
American and global mass consumption--except that, of course, gender
becomes the other space through which politics is reintroduced in
the domestic sphere represented by the film.
However, this "NAFTA film" was followed the same year, 1992, by
another Mexican film, which also articulates a "NAFTA imagination"
and is also centered on the issue of "consumption." I am referring
to Cronos by Guillermo del Toro, a very successful film
with the North American and global audiences and critics: it won
the Critics' Week Award at Cannes and landed Del Toro a job in Hollywood
with the direction of Mimic.
Cronos can be reread as the anti-NAFTA Like Water
for Chocolate. In the film, magic realism and testimonio make
room for a new form of gothic realism: the grandfather, an antiquarian,
buys an artifact hidden in a piece of furniture, precisely the artifact
that a dying industrialist, with North-American connections, wants
in order to secure his health. The artifact is an alchemic object,
part machine part animal, created back in the Renaissance by a Spanish
alchemist who eventually had to flee to the New Word and became
the Viceroy's watchmaker. This artifact, the Cronos device, turns
its possessor into a vampire but, by the same token, makes him or
her immortal. The adventures of the grandfather are witnessed by
a voiceless child, the granddaughter, in what could ultimately be
read as a voiceless filmic testimonio of NAFTA capitalist prey.
Thus this film could also be entitled Like Blood for Chocolate,
in the sense that here capitalist consumption is not centered on
food but rather human beings. In this case, however, the Mexican
discourse of the film abandons its national setting, as
represented in Like Water for Chocolate, and resorts to
a postcolonial trope--the device traveling to the New World in the
Renaissance--so that its own imperialist ancestry and resulting
new postcolonial position are foregrounded.
Following the cultural consumption of testimonio and magic realism
across the NAFTA divide, as exemplified by Like Water for Chocolate,
it seems that Latin American culture, and in this case film, is
able to retell, to recontextualize the narrative of North American
consumption, so that a new genre (the gothic) and a new position
(the postcolonial) are deployed. In this way, Latin America escapes
that very same North American consumption--be it academic or mass-culture
oriented, as exemplified by Cronos. I would like to call
this effect of evasion or resistance the "Like Blood for Chocolate
Effect."
The above effect brings to the fore the other problem of postcolonial
discourse in Latin America, which I would like to address here from
a global and Atlantic standpoint. I am referring to what Alberto
Moreiras defines as "historical Latinamericanism," at the core of
which we would have the aura of testimonio literature ("Aura," "Global
Fragments"). Beverley wonders in this respect: "Is testimonio…
simply another chapter in the history of what Angel Rama called
the 'lettered city' (ciudad letrada) in Latin America:
the assumption, tied directly to the class interests of the creole
elites and their own forms of self-authorization, that literature
and the literary intellectual are or could be adequate signifiers
of the national?" (271). I agree with Beverley in his negative answer,
but if we center on Latinamericanism, and more precisely in the
latter's North American development, perhaps one could conclude
that Latinamericanism and its institutionalization of testimonio
are indeed a continuation, not of the lettered city, but the new
lettered metropolis: North America reading testimonio in direct
connection with the class interests of the new transnational "creole"
elite. Obviously I am not a Latinamericanist, and thus I am speaking
from a very local and limited location. After all, I am a Spanish
Peninsularist working in North America. The specific and challenging
exchange between Hernán Vidal and Nelly Richard, for example,
although framed within Latinamericanism, would escape the more general
approach of this article. However, from my own point of view, I
want to contribute to the problematization of Latinamericanism and
make an Atlantic and postcolonial argument for Latin America from
the analysis of the "Like Blood for Chocolate effect."
Walter Mignolo is probably one of the most outspoken theorists
of postcolonialism in Latin America. As he himself has declared
repeatedly "It is not the historical postcolonial condition that
has to attract our attention but rather postcolonialism's loci of
enunciation" ("Razón" 8, my translation). He concludes that,
as a result "postcolonial theoretical practices are not only changing
our vision of the colonial processes, but also defying the very
same basis of the Western concept of knowledge and understanding
when they establish epistemological connections between geocultural
site and theoretical production" ("Razón" 18, my translation).
Following Ann McClintock's distinction between "settlements" and
"deep settlements" ("Razón" 11), Mignolo differentiates between
postmodernity and postcolonialism by ascribing them to different
geopolitical areas: "postmodernity is the discourse of countermodernity
that emerged from colonies of settlement [USA] whereas postcoloniality
is the discourse of countermodernity manifested by colonization
of deep settlement (i.e. Algiers, India, Kenya, Jamaica, Indonesia,
etc." ("Razón" 11, my translation).
Although Mignolo claims that postcoloniality is changing the vision
of the colonial process, he does not nevertheless locate the position
of Latin America in postcoloniality. Several critics have already
pointed out the chronological difficulties of applying the condition
of "postcoloniality" to an area that, historically speaking, has
been postcolonial since the mid nineteenth century. Mignolo argues
that postcolonialism is not attractive because of its historical
condition but because of its location as a "different locus of enunciation"
(Razón 8). Thus the fact that even among the colonies of
"deep settlement" there can be an almost 150-year gap in the process
of liberation, such as in the case of Mexico and Algiers, should
not be in principle a problem for postcolonial theory. However,
this rather historical resilience of postcoloniality applied to
Latin America points to a more important problem in the very basis
of the postcolonial locus of enunciation: theory and culture seem
to have the same location in Mignolo's case and thus the divide
created by Latinamericanism seems to be curiously absent.
In front of the dilemma posed by the location of postcolonial theory
vis-à-vis postcolonial culture, Mignolo collapses both by
concluding that "postcolonial discourses and theories are constructing
a postcolonial reason as locus of differential enunciation. Of course,
I am oversimplifying, but I am doing so with the purpose of accentuating
my perception of postcolonial reason as locus of differential enunciation"
("Razón" 19, my translation). In short, discourse, reason,
theory, and enunciation are similarly situated as postcolonial,
as belonging to a single location, regardless of their specific
locus of production and enunciation across the new and global divide
of knowledge production between first, second, and third worlds.
I would like to argue that the reason of this collapse could be
ultimately traced to what I have denominated above "reverse colonialism."
Exporting postcolonial theory to Latin America poses the following
problem: the concepts of 'the West' and 'modernity' do not function
as referent, geopolitical and theoretical, because of Latin America's
original site of imperialism and decolonization. Spain, an empire
that is in decline by the time the capitalist West develops and
gives rise to French and British imperialisms, cannot be accounted
for when referring to "the West, modernity, and imperialism." Mignolo
clearly notes this effect when discussing language, knowledge production,
and imperialism: "The Spanish language, in Latin America, was twice
subaltern: it was no longer the Spanish of Spain, while at the same
time, Spain and Spanish became marginal to European modernity since
the seventeenth century ("Globalization" 47). Thus Mignolo accounts
for the double linguistic subalternity of Latin America but, he
does not apply it to the very location of Latin American postcolonial
theory.
As a result, the new postcolonial condition predicated by Mignolo
cannot account for the new imperialist relation between the United
States, Spain, and Latin America. Unlike in the case of Anglo-American
postcoloniality, which is defined by one single axis, in the case
of Latin America there are two: the old Spanish/Latin American and
the new North-American/Latin American. The first axis defines the
difference in terms of locus of post/colonialism but no longer represents
a difference in the locus of enunciation. The second axis marks
the difference in terms of post/colonialism but it also defines
a difference in terms of locus of enunciation: the USA as locus
of postcolonial theory of its Latin American object and Latin America
as locus of postcolonial discourse and theory. The differences between
locus of post/colonialism, object of postcolonial theory, and locus
of postcolonial discourse cannot be erased either by turning them
into a "transnational" continuum of culture:
Territories and locations are at once fixed and floating, emergent
at the crossroads of places, memories, and sensibilities, where
people cross borders, change languages, and deal with both the imprints
of their early cultural legacies… and whatever options arise
later. The transnational does not, of course, erase the national,
in the sense of the place where one is born and educated (even if
that place is a borderland), but it does imply such erasure. Nor
is the transnational necessarily the postnational. It is, rather,
the coexistence of regional languages, smells, tastes, objects,
pictures, and so forth, with international communications, interactions,
and the activities of daily life. ("Afterword" 174)
In other words, postcolonialism does open up a site of enunciation,
a very important theoretical locus of enunciation in Latin America
too. But if Anglo-American postcolonial theory is imported directly,
the resulting place of enunciation is not located within the history
of Latin American politics, culture, and theory. Both the Unites
States and Spain must be accounted for in any Latin American theory
of postcolonial loci of enunciation since, in the Latin American
case, there are two axis of post/colonialism that cannot be reduced
to a single locus. Ironically enough, postcolonialism needs to account
for the uneven modernity of Latin America and thus for the latter's
national development of the last 150 years. This is not simply a
problem of "historicity" versus "locus;" it affects location too.
In this respect, Latin American postcolonial theory needs to become
postnational first and then account for its specific location in
the USA (here postnational is meant in the sense that the local
political reality remains national but at the same time is directly
affected by globalization). Otherwise, the lack of an explicit and
clear differentiation between locus of academic enunciation and
general discursive enunciation (any Latin American political and
philosophical discourse) still bounces back to the formation of
historical Latinamericanism. Any Latin American postcolonial theory
not aware of its North American location is bound to become historical
Latinamericanist discourse.
Another way to approach this problem would be to posit that Mignolo
too is looking for an "epistemic testimonio," from his own North
American position, whereby different philosophical and theoretical
works produced in Latin America become "testimonios" of epistemic
reality, politics and violence. Through the recuperation and transcription
of these Latin American discourses in the United States, they become
Latinamericanist discourses of Anglo-American postcolonial knowledge/power:
they speak for the North American epistemic interest. As a result,
Latin America and its current postcolonial condition move elsewhere,
just like in the Cronos film, outside the NAFTA consumption
of North American Latinamericanism.
SPANISH NEOCOLONIALISM AND THE REAL
In front of this problem of Latin Americanism and its postcolonial
discourse, allow me to elaborate the "Like Blood for Chocolate effect."
There is a new stage in the globalization of Latin America that,
from the epistemological and theoretical reduction effected by historical
Latinamericanism, has gone overlooked so far, at least at the theoretical
level. I am referring to the Spanish neocolonial, or more properly,
global invasion of Latin America. Probably Telefónica, with
its acquisitions in Brazil, Chile, Peru, etc. or Repsol are some
of the most notable cases. However the list is long and points to
the fact that, as of 1999, Spain is the second largest investor
in Latin America, after the US. As Francesc Relea reports for the
Spanish newspaper El País: "Entre 1990 y 1998, las
empresas españolas invirtieron mas de 23.000 millones de
dólares en América Latina (mas de 5,5 billones de
pesetas). España es el segundo inversor en términos
globales, detrás de Estados Unidos, y en algunos países
ocupa la primera posición" (1).
A thorough socioeconomic research in the area remains to be done,
or it is buried so deep in economic journals that the retrieval
of information will resemble an archaeological expedition. However,
it is clear that part of the capital of these Spanish companies
is European and, more generally, global. In other words, at a moment
when there is a reversed postcolonial situation at the cultural
level--by which Spain is becoming Latin American--at an economic
level a new form of post-postcolonial or neocolonial situation is
emerging. Spain is aggressively entering Latin American markets
from Chile to Cuba, so that global capital is mobilizing a history
of post/coloniality (first postcolonial axis) in order to reenter
this area through old channels (second postcolonial axis).
Rather than reversed postcolonialism, this seems to be a case of
"lateral postcolonialism" whereby global capital, instead of entering
directly through contemporary channels of imperialism, such as NAFTA,
mobilizes old loci and channels of commerce to make a new incursion
in those markets, under the pretense of a shared cultural and historical
tradition. In other words, and unlike in the film Cronos,
in reality global capitalism is finally getting hold of the Cronos
device, although with a new twist: it is a Spaniard who gets it,
so that he or she can then sell it to his or her European, North
American, or global counterparts. In this respect Cronos
is more aware of the new global and postcolonial deployment of capital
than most North American postcolonial discourses of Latin America.
This is the reason for the filmic inscription of the old Spanish
origin in the representation the device (the device does not hail
from a "native" or "pre-Colombian" site as the North-American Latinoamericanist
discourse would desire).
If one attempts to put together the two types of postcolonialism
I have isolated so far--reversed and lateral--one realizes that
the global flow of capital and culture, in and out of Spain and
Latin America, does not follow one single direction or channel.
In other words, globalization is mobilizing older routes, such as
the Hispanic Atlantic, in ways that defies national understandings
of boundaries, while taking advantage of each nation and history.
My Atlantic reading of North American postcolonial theory of Latin
America thus would emphasize that the colonial history of Latin
America is paramount to any situated, strong version (Haraway) of
postcoloniality. If Mignolo regards the specific postcolonial and
historical development of Latin America since the mid nineteenth-century
as not connected with the location of postcolonial enunciation,
the new Spanish neocolonialism discussed above serves as a reminder,
a historical trace of the Real (Lacan, Zizek), which in its Anglo-American
postcolonial unsymbolizability, becomes central to the symbolic
order of actual Latinamericanist discourse.
In other academic areas, such as Hispanic lesbian, gay, and bisexual
studies, queerness itself becomes part of this unsymbolizable reality
of the Atlantic. Thus it is not surprise if most essay collections
(Bergman and Smith, Molloy and Irwin) are in fact Atlantic in design.
Furthermore, as in the case of Paul Julian Smith's Vision Machines,
this Atlantic continuity is stated as the location of the Hispanic
queer vis-à-vis its Anglo-American counterpart: "There may
well be no way out the vision machine; certainly there is no space
innocent of technology. But freed from rigid and repressive Anglo-Saxon
modernity, Spanish and Cuban film and literature offer us images
that speak to us eloquently even as they keep their silence" (150).
Thus discourses where geopolitics are not the main concern, the
postcolonial Real stops being unsymbolizable and becomes part of
the symbolic order of the Hispanic Atlantic, thus proving that the
latter is only a theoretical problem in geopolitical discourses
of area, such as Hispanism or Latinamericanism.
If you allow me a geopolitical deployment of Lacanian theory, I
would say that Latinamericanism is the imaginary discourse of Latin
America and the economic and cultural relations between the USA
and Latin America the symbolic-global. However, the Hispanic Atlantic
would be the Real, in the sense that capital and culture hits us
with the unexpected and unsymbolizable energy of an anachronistic
blow, such as that of an old, and decadent imperialism like the
Spanish. This real and yet violent decadence is nowhere better captured
than in Saura's Atlantic deployment of españolada: one that
aims at converting the film Tango into a global visual
phenomenon, but actually brings decadence and death to Latin America
as its signature. The dialogue between the aging art director--who
emblematically represents Saura himself--as his new protegee--a
new Argentinean Carmen of sorts--is set as the traditional male
seduction ritual but, once recontextualized as Atlantic postcolonial
dialogue, shows its imperialist decadent and deadly effect. The
art director resorts in his discourse of seduction to colonial tropes
such as the naturalized African sabhana and the Orientalist, refined,
and almost-Mandarine gift.
Finally I would like to discuss the use of the term 'postnational'
rather than 'transnational,' in order to refer to the new flow of
globalization in the Hispanic Atlantic. Indeed my own interest resides
in the fact that as a Basque critic, with my own new "area" of Peninsular
studies, the only way to challenge Spanish neo-nationalism--or internal
Spanish neo-imperialism--is to remap historically Spain, the "after
the nation-state, yet national, Spain." I am invested in redrawing
maps of Spain that do not favor globalization and its capitalist
flow and, rather, function as a historical anamnesis of past imperialisms,
so that the present is captured, not totalized, in its global specificity.
Jameson proposes "to 'define' globalization as an untotalizable
totality which intensifies binary relations between its parts--mostly
nations, but also regions and groups, which, however, continue to
articulate themselves on the model of 'national identities' (rather
than in terms of social classes, for example" (xii). Perhaps there
is a way to totalize globalization departing from specificity, not
in a pro-jective way, but rather in a retro-jective or retro-spective
way: globalization is the active and ahistorical actualization
of history in so far as the latter can be mobilized by capital in
order to further expand commodification in the present.
The Hispanic Atlantic, in its global and post-national/-colonial
deployment, constitutes one case of such retro-jective mobilization
of multinational capital.
In this case, I believe that the new incorporation of Basque immigration
to Latin America and the Untied States--las Americas/Amerikak, as
we call them--can serve as way to create a Basque Atlantic. This
new Basque map, although truthful to its Hispanic history, can challenge
and resist Spanish nationalism and, at the same time, create a discourse
that will once again defy and reorganize the unidirectionality of
Anglo-American theory at the same time that aligns itself with other
Altantic realities such as the one outlined by Paul Gilroy in his
Black Atlantic. Thus the Atlantic option is my own contribution
to the important and necessary discussion of an impossible Meta-Hispanism
that would be concerned with brokering a postnational Spain, one
that becomes Latin American the moment it "plays Banderas" but bounces
back into the Atlantic the moment is rendered Latin American.
MAPPING THE HISPANIC AND BASQUE ATLANTIC
Finally and in order to give a sense of my future project of mapping
the Hispanic Atlantic, I would like to present two milestones, not
in order to settle and draw new limits but rather to point to another
geography, cartography, and enunciation.
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873), one of the most
important Hispanic writers of the Romantic period, lived most of
her life in Spain where she wrote the majority of her work. She
is best known for her novel Sab (1841) about a slave who
sacrifices himself and his fortune (won at the lottery) in order
to make her friend and mistress Carlota happy with her lover, a
white empoverished landowner of English descent, Enrique. At the
end, Carlota finds herself miserable in her new position as wife
of a landowner and her life only regains meaning when she discovers
Sab's sacrifice.
Gómez de Avellaneda has so far been excluded from the Peninsular
Spanish canon although she was a colonial Spanish subject and writer.
At the same time, she was first celebrated as Cuban in her return
to her homeland, but then quickly rejected as nationalist sentiments
grew stronger towards the end of the nineteenth century (Bravo Villasante
221). She returned to Spain in her later years. However, and since
the mid 1940s, there has been a consistent attempt to incorporate
her work to the Cuban and Latin American canon. Perhaps Doris Sommer's
reading of her work has been the most productive and ambitious.
Sommer herself acknowledges that Gómez de Avellaneda was
"Neither Old World, nor New World, neither a woman's writer, nor
a man's, Gertrudis was both, or something different; she was Sab"
(111). Sommer is most lucid when she reads the novel as a sign of
a political colonial situation that, in a psychoanalytical approach,
could be best characterized as abject. The symbolic order of colonialism
fails in the novel, except that Sommer herslef re- symbolize it
retroactively as "Cuban:"
The result in both Sab and Memorias is an awareness
that our Reality suggests its imaginary form, to borrow Lacan's
terms, but that it still lacks a Symbolic expression. If reality
had an expressible form, if we could imagine an adequate sign that
would represent Sab, a sign that would name this nameless pariah
in the slave-holding language of the 'parvenues' that sign might
be, perhaps Cuban." (114)
What is most interesting about this retro-symbolization effected
by Sommer is her attempt to re-locate Gómez de Avellaneda
within the "foundational fictions" that define the rest of postcolonial
Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico, throughout the nineteenth
century. In other words, Sommer is resymbolizing the abject textuality
of Sab as foundational and ultimately national, that is,
as Cuban.
However, given the abject nature of the Avellanedan discourse,
Sommer has no choice but to locate it at the beginning, in the ur-
moment of the later foundational narratives written by postcolonial
male authors: "I am more concerned to show that she was at the vanguard
of what would become the standard male canon and to suggest that
the canon itself is remarkably feminized" (117). Thus colonial abjection
becomes a prelude to postcolonial marriage, since in the later foundational
narratives "Instead of keeping race, class, gender, and cultural
differences pure, the 'historical' romances that came to be considered
national novels in their respective countries married hero to heroine
across those former barriers" (117). However, given the dis-phase
between colonial and post-colonial narratives, Sommer wonders "The
obvious question with regard to Sab is what Avellaneda's
Cuba has to do with this postindependence aesthetic" (118) and she
proceeds to respond by concluding that "Perhaps romance takes over
because internal unity would be necessary for the fight against
Spain" (118). In short, "Sab is already a projection of national
consolidation" (120). Sommer is very aware that her "suggestion
may be a flagrantly Menardian anachronism" (120). Thus in her Menardian
reading of Cuban foundations, Sommer has to conclude that "Avellaneda
must have felt safer about writing the old words in new combinations
so that they would only look incoherent, because the idea of inventing
new and revolutionary names evidently seemed more violent than constructive"
(123). But only from a retroactive postcolonial and national reading
can colonial abjection become a first step towards postcolonial
violence and national construction. However, from a Hispanic Atlantic
reading, one could allegorically read Sommer's own reading, á
la Menard. That is, Sommer's own criticism seems "incoherent" because
she feels safer writing the old (national, foundational) words in
new combinations, because the idea of inventing new and revolutionary
(Atlantic) names evidently seems more violent than constructive.
From a Hispanic and Atlantic position, one could read Sab
not an ur-postcolonial Cuban text, but rather as a colonial, Hispanic-Atlantic
text, so that its specific historicity is rescued. In this context,
and by resorting to Freud's analysis of melancholia as a device
of criticism towards a lost object of desire, Sab can be
read as a novel critical of colonialism, in its Atlantic melancholia.
In this respect, Sab could be mobilized anew against both
Latinamericanism and its foundational fictionalization as well as
against Spanish global neocolonialism. Finally Sab could
be a departing point to follow Sommer and effect an Atlantic reading
of foundational fictions of postcolonial Latin America, so that
they also become Menardian texts of the Hispanic Atlantic.
At the end of the twentieth century and in the Basque Country,
the Menardian reading of an Atlantic Sab, can find its
perfect counterpart. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao represents
a postnational architecture that, although North American and postmodernist
in design and history, is located in the Basque Country and has
been built with Basque public capital. From a nationalist reading,
this Atlantic enterprise could be contained and differentiated so
that each of its aspects can be referred back and compartamentalized
into a single national category: Basque, Spanish, North American.
However, from a Hispanic and Atlantic reading, the Guggenheim emerges
as the first sign of the weakening of a global and North American
postcolonialism, in the sense that the old Spanish empire, in its
specific and new Basque postnational location, is able to purchase
North American art in order to embody global capitalism in culture.
In other words, the Guggenheim is the reversed form of the Banderas
effect.
The Hispanic Atlantic discourse and condition emerge somewhere/sometime
between Gómez de Avellaneda's novel and Frank Gehry's building.
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