ABSTRACT
At least once did Raymond Williams write on the South Atlantic. In 1982, a piece entitled ‘Distance’ appeared in the London Review of Books, in which Williams reflected on the ongoing war between Argentina and the UK in the Malvinas/Falklands Islands. Yet Williams would be surprised to know (indeed, he was) how closely and prolifically his thinking had been followed in the South Atlantic since the 1970s. Perhaps without irony, faithful to his peripheral quality in the Oxbridge intellectual milieu, Raymond Williams’ thinking burgeoned in the periphery of capitalism. In contrast to his solitary grammar – Williams rarely quoted, or made explicit a genealogy of influences – it would be virtually impossible to trace an intellectual history of the South Atlantic without mentioning him. ‘South Atlantic’ here is to be understood not in a mere geographical
sense, but as a cultural term, much in the critical appraisal of spaces that Williams inaugurates with The Country and the City. Originally coined by the outstanding Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, it refers roughly to the area ranging from São Paulo to Buenos Aires. In sketching a partial history of Williams’ reception in the region, this chapter is intended to contribute to the history of cultural studies. A caveat or two are in order regarding the present and the past of cul-
tural studies, a tainted name now that ‘every humanistic discipline is hastening to transform itself into something called “cultural studies”’ (Jay 1998: 2). Let us remark here only some critical differences between cultural studies in the North and the South, since it would require a separate study to cogently foil them in the multiple aspects of their definition – a rather difficult enterprise in itself. Only to austere accord, cultural studies may be
pinned down to the endorsement of a methodological approach, the postulation of a new archive rather than an established topicality. Without question, the history of the formation of cultural studies in
Latin America is very different from the same in the US. Taking into account how a critical tradition has reflected upon literature along with social and political processes, one could posit cultural studies avant la lettre in Latin America if such a title is allowed for the terminology that was conceived in Birmingham being itself, as they all are, après coup. In this sense, one may argue that in Latin America cultural studies
represent not only an epistemological break but also a certain continuity with the great essayistic tradition of the nineteenth century. To the twentieth-century horizon of their emergence one should antedate an illustrious genealogy that wrote their fundamental concern with culture in conjunction with the political in texts of jumbled genres known as ‘essays of ideas’. This list of ancestors (the term is more fitting than precursors) could include Andrés Bello, Domingo F. Sarmiento, José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Carlos Mariátegui. If not going as far as to state that these thinkers reflected on texts in the anthropological sense – as the symbolic production of reality, or positing culture with Williams ‘as a whole way of life’ – so as to postulate a new archive, their musings in fact encompassed topics that resonate with those of cultural studies, such as the country and the city, the role of intellectuals and institutions, the national and the continental question. The legitimate founding fathers of Latin American cultural studies,
dating from the early 1960s, are Ángel Rama and Antônio Cândido in Brazil. Albeit supported by different conceptions of literature, both critics delve into the specificity and density of meanings of literature in culture and culture in literature, in a way Williams would distil as theory. Rama’s endeavours to construct a literature of América were to be anchored ultimately by the notion of transculturation; Cândido’s efforts aimed beyond the subcontinent, and were consistently propelled by the dialectics of the local and the universal, which literature should reveal. Both reach back to colonial times; their revision of history supports a conception of the present. This historical scope is an important difference with cultural studies
elsewhere that deal with contemporary culture and more recent processes of globalization, mass culture or the postmodern question. In Latin America we could name the work of George Yúdice, Néstor García Canclini, Jesús Martín Barbero as pertaining to these issues, which were actually the first to receive the official cultural studies badge. Working in the early 1980s within the context of the post-dictatorship that witnessed the expansion of cultural studies in Latin America and the world, they endorsed a democratization of the concept of literature breaking the boundaries between elite and popular. But this point of view proves valid perhaps as it
remains internal to the nation or the subcontinent, for when the relationship North/South or centre/periphery is at stake, this same trace becomes a controversial geopolitical mark. This controversy has recently compelled Beatriz Sarlo, who introduced
Williams to Argentina and is perhaps the most important critic in Spanish America today, into calling cultural studies ‘an avatar of new Latin Americanism’ (Sarlo 2002). This qualification intends to denounce the strongly ideological North American machine that would dissolve all specificity and, effectively breaking down borders epistemological and beyond, end up engulfing the whole Latin American field, sweeping by it with political (more often banal) markers, and not tending to the formal complexities a work of art offers almost in spite of its Latin American origin. Asymmetries can impossibly be set aside. Marx ignored Latin America in
his writings – a fact that, in the words of Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz (Cândido’s finest disciple), was paid back with ‘distinguishing malice’: inventing Marxist categories to adapt them to a reality different, but not foreign to them (Schwarz 1996: 34). Such malice may be a useful guide into the particular geography of Williams’ diffusion, and towards the horizon of emergence of cultural studies in the South Atlantic. Indeed, the ‘regional’ tradition has been supplemented by the fact that
the thought of Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin, together with Adorno, circulated early in Latin America, as Schwarz’s candid remark also indicates. Along with Sartre, Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu, whose translation was almost simultaneous to French publication, these perspectives would start laying the heterogeneous ground that would crystallize the sublation of the sociology of culture as practiced to that date. To all these thinkers, who were intellectual references previous to reaching such status in the United States – and perhaps also in the larger Anglo-Saxon world – one should add the early reception and enormous impact that Raymond Williams had, followed by Richard Hoggart and later Stuart Hall, on the local intellectual field. Let us also include, to avoid all populist suspicions (and facile extrapolations), Barthes’s Mythologies as a necessary part of the roster in the local genealogy of cultural studies. At first glance, a reader unfamiliar with the discipline may wonder how
this pantheon that dealt with the culture of the centre (with the exception of Fanon, and arguably Gramsci) could remotely speak to the problematic of the peripheral South Atlantic. Take, on the one hand, the theoretical efforts – with Walter Benjamin as the illuminated precursor of thinking culture in a way Williams would define as ordinary – towards a de-hierarchization between copy and original, or popular and elite cultures. These contributed to theorizing the relationship between the terms that are central to a culture of the periphery, and have been the constant concern of local intellectual endeavours in the face of practices that are appropriated and reformulated to fit in the scene.
