Comparative Literature

SPITTA, SILVIA; ZAMORA, LOIS PARKINSON

2009 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2009-010

Taking as their point of departure the murals painted by the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Miguel Covarrubias for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, the editors address the development of comparative literature as an academic discipline in the U.S. and, more particularly, the recent development of the comparative study of the Americas. This growing field is variously referred to as Americas Studies, Transamerican Studies, Interamerican Studies, Hemispheric Studies and, depending upon the program or curriculum, it may also involve area studies programs that focus on the U.S./Mexico border, the circum-Atlantic, the Pacific rim, the Caribbean, and/or the recently developed conceptual area of the Global South. The editors address these emerging American comparativisms—their limitations and potentials, their disciplinary commitments and conditions, their theories and practices, and their shifting regions and relations. The editors call for a more expansive definition of academic work in the U.S., a definition based on the example of Latin American public intellectuals, and they also call for greater commitment to the teaching and learning of languages and to the translation of literature and literary theory from all areas of the hemisphere.

KADIR, DJELAL

2009 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2009-011

Marked by exceptionalism as endemic characteristic, America's cultures, literary and otherwise, conform to the history of humans globally. American (especially U.S. American) exceptionalism is a paradoxical trait of inevitable conformity. Thus, America's self-estimation as incomparable may be its most comparable trait. This essay explores some of the diverse symptoms and literary manifestations of this perennial hemispheric irony.

LOPEZ, ALFRED J.

2009 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2009-012

Hugo Meltzl de Lomnitz's 1877 list of ten "founding" languages for comparative literature implicitly includes the Americas, where at least five of the originary ten languages (English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish) were widely spoken at the time. Yet until very recently American texts in these languages have been largely excluded from comparative literary studies. A comparative reading of two 1877 texts—Meltzl's "Tasks of Comparative Literature" and José Martí's prospectus for the Revista Guatemalteca —reveals that the literatures of the Americas, and the Caribbean especially, are a supplement (in the Derridean sense) to Meltzl's Eurocentric model. Martí's 1877 prospectus for a comparative American literature is more inclusive than Meltzl's Eurocentric model of "polyglottism," and it offers a vision of global comparative literary and cultural studies that we ignore to our peril.

BARRENECHEA, ANTONIO

2009 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2009-013

This essay locates the intellectual origins of comparative American studies in Herbert Eugene Bolton's "The Epic of Greater America" (1931). Bolton argued for a hemispheric approach to the study of history and laid the groundwork for a comparative practice with plural perspectives and points of entry. His legacy is not without controversy. In the 1950s the distinguished Mexican historiographer, Edmundo O'Gorman, engaged Bolton in heated debate regarding their different conceptions of the "invention of America," to use O'Gorman's phrase. Nonetheless, Bolton's work underpins the current practice of Latin American history, U.S./Mexico border studies (particularly as developed by U.S. academics), and, since the 1980s, comparative American studies. The essay concludes by outlining a Boltonian approach to teaching the literature and history of the Americas and calling for a return to a comparative model that foregrounds languages and literary histories.

WINKS, CHRISTOPHER

2009 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2009-014

Building on Ngugi wa Thiong'o's concept of moving the cultural center away from Europe towards a multiplicity of creative centers and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's call for a revitalized comparative literature that would avail itself of the insights of a post-Cold War area studies, this essay explores the Caribbean as an exemplary inter-American and comparatist crossroads space and analyzes several elements that enter into the diverse poetics of the region as articulated by its major writers and theorists: from chaos to transculturation, from magical realism and the "imaginary eras" to the "Tout-monde."

DUSSEL, ENRIQUE

2009 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2009-015

The present essay offers an interpretation of hispanos (Latin Americans and U.S. latinos) as historically, culturally, and geographically located "in-between" many worlds that combine to constitute an identity on the intercultural "border." To illustrate how hispanos have navigated and continue to navigate their complex history in order to create a polyphonic identity, the essay sketches five historical-cultural "worlds" that come together to form the hispanic "world."

PRADO, IGNACIO M. SANCHEZ

2009 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2009-016

Leopoldo Zea's philosophy of history constitutes a cogent interrogation of the colonial legacy in Mexico and thus also serves to demonstrate the importance of Latin America as a site of theoretical enunciation. This essay addresses Zea's early work on Mexico and his "Discourse on Margination and Barbarism," putting them in dialogue with Gloria Anzaldúa's more recent theoretical engagement of border culture in order to assess their value as models for what Raewyn Connell calls "Southern theory." This essay concludes with a discussion of several theorists who present models of comparative American studies compatible with the Southern theory discussed in the previous pages.

MALCUZYNSKI, MARIE-PIERRETTE

2009 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2009-017

This essay was written in 1987 in French by the late Polish theorist and critic Marie-Pierrette Malcuzynski and translated by Wendy B. Faris. Malcuzynski explores the theories of the New World Baroque and Neobaroque developed by the Cuban writers Alejo Carpentier and Severo Sarduy and the Brazilian poet and essayist Haroldo de Campos from the 1960s through the 1980s. Together, they represent a specifically Latin American combination of postmodernism and postcolonialism, a combination that is based in the historical and literary realities of the region. The author moves from a definition of the European Baroque, including a detailed discussion of its various possible etymologies, to the American Baroque and places Carpentier, Sarduy, and de Campos in the company of a number of European theorists to test their American arguments and applications. Mikhail Bakhtin is primary among the European theorists, but Saussure and Kristeva are also central to her evaluation of Sarduy. While Malcuzynski remains critical of certain aspects of these theories, she also implies that their historical rootedness in Latin America and the Caribbean make them more useful analytical tools than, say, Foucault, Lyotard, Bhabha, or Spivak—postmodernist and postcolonial theorists all too eagerly adopted in Latin America after passing through the "gate" of U.S.-American and European academia.

BROWN, J. ANDREW

2009 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2009-018

This essay focuses on Ricardo Piglia's use of cyborgs and post-punk music to generate the "proliferating nuclei" that Alejo Carpentier identifies as basic to baroque and neobaroque expressive structures. Brown traces the link between cyborgs and the New World baroque from Diego Rivera's mural Pan American Unity (1939) to La ciudad ausente (1992), arguing that Piglia's blend of science fiction, literary canons, and popular culture creates a model for understanding the neobaroque tendencies of a hemispheric American literature that includes Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Jonathan Lethem, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Rodrigo Fresán, and Alberto Fuguet.

GREEN, MARY JEAN

2009 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2009-019

Although the field of American Studies has expanded beyond the borders of the United States, it continues to marginalize French-speaking cultures in the Americas: Québec, the Francophone islands in the Caribbean, and even Franco-Americans in the U.S. Although this marginalization has been the consequence of historical processes, contemporary francophone theorists in Canada and the Caribbean are now energetic participants in comparative American Studies, remapping their cultures within the Americas and providing a welcome accent to the transcultural process.