John Beverley - The Failure of Latin America: Postcolonialism in Bad Times

ILLUMINATIONS

CULTURAL FORMATIONS OF THE AMERICAS

John Beverley and Sara Castro-Klarn, Editors

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright 2019, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
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Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4567-3
ISBN 10: 0-8229-4567-3

Cover art: Photo of a monument to the death of Simn Bolvar in Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino, Colombia

Cover design: Alex Wolfe

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8690-4 (electronic)

In memory of my parents, John and Edith Beverley.

For my brother James, a third culture kid like me.

For my daughter Alisa.

And for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, compaera.

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wchst

Das Rettende auch.

Where there are bad times,

there is also salvation from bad times.

Hlderlin, Patmos (1803)

BAD TIMES? In the United States, certainly Trump: whatever happens to him personally, whether he can win the 2020 election or whether he is impeached or forced to resign, the deeply reactionary consequences of his administration will last for the better part of a generation. In Latin America, the precipitous decline of the so-called Pink Tide governments, after some fifteen years of relative hegemony and success. The most tragic case is, of course, that of Venezuela and its project of twenty-first-century socialism, which is pretty much in a meltdown. But the most consequential is the impeachment of Dilma Roussef and the imprisonment of Lula in Brazil, which has led to the election of Jair Bolsonaro, an ultraright, racist, openly authoritarian candidate as president of Brazil. Very hopeful on the other hand is the victory of Andrs Lpez Obrador and his party Morena in the Mexican elections, suggesting a new direction for that vast and complex county.

The bad times correspond with the waning in academic criticism of the idea and project of postcolonial studies. We have gone from a mild dissatisfaction with multicultural identity politics, supposedly linked in part to postcolonial theory, to white nationalism and Brexit.

It has been clear since the early years of the new century that there is an impasse in the postcolonial project. I am certainly not the first to say this: there is an abundance of critical literature predicated on the post of postcolonialism. I had originally intended to title this book After Postcolonialism, but I quickly discovered that this title already had been taken more than once. Dipesh Chakrabartys 2002 book, Habitations of Modernity, carried with it the qualification: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. These are also essays in the wake of subaltern studies, but sixteen years after Chakrabartys.

If postmodernism was the next big thing of the 1980s in the humanities, fitting with the neoliberal, global turn in economics and the collapse of communism, postcolonial criticism, itself bound up in some ways with postmodernism, was the next big thing of the 1990s. But now it too has come to seem like a ship that has passed, leaving us, as Chakrabarty wanted to signal in his subtitle, amid a roiling wake of possibilities: indigenous literatures, queer theory and criticism, media studies, performance, posthegemony, the digital humanities, ecocriticism, robotic ethics, global humanities, the posthuman, the Anthropocene (a concern in Chakrabartys own subsequent work), neophilology, new materialism.... Above all, perhaps, the affective turnDeleuze, having become (certainly against what would have been his own inclination) the new Angel of History. I dont mean to be dismissive: I understand that on these words careers and livesour careers and livesare built or collapse. The academic humanities are a space of perpetual renovation. I think it was Richard Rorty who remarked that if what is in fashion today in humanities departments is still fashionable fifteen years from now, something has gone wrong. But one cannot avoid noting that there is missing here what Georg Lukcs would have called, channeling Hegel for this purpose, the totality.

Postcolonialism was the last critical wave that sought to seize the totality, to constitute itself as a kind of Archimedean point from which one could move from but also beyond the academic disciplines to change the world. The new approaches are usually postsocialist, not so much in the sense of rejecting socialism as of celebrating their distance from any such notion as totality. Like postmodernism generally, they are against metanarratives and metaexplanations, like Marxism or Freudianism. They have the same relation to Marxism or Freudianism that Derrida had to structuralism.

Still, someone of my generationthe generation of the sixtiesmight feel certain nostalgia for the moment of structuralism itself (before the post). Embedded in structuralism was the claim that the human sciences had discovered in a way the nuclear physics of the human subject itselfLacan or Foucault, Althusserian interpellation, Greimass semiotic rectangle, or the idea of cultural studies and its political aspect, to recall Stuart Halls characterization, would in different ways signal this claim.

It goes without saying that the melancholy loss or cheerful abandonment of totality is connected with the emergence of a vigorous global form of capitalism; a capitalism that, as Fredric Jameson put it in his famous essay on postmodernism, unlike the capitalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, no longer has an outside: nature, traditional forms of community (Gemeinschaft), the Third World, the former socialist countries, the individual psyche of existentialism and modernist art... all have been colonized, including, it now seems, postcolonialism itself.

But if you think, as I do, that there is a necessary connection between the rise and character of modern capitalism and the project of European colonialism from the late Middle Ages onward, then globalization heralds not the end of the coloniality of power but rather its universalization. (By coloniality of power I understand the persistence, into modernity and postmodernity, of forms of thought and organization derived from historical colonialism: modern racism would be one of these, for example.)

Yet even in this recognition, there persists a sense of loss of totality. First, because while it explains a lot, the idea of the coloniality of power doesnt explain every contradiction or possibility of change, and, second, because there remains the question: What will the decolonial be? A new form of life and society? Or simply global capitalism with a cheerful face, what the cultural critic Coco Fusco called happy multiculturalism (or perhaps a not so cheerful face, as in the case of ISIS or Anglo and European white nationalism)?

The problem of loss of totality is not only an epistemological one: that we no longer know or want to know what determines what. It is also a political one: the humanities seem no longer capable of producing a hegemonic narrative, understanding by hegemony, in Antonio Gramscis phrase, the moral and intellectual leadership of the nation. What we do in the humanities should be connected to the analysis and production of hegemonythat is where we earn our keep. Different sorts of theory and practice might count toward that end. But if we cant do that, if we happily renounce that task, then it should be no surprise that society, under conditions of neoliberal market capitalism and ruled by calculations of monetary gain or loss, does not feel it needs to take our courses or read our books anymore or give us tenure.