A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture

Sara Castro-Klaren

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118661352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

A COMPANION TO LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

"The work contains a wealth of information that must surely provide the basic material for a number of study modules. It should find a place on the library shelves of all institutions where Latin American studies form part of the curriculum."

Reference Review

"In short, this is a fascinating panoply that goes from a reevaluation of pre-Columbian America to an intriguing consideration of recent developments in the debate on the modem and postmodern. Summing Up: Recommended."

CHOICE

A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture reflects the changes that have taken place in cultural theory and literary criticism since the latter part of the twentieth century.

Written by more than thirty experts in cultural theory, literary history, and literary criticism, this authoritative and up-to-date reference places major authors in the complex cultural and historical contexts that have compelled their distinctive fiction, essays, and poetry. This allows the reader to more accurately interpret the esteemed but demanding literature of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, and Diamela Eltit. Key authors whose work has defined a period, or defied borders, as in the cases of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, César Vallejo, and Gabriel García Márquez, are also discussed in historical and theoretical context. Additional essays engage the reader with in-depth discussions of forms and genres, and discussions of architecture, music, and film

This text provides the historical background to help the reader understand the people and culture that have defined Latin American literature and its reception. Each chapter also includes short selected bibliographic guides and recommendations for further reading.

PART I

Coloniality

1

Mapping the Pre-Columbian Americas: Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and Western Knowledge

Gustavo Verdesio

The power of the first chronicles to relate the stories of exploration and colonization of the Americas is still intact. They represent a land that appears to these authors as pristine and untouched by what the West has called civilization. If one were to believe this corpus of texts about lands that were at that time unknown to European subjects, those lands showed no evidence of significant traces of human labor. The predominance of this early perception of the Americas occurs in spite of both the existence of later chronicles and documents that describe, to a European audience, the wonders of human settlements as complex and sophisticated as Mexico-Tenochtitlán and Cuzco – just to mention the two most spectacular concentrations of people in the first half of the sixteenth century – and the constant presence of indigenous peoples in the daily social lives of most American nations.

In my courses about indigenous societies from the past I usually encounter the following situation: a vast majority (actually, almost the totality) of students who, when asked about the way in which they imagine the pre-contact land of what today is the territory of the United States of America, respond with a depiction of a landscape that contains idyllic images of woods, rivers, and prairies that seem to be, in their different versions, uninhabited. In other words, they often present answers that offer a portrayal of the Americas as a wild territory untouched by human hand. It is only after several questions that lead them to admit the obvious (that is, that the lands were populated by a wide variety of human societies and cultures) that they begin to realize how pervasive the initial views we inherited from the explorers of the European expansion era still are. Why is it, then, that the myth that represents the Americas as a blank page where European settlers are free to leave their imprint still survives in the collective unconscious of Western culture? Why this inertia of collective memory that privileges only one of the different images of the past?¹ There are, in my view, no simple answers to these questions. Maybe if we try to view this state of affairs as the result of a combination of factors we could understand it a little better. I will address these factors briefly later on, but first, I will go back in time and try to deal with the issue of how the scholars and indigenous peoples believe the Americas were populated, and since when.

This is not a conflict-free matter. On the contrary, there are several contending versions from different camps. The main disagreement can be identified as the one that confronts, on the one hand, several Amerindian nations and, on the other, scholars who believe that Western disciplines can reveal the secrets of the distant past. In general, the latter can be found in the ranks of archaeologists and biological anthropologists. Many an indigenous group claims to know where they come from and when they came to the Americas. In their oral traditions, we learn about stories of origins that present us with peoples who believe that they have occupied the territory of the Americas since time immemorial – since the beginning of time (Zimmerman, 2002: 16). These versions of the origins of the different indigenous groups are contested by Western scholars who have a completely different perspective on this issue. In their opinion, and in spite of the differences among them that we will discuss later, Amerindians arrived in the Americas as immigrants from Asia.

It should be pointed out that although Western scholars have a tendency to view indigenous oral histories as nonscientific, the stories passed from generation to generation by Amerindians are a useful tool to reconstruct the past – even the very distant past. As Roger Echo-Hawk has shown, it is possible to use traditional tales together with geological, archaeological, and historical evidence to have a richer picture of the distant past, as long as “the historical content of the oral or written information should be compatible with the general context of human history derived from other types of evidence” (2000: 271). In other words, “the oral information must present a perspective on historical events that would be accepted by a reasonable observer” (ibid.). He makes a very convincing case about the time depth of some indigenous stories about their origins. He even goes as far as to say that some Arikara origin accounts can go as far back as describing the Arctic Circle and Beringia as the place where everything started for them (275–6).

The idea that indigenous peoples came from Asia, which now passes as the uncontested truth among Western scholars, despite many Amerindian groups’ rejection of it, was (probably) first advanced in 1590 by a Jesuit priest, Father Joseph de Acosta, in a passage about the origins of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In it, Acosta makes a huge intellectual effort to reconcile the teachings of the Bible about the origins of humankind (a part of which narrative is the Noah’s Ark story), and the undeniable evidence of long and continued human occupation of the lands then known as the Indies (2002: 51). After a careful analysis of the possibility that Amerindians had arrived in the Indies by sea, he concludes:

The argument that I have pursued leads me to a great conjecture, that the new world that we call the Indies is not completely divided and separated from the other world. And, to state my opinion, I came to the conclusion some time ago that one part of the earth and the other must join and continue, or at least that they come very close. To the present day, at least, there is no certainty that things are otherwise, for toward the Arctic or North Pole the whole longitude of the earth has not been discovered and there are many who affirm that above Florida the land runs very far in northerly direction, which they say reaches the Scythian or German Sea. Others add that a ship has sailed there and state that the sailors had seen the coast of Newfoundland running almost to the ends of Europe. Above Cape Mendocino in the Southern Sea no one knows how far the land extends on the other side of the Strait of Magellan … Therefore there is no reason or experience to contradict my conjecture or opinion that the whole earth must join and connect somewhere or at least that the parts are very close. If this were true, as indeed it appears to me to be, there is an easy answer for the difficult problem that we propounded, how the first dwellers in the Indies crossed over to them, for then we would have to say that they crossed not by sailing on the sea but by walking on land. (63)

The idea of a migration of peoples from Asia has taken, with time, the form of a popular hypothesis: the crossing of what after 1728 was to be known as the Bering Strait. The template of said hypothesis goes like this: in the Wisconsin period (the latest glacier advance of the Ice Age) glaciers retained so much water that the level of the sea descended dramatically, transforming the Bering Strait into dry land that connected Siberia and Alaska. This land, called Beringia by scholars, allowed the passage of human beings from Asia (there is no agreement, however, about the exact region or regions of the continent they came from) to North America, from where they later moved south, thereby occupying the rest of the continent. This hypothesis has it that the migratory groups of human beings entered the continent through the ice-free corridors that opened during the short periods of de-icing. And of course, some elaborate conjectures have been advanced about the different possible routes that those human travelers followed.

In a more recent development of the crossing of the Bering Strait hypothesis several scholars (among them Thomas Dillehay, one of the major voices today on the issues pertaining to the peopling of the Americas) have advanced the idea that the migration may have taken place, among other ways, by sea – thus contradicting some of Acosta’s conjectures. The new version of the story is based on recent geological investigations that point to different climate changes, on disagreement about dates of deglaciation, on newly discovered patterns of settlement in South America, and many other factors. In South America, for example, the archaeological record is clear about the survival of the megafauna of the Pleistocene well into the early Holocene – something than cannot be said about North America, where most of the megafauna had already disappeared by that time.² For this reason and many others – among them the once controversial site known as Monte Verde, located in the present-day Chile – a narrative considered as the true one in North American academic circles is much more difficult to defend for the South American case. I am referring to the “Clovis first” hypothesis that in its most traditional (and I dare say reactionary) versions includes the variation known as “overkill.”

The first hypothesis maintains that the culture that produced the fluted point known in academic circles as Clovis was one organized as bands of hunter-gatherers who moved from one place to another in search of food. The food, so the story goes, was mostly taken from big animals such as mammoths and other giants known as part of the megafauna of the Pleistocene. In the “overkill” version of it, these bands were so greedy and so environmentally irresponsible – they would have refused to sign the Kyoto protocol, I guess – that they ended up depleting their hunting grounds. Therefore, the big animals that fed them for millennia vanished from the face of the earth. This culture would have been the one that populated the rest of the Americas.

There are many problems with the application of this narrative to the vast territory south of what today is the USA. One of them is, as we said, that those big beasts survived into the Holocene in South America. Another element to take into account is that the Ice Age did not end between 11,000 and 10,000 BF in South America, but sometime between 14,000 and 12,000 BP.³ But another set of problems is raised by the study of the evidence found in Monte Verde, Chile. That site – like several others in the southern hemisphere – shows very clearly that not only were its inhabitants not hunting big mammals, but also that their way of life differed dramatically from the one described not only by the “overkill” version but also by the more comprehensive one: “Clovis first.” Many a society in South America developed, at an early stage of human occupation of the Americas, complex and diverse cultural habits – those of foragers – that differ dramatically from the model that presents Amerindians of the ancient past as predators. This relatively new evidence puts into question the simplicity and most of all the appeal of the Clovis theory that, in its basic form, states that the hunters of megafauna were the first society in the Americas and that later they populated different parts of the continent for a relatively long period of time. As a consequence, the population of South America, according to this theory, must have been a much later development. Unfortunately for its proponents, archaeological evidence shows that some radiocarbon dates of South American archaeological sites are much older (12,500 BP, in the most conservative estimates) than the ones identified as Clovis, which are only 11,200 years old – and very short-lived, because the most recent dates for Clovis place the end of that culture at around 10, 800 BP.⁴

Of course, there is more than science behind this dispute about dates, ancestry, and genealogy. There is also politics: the “Clovis first” narrative is mostly supported – not surprisingly – by North America-based scholars. Some have even said that the Clovis fluted point is the first manifestation of American (understood as pertaining to the US) ingenuity, which also gave us Coca-Cola and baseball caps.⁵ This situation, besides being a blatant case of academic imperialism – it took Dillehay years (many more than the usual period for any investigation) to be able to get his radiocarbon dates and stratigraphic analyses broadly accepted by the archaeological community – it is also a dispute that may help us rethink the way in which we represent the past. That is, it may help us realize how important are the narratives we produce in the present to create a past that suits our community’s – whatever community one belongs to – needs in the present, and how those pasts one invents are going to determine the futures that will actually happen or take place in real life.

The way in which one represents the very different indigenous pasts is no small part of the reconstruction of the past Western society has been producing for several centuries now. In this sense, the Clovis case is a very pedagogical introduction to the contradictions present-day scholars incur when trying to write a past that favors the cause of their own culture. For example, it is clear that the image of the first Amerindians as predators who exterminated the megafauna, and as nomads who had no abode, are not the ones preferred in the West to represent civilization. On the contrary, the less complex the society, the more “savage” or “primitive” it appears to Western eyes. On the other hand, Clovis defenders seem to be interested in presenting a scenario where the inventors of the fluted point appear as the pioneers who led the migration from Asia. Therefore, one could even speculate further and say that they could be seen as leaders of a prehistoric expansion that foretells the conquest of the West undertaken thousands of years later by (North) American pioneers. It was they who populated all there is to populate in the Western hemisphere. In this way, US-based scholars make a nationalist claim in the name of science – or if you prefer, disguised as science – in order to appropriate, once again, the territories located south of the Rio Bravo (or Rio Grande, depending on your perspective and geopolitical situation of enunciation). So to sum this contradiction up, I would like to play a little with an extravagant and impossible experiment: to be able to enter the mind of an imaginary “Clovis first” supporter. If that were possible, I bet we could hear something along these lines: “Those Amerindians may have been kind of primitive, but they are ours and they led the peopling of the Americas.”

The diversity of indigenous peoples in what today is Latin America only grew with time. In addition to the already complex and diverse panorama of ancient times we are starting to get glimpses of the wide array of peoples and cultures that flourished south of the territory of what today is the USA. The most sobering thing for those who yearn for evolutionist narratives is that there is no visible line that shows any “progress” or “development” in the life and history of indigenous societies throughout the Americas. If an ideal observer could travel through time and space at will she would see hunter-gatherers coexisting with settlements of early agriculturalists, or fishers and hunters living side by side with state-like organized societies. There is, then, no single line of “progress” that societies followed. That is to say, there is nothing in the archaeological and ethnographic evidence available to us today that points in the direction of the existence of a rule or set of rules that determine the “evolution” of societies. Let us now take a look at just a handful of societies that existed in the past, and some that exist in the present, to get an idea of the enormous diversity and the wealth of human variety existent in the Americas.

Let us start with the most vilified ones:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Notes on Contributors
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Acknowledgments to Sources
• Introduction
• Preamble: The Historical Foundation of Modernity/Coloniality and the Emergence of Decolonial Thinking
• PART I: Coloniality
• PART II: Transformations
• PART III: The Emergence of National Communities in New Imperial Coordinates
• PART IV: Uncertain Modernities
• PART V: Global and Local Perspectives
• Index