introduction the institutionalization of cultural studies in latin america

7/31/2019 Introduction The institutionalization of cultural studies in Latin America

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Gregory J. Lobo, Jeffrey Cedeno andChloe Rutter-Jensen

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps, in some sense, it was for the better that Cultural Studies atBirmingham, at least qua Cultural Studies, closed its doors or, moreaccurately, had its doors closed back in 2002. From death life proceeds, andwhile the disappearance of Cultural Studies from Birmingham may have led tomisgivings and questions, doubts and uncertainties for some, even existential

ones

it in no way and in no sense marked the end of, if we may, the project.Cultural Studies may have died there, but it lives on elsewhere. This specialissue of the eponymous journal that focuses on the field is dedicated todocumenting the reality and the problematics of ongoing life of CulturalStudies in the elsewhere otherwise known as Latin America (Spanish speaking)where, since 2002, a number of post-graduate degrees (and one pre-graduate)have been institutionalized in leading universities throughout the region.Though not all of them bear the name Cultural Studies for reasons that areaired in some of the following articles they all share its perspective on

culture, as an arena of contestation, resistance, conflict, negotiation, educationand cooptation, as vital for understanding current configurations, balances,shifts, victories, defeats and stalemates (provisional). In short it is no longer thecase that in Latin America Cultural Studies exist more as an individual practicethan as an institutional field (Szurmuk & McKee Irwin 2009, p. 24). It iscoming in to its institutional own.

If we are at all concerned with and for the future of Cultural Studies, thisedition of Cultural Studies ought to contribute somewhat to a lifting of ourspirits. While Cultural Studies may not have had the impact that it promised in

the metropolis (Berube 2009), the fact of the matter is that here in Spanish-speaking Latin America the promise and the challenge of complexity andcomplication are being welcomed, and this is evidenced at the level ofinstitutionalization. That is to say, not only are universities gestating specificdegree programmes in Cultural Studies, but students are filling the availableslots, and then some. And so once more, perhaps, we see that these troubled,struggling contexts places that have not seen the consolidation of moderndisciplinary and biopolitical society as described by Foucault, where capitalismhas always been savage and never really acquired the veneer of decency lent toit by the advances

however limited

of social democracy in the West,situations that have not experienced the profound regimentation andtranquilization of life resulting from the thorough-going penetration of

Cultural Studies 2011, iFirst article, pp. 17

ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis

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capitalist, governmental culture into the deepest recesses of both collective andpersonal experience offer, for that very reason, the possibility of a detour, asit were, of a tangent, a line of flight. In this case, Cultural Studies understood as the intellectual opportunity to see things more clearly, more

accurately, as the opportunity to elaborate a better understanding of contextsboth local and global may also signal the real possibility of changing things.

Though inevitably incomplete, in this issue we hope to have compiledarticles that will keep the reader informed as to what has been going on here oflate. Of course, one glaring omission is a report from Brazil, and for that wecan only offer our apologies. That said, in broad strokes, in recent years,various universities in Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile andVenezuela, have inaugurated programmes, centres, institutes and Masters andDoctoral level programmes in Cultural Studies. The Universidad de Los Andes in

Bogota, Colombia

the city from which we write

notably established anundergraduate degree in Languages and Socio-Cultural Studies (for all intentsand purposes, a degree in Cultural Studies) back in 2000, and recently added amasters degree in Cultural Studies. Also in Bogota there is a masters degreeat the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. InChile there is a masters at the Universidad de Arcis, Santiago, while in Argentinathere is the masters at the Universidad de Moron, Buenos Aires, and theUniversidad Nacional del Rosario, in Rosario. In Ecuador there is the masters at

the Universidad de Cuenca, while in Quito there is a PhD in Cultural Studies atthe Universidad Andina Simon Bolvar which also has a masters in studies ofculture, which is related to Cultural Studies. Centres related to CulturalStudies include the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies (Instituto de EstudiosSociales y Culturales, PENSAR), at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota,Colombia; the Center for Latin American Cultural Studies (Centro de EstudiosCulturales Latinoamericanos) at the Universidad de Chile, Santiago; and theProgramme in Globalization, Culture and Social Transformation (ProgramaGlobalizacion, Cultura y Transformaciones Sociales) at the Universidad Central de

Venezuela in Caracas.Of course, at the same time, the field of a specifically Latin American

Cultural Studies has been undergoing something of a consolidation. But whileLatin America obviously presents itself as the object of much but certainlynot all Cultural Studies work done here in Latin America, our concern inthis issue is not to provide a space for reflection on that field, or to limitreflections to that field that of Latin American Cultural Studies. As the listabove should make clear, the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in LatinAmerica is not at all the same thing as the institutionalization of Latin American

Cultural Studies which, if we were to be so bold, we would argue is moreproperly a phenomenon of US/UK origins and contexts. And so, in an attemptto keep ourselves on the terrain of a common and more expansive project wehave asked our contributors to reflect on Cultural Studies in Latin America and

2 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

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the process of its institutionalization, and not on Latin American CulturalStudies and its distinct institutionalization.

What accounts for the surge in Cultural Studies qua, specifically, CulturalStudies in Spanish speaking Latin America? We ask because the case has been

made on more than one occasion that whatever the name, people in LatinAmerica have been doing the sort of intellectual work promoted by CulturalStudies for a long, long time and indeed, some of the articles that followundergird and fill out this assertion. But as the articles also make clear, what isbeing institutionalized as Cultural Studies is not a field constituted only byLatin American works and thought that precede the Birmingham Centre.Rather, classical thinkers of the Latin American national question, theindigenous question, of the relation of literature to culture and power, torace and ethnicity, in Latin America, are being bundled, as it were, with

thinkers like Hall and Grossberg and Bennett, as well as, Irigaray, Haraway andSpivak, and of course many others, because, one would like to argue, such aCultural Studies allows us and helps us to complicate things. This, of course,notwithstanding the fact the bearers of standard academic disciplinarity rejectCultural Studies out of hand, regarding it as a field of celebratory pop-culturalanalyses, seeing it only as in importation into Latin America which speaksvolumes both of the power of metropolitan tastes and preoccupations, and ofthe perceived cowed, self-loathing, Latin American (academic) public. But theother way to understand the rise of Cultural Studies is as a response to the fact

that reality really is complicated. Though there still exists a romantic criticaldiscourse that still decries cultural imperialism from without and blames itfor the failure to build strong national identities and communities, though astrain of dependency theory is alive and well and blaming regional difficultieson US machinations, and though unreformed Marxists are aplenty and ever-keen to reduce all social phenomena to expressions of the class struggle,Cultural Studies has taken off in Latin America because it has been recognizedas an admittedly mixed but terribly useful bag of critical tools approachesand methods that can help in the understanding and change of social

reality in Latin America, when other more singular perspectives have stalled.But while the why is important, it is nonetheless the actual process of

institutionalization that really interests us here. How has Cultural Studiesbecome institutionalized? What does this Cultural Studies look like? What areits forebears and its futures here? What tendencies have facilitated the processand what are the problematics that have, as it were, bedeviled that process?How has the institution impinged on the institutionalization and how hasCultural Studies impinged upon the university/institution? For example, theinstitutionalization of Cultural Studies has had to deal with the fact that manystudent applicants to the programmes continue to be somewhat confused atwhat is being offered. It is still surprising how many students struggle to graspthat we are interested in understanding culture as an ordinary phenomenonthat is nonetheless the location of the naturalization of social relations of

I N T R O D U C T I O N 3

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power. Many seem to think, rather, that Cultural Studies is devoted to theformation of cultural policy professionals, that it is about how to bring culture understood in its antiquated sense as something like high culture, acircumscribed object that people relate to, that is somehow distanced from

their daily lives

to the uncultured masses, so as to enrich and edify, that is,to culture them.

In inviting contributions we have sought to give voice not only to thosewho are working on and in the institutionalization of Cultural Studies; wewanted to give voice to those who will likely not be too familiar to mostEnglish-dominant readers. We do not begrudge at all those who have for whatever reason been able to associate themselves with Cultural Studies in thefields collective (English speaking) imaginary, but we hope here to have,rather, highlighted other voices, who despite their as yet low profile vis-a-vis

the global Culutral Studies landscape, are nonetheless crucial for the ongoingvitality of the democratic project of Cultural Studies on the ground here inLatin America. That said, if this issue seems somewhat over-loaded withreflections on the Colombian case it is only because, as Robert Irwin andMonica Szurmuk point out in their article, Colombia has been the site of itsown specific boom within the larger boom of Cultural Studies Latin Americaninstitutionalization. Irwin and Szurmuk give a comparative account of theinstitutionalizations in Colombia and Argentina, in which they explain why

Cultural Studies has been institutionalized under the name Cultural Studies inthe former, while needing to give itself another in the latter. Monica Bernabeand Sandra Valdettaro take up the narrative of Cultural Studies institutiona-lization in Latin America with their article, which focuses on how the authorsorganized a Cultural Studies programme in a specific place: the city of Rosarioin Argentina. They argue for the need to attend to the specific forms ofcontextualization in which knowledge is produced, while not forgetting aboutglobal frameworks and transnational spaces, and their determining effects. JuanRicardo Aparicio, then, in some sense fleshes out Irwin and Szurmuks

discussion of the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in Colombia with amore detailed history of its specific genealogies and a narrative of his ownparticipation in the process as, one would say, one of its effects or products.He also offers a critical reflection, a sort of provisional assessment of the

journey so far travelled by Cultural Studies in Colombia.In rounding out the reflections on and from Colombia, Chloe Rutter-

Jensen gives an account of the Cultural Studies classroom, in which issues ofinstitutional hierarchy can be felt as contradictions that provide fertile groundfor the interrogation of relations of power, allowing students to deconstruct

identity categories that are inherent in their attendance in an institution such asthe private, elite university; while Gregory Lobo writes of the evolution of theepistemological and theoretical posture of Cultural Studies as it went from ideato implementation at his home institution.


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From Ecuador, Catherine Walsh emphasizes the role played by indigenousthought in the institutionalizaton of Cultural Studies there, and morespecifically she focuses on the determining centrality of interculturality inthat process, showing how Cultural Studies again has proved fruitful in ways

that for some of its critics, would be unexpected. In an interview, ArgentinianDaniel Mato from a more adversarial position urges us to forge ahead inthe study of culture and power while remaining leery of the thing calledCultural Studies as such, and even more so of that derivative thing called LatinAmerican Cultural Studies. For Mato, both of these projects are irredeemablycorrupted by their metropolitan origins, which make their institutionalizationin Latin America nothing more than the cliched playing out of old and ongoingrelations of domination-subordination. Matos argument is that academic andintellectual work should without regard for nomenclature simply

undertake the challenge of studying relations of culture and power, withoutservile and unnecessary reference to what is called Cultural Studies.

From Peru, Victor Vich and Gonzalo Portocarrero combine a narrative ofthe relatively non-problematic (apparently) institutionalization of CulturalStudies at their university in Peru with some particularly insightfulobservations. Their narrative would have us understand that the logic ofCultural Studies makes its inclusion into the university exigent, rather thandepending on the politics of the academy, on overcoming disciplinaryterritorialism and jealousies. Their emphasis of the importance of the cultural

approach to analysis is not, that is, one shared by everyone who thinks aboutcollective human behaviours, problems, and interactions, about power anddomination and subordination. A second interview, this one with US-based,Uruguayan Mabel Morana, ranges over various issues central to theinstitutionalization of Cultural Studies in Latin America, while making thestrong case for a revitalization of the political in intellectual work in aglobalized world that while it claims to be post many things, has not leftdomination and inequality behind, but only reconfigured their modes ofinstantiation.

Finally, from Chile Nelly Richard reviews some of the major contributionsto the development of Cultural Studies in Latin America and what one mightcall Latin American Cultural Studies. She argues that Cultural Studies cannotsimply be the institutionalized space of a pacific conciliation between the socialsciences and the humanities, but rather must take advantage of itsinsitutionalized space to encourage the subversion of the hegemony oftechnocratic knowledges and certainties and their concommitant socialimplementation through the proliferation of a disobedient language. Itsinstitutionalization, in other words, must if it is to count for anything somehow serve as a point of departure for critique of the institution.

In closing this brief introduction, we want to riff, as it were, off of a stillquite recent book, by Joel Pfister, in which he asks, critique for what? He givesa tripartite answer: critique for analysis, organizing, and what Stuart Hall


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terms hegemonizing (2006, p. 213), which up until now, Pfister observes,has best been achieved by conservatives (2006, p. 288). We would ask andrespond in the same way regarding institutionalization of Cultural Studies hereLatin America: institutionalization for what? For analysis, for organizing and

for, optimistically, hegemonizing. Cultural Studies, or the sort of work goingon which could quite easily be described by such a moniker, as it isinstitutionalized in Spanish-speaking Latin America, may not always beobviously useful in terms of organizing or hegemonizing; but who can say,really, what sort of analysis will consistently and necessarily serve in suchterms? That the field of analysis is opened up, that the terrains of ourinvestigations and the methods brought to bear multiply, this may not in itselfbe enough. But it is most likely a necessary component in the long revolution,is it not? By bringing the news about the institutionalization of Cultural Studiesin Latin American to the readers of Cultural Studies, we hope not only toinform, but to encourage. There really is something going on out there.

That said, we close with an expression of thanks to Lawrence Grossbergand the Editorial Committee ofCultural Studies for encouraging this project andallowing us the space to put it before the interested public.

Notes on contributors

Gregory Lobo received his PhD in Literature from the University ofCalifornia, San Diego, in 2002, after which he took a position at the Universidad

de los Andes, in Bogota, Colombia, to help build the department with which he

was affiliated, the departamento de lenguajes y estudios socioculturales, and design

the departments MA in Estudios Culturales. Winner of the equivalent of a

National Science Foundation financial award to investigate nation discourse in

Colombia, Lobo has published articles and chapters in academic journals and

books, and most notably, in 2009, Colombia: algo diferente de una nacion

(Colombia: Something other than a Nation). He is currently working on a study ofhegemony in Colombia, 20022008, and more generally on left-liberal

political culture and its adversaries.

Jeffrey Ceden o teaches in the Department of Literature in the Pontificia

Universidad Javeriana, Bogota. He was co-editor of Cuadernos de Literatura

(2001, 2002, 2009), Universitas Humanistica (2003), Estudios (2007, 2008),

ReVista. Harvard Review of Latin America (2008), Iberoamericana (2008),

Revista de Crtica Literaria Latinoamericana (2009), Revista Iberoamericana(2009, 2012). He has published various articles on Latin American literature

and culture.


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Chloe Rutter-Jensen PhD in Literature from the University of California,

San Diego. Publications include La heteronormatividad y sus discordias: narrativas

alternativas del afecto en Colombia. Bogota, CESO, 2009, and Pasarela Paralela:

Escenarios de la estetica y el poder en los reinados de belleza, Editorial CEJA. Bogota

2005. Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Socio-CulturalStudies at the Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia. Areas of interest

include gender and sexuality studies and critical disability studies, as well as

feminist pedagogy.

References

Berube M. (2009) Whats the Matter With Cultural Studies?, Chronicle of HigherEducation, 14 September, pp. B9B11.Pfister, J. (2006) Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies,

Boulder, Paradigm Publishers.Szurmuk, M. & McKee Irwin, R. (2009) Diccionario de Estudios Culturales

Latinoamericanos, Mexico, Instituto Mora, Siglo XXI Editores.


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