The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas

Wilfried Raussert,Giselle Liza Anatol,Sebastian Thies,Sarah Corona Berkin

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351064682
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Política

Exploring the culture and media of the Americas, this handbook places particular emphasis on collective and intertwined experiences and focuses on the transnational or hemispheric dimensions of cultural flows and geocultural imaginaries that shape the literature, arts, media and other cultural expressions in the Americas.

The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas charts the pervasive, asymmetrical flows of cultural products and capital and their importance in the development of the Americas. The volume offers a comprehensive understanding of how inter-American communication is constituted, framed and structured, and covers the artistic and political dimensions that have shaped literature, art and popular culture in the region. Forty-six chapters cover a range of inter-American key concepts and dynamics, divided into two parts:

• 
  
  

• Literature and Music deals with inter-American entanglements of artistic expressions in the Western Hemisphere, including music, dance, literary genres and developments.

• 
  
  

• Media and Visual Cultures explores the inter-American dimension of media production in the hemisphere, including cinema and television, photography and art, journalism, radio, digital culture and issues such as freedom of expression and intellectual property.

This multidisciplinary approach will be of interest to a broad array of academic scholars and students in history, sociology, political science; and cultural, postcolonial, gender, literary, globalization and media studies.

PART I

Literature and music in the Americas

Edited by

Wilfried Raussert

BIELEFELD UNIVERSITY

Giselle Liza Anatol

THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

1

INTRODUCTION

Literature and music in the Americas

Wilfried Raussert and Giselle Liza Anatol

As a handbook, this volume can be used to introduce “students” of all ages to the complexities of Inter-American Studies. It is designed to rethink the Americas as interconnected geographical spaces, cultures, and peoples since, as is too often the case, subjects throughout the Americas use the term “American” to refer only to the United States. This tendency essentially cements the role of the U.S. as a neocolonial agent by failing to acknowledge the very presence of Canada and Mexico on the North American continent, and Central and South American nations and those of the Caribbean basin as sharing the same hemisphere – not only the continental landmass but also its waterways and other natural resources. Furthermore, the conceptualization of the U.S. as the only America fails to acknowledge the crucial contributions that populations throughout the Americas have made, and continue to make, to each other’s knowledge bases and cultures – particularly, for this portion of the volume, their music and literature. The essays in this collection encourage a different way of understanding the Americas within a global perspective, beyond a U.S.-centric vision of influence and power that perceives an orientalized Latin America, exoticized Caribbean, and passive Canada solely as the weaker, dependent, derivative, and colonized parts of the Americas.

The current field of inquiry

Inter-American Studies presents itself as a flourishing arena of scholarship with important predecessors in the 20th century. We may think of literary comparatists and Latin Americanists such as M. J. Valdés, José Ballón Gari Laguardia and Lois Parkinson to name but a few, and during the 1990s comparative Inter-American scholarship in the U.S. by critics as Djelal Kadir, Doris Sommer, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and José David Saldívar. One might also contemplate critiques of Paul Gilroy’s influential The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, which has been criticized for neglecting the transatlantic travel of black intellectuals from lusophone South America and for focusing too narrowly on the east-west traffic between the U.S. and Great Britain, causing major oversights to the north-south journeys of people, ideas, and cultures throughout the Americas.

Many critics continue to nourish the field with theoretical and critical insight, as Saldívar’s relatively recent book Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (2012) illustrates. Earl Fitz stresses,

though we have seen interest in the Inter-American project wax and wane through the years, we are now living in a time when, for a variety of reasons, interest in Inter-American relations suddenly looms large and more urgent than it ever has before.

(2004, 13)

This is due in part to the fact that postnational and transnational turns in Latin American and American Studies have increasingly recognized the necessity to think “nation” and “area” anew and have slowly entered the critical debates about the restructuring of area studies; these discussions have been prompted by radical transformations in geopolitics and economics in times of globalization. Critics like Walter Mignolo and José David Saldívar have introduced new kinds of border thinking that question traditional knowledge and challenge the power divisions that have created hierarchies along the North–South axis, which have become as troubling as earlier examples of a divide between East–West.

Selected key topics from the fields of literature and music in the Handbook to Culture and Media in the Americas provide transdisciplinary insights into the development of literary and musical production within the Americas. While comparative literary studies (Fitz 2004) and world literature approaches (D’haen, Damrosch, Kadir 2012) as well as world music approaches (Stokes 2012) have transgressed national boundaries to explore and study the connectedness, affinities, and differences between cultural productions, none of these have provided an adequate methodology to think about cultural productions and developments as related within the Americas in a more systematic way. The entries in the section on literature and music follow three strategies, in different degrees and oftentimes overlapping paradigms, of how to put theory into practice: using a comparative perspective, a relational perspective of flow and citation and, third, a perspective of entangled Americas to explore the knots, ruptures, and intersectionalities within historical and cultural processes of literary and musical production. The editors consider this an innovative methodology that permits the reader to come to terms with entangled and disentangled cultures, literatures, music, and performance styles in the Americas. The comparative dimension stresses similarities, but also explores diversity, difference, multiplicity, and plurality. The relational paves the way to unravel transcultural and transnational phenomena, affinities, and perspectives. The focus on processes of entangling and disentangling looks at aesthetic forms and developments shaped by colonial and postcolonial conditions, intra- and intercultural dynamics and tensions. As literature and music are revisited through postcolonial and decolonial perspectives in an overall inter-American framework (Mignolo 2000; Saldívar 2012), we consider the assemblage of selected key topics a pioneering effort aimed at broadening the reach of academic traditions and disciplinary conventions, moving beyond local, regional and national biases to overcome long lasting patterns of epistemological and methodological nationalism.

The editors and authors intend to generate new ways of considering certain literary and musical phenomena, genres, and classifications by decolonizing concepts, and hegemonic frameworks, not just to reproduce conventional understandings. Accordingly, the points of view unfolding in the entries follow dialogical patterns; the selected key topics pursue shifting and fluid positionings of south and north within a redefined area study approach. An inter-American lens challenges the ways of thinking about the Americas beyond South American and North American “Creole Nationalisms” (Mignolo 2011) that have created distinct nationalities in the aftermath of conquest and colonization in particular and, thusly, have put into question earlier conceptualizations of area studies in general. Inter-American Studies, as understood by the editors, conceptualizes the Americas as transversally related, chronotopically entangled, and multiply interconnected (Raussert 2014). In that sense, Inter-American perspectives envision a post-territorial understanding of area(s). With its critical positioning at the crossroads of cultural studies and area studies, the field pushes further the postcolonial, postnational, decolonial and cross-border turns in studies of the Americas toward a model of horizontal dialogue beyond constructed areas and cultures as well as disciplines. John Carlos Rowe argues that, “the U.S., Canada, Europe, and their Greco-Roman sources – are not ‘areas’ at all, but conceptualizations … [and] the intellectual complements” of what Mignolo calls the “modern/colonial world system” (Rowe 2011, 322–23). The editors have sought to push these conceptualizations even further, urging contributors to consider how they are tied to spatialities and temporalities within the American hemisphere. To investigate to what degree and in which ways “America/América” as geopolitical, cultural and social manifestation should be seen as “entangled Americas,” beyond closed national and area spaces, is one notion that operates – at least as subtext – in many of the entries discussing literary and musical phenomena in the Americas. An Inter-American framework must be considered to more fully comprehend cultural productions of the Americas in their intricate historical, social and cultural interrelatedness.

Decolonizing the history of concepts and terminologies

The readings of literature and music in this volume take scholars out of their comfort zones – the conventional fields of specialization established by disciplines such as American Studies, Latin American Studies, Canadian Studies, and Caribbean Studies with their potentially limiting focus on content and methodology. While we recognize that cultural and historical specificity are extremely important, we argue for a process that permits the unfolding of a productive critical epistemology of Inter-American thinking, considerations of literal movement and border crossings, and metaphors of flows, itineraries, borders, and entanglements. Inter-American scholarship as performed in the entries on literature and music allows these concepts to move to the foreground, directing focus to multi-layered connections, multidirectional currents, conflicted and overlapping geopolitical imaginaries, and complex entanglements within the Americas.

So often, specialization and conventional categories silo scholars and prevent crucial exchanges of information and methodologies from taking place. Accordingly, an Inter-American framework aspires towards new knowledge production that revises master narratives, canon-making, and genre-making. “Knowledge” gets infused by the idea of mobile sites of enunciation, and hence, becomes thinkable as contextually framed yet open, historically grown but changing, specific and at the same time interconnected: America in its plural version, related to and in process. To accomplish this goal, many entries were co-authored to provide expertise from multiple locations – both geographical and metaphorical. Even in entries that were written by a single author, the intention was to integrate a point of view addressing the multiplicity, hybridity, and complexity behind the production and diffusion of literature and music.

The dialogical paradigm that underlies any sincere Inter-American scholarship makes clear that no single scholarly positioning can capture the complexity of Inter-American connectivity. This is what Inter-American approaches share with Global Studies: a necessity to negotiate multiple and at times conflictive paradigms to tackle the objects of investigation. In a now famous quote, Frederic Jameson has called globalization an “untotalizable totality” (Jameson xii). Similarly, the interconnectedness of the Americas in its totality escapes our comprehension. At the same time, a focus on what connects and what divides outside the closed concepts of place, city, territory, reservation, and nation is essential: one of the aims of the Inter-American scholarship is to give back voices to those who narrate and share the numerous and diverse stories from geographically distant and/or manifold locations and cultures. The editors, hence, endeavored to employ authors from within the region and outside the region to approach the selected key topics in literature and music dialogically.

When the editors first envisioned the Inter-American Studies series, separate volumes for literature and for media were planned. They were eager to include music, since music traverses boundaries and borders as rapidly as other media forms like film and video, but did not have enough space for a separate volume. We eventually decided to include literature and media in a double volume, and anticipated that the music entries would serve as a type of bridge joining the literary through the verbal (lyrics), the non-verbal aspects of communication and culture (tunes and melodies), and the visual realm through performance. Music stands as one of the most important forms of popular culture production in the Americas, and those popular culture forms have clearly shaped global culture (reggae, calypso, jazz, blues, samba). These genres, like the “slave narratives,” are specific contributions from the Americas to the world, definitively and consistently shaping societies and individual identities.

The entries

To cover all aspects of literary and musical production in this handbook format would be an impossible mission. Accordingly, a list of topics was established that was not exhaustive, but could provide representative coverage of major phenomena, movements, developments, and epochal references. The selection of terms aims at a mix of broad, sweeping categories and smaller, concrete units. The idea behind the choices is to touch on traditional key concepts in literary and, to a lesser extent, musical study but also to expand the canon through diachronic and synchronic revisions. The editors thus consider these terms to be an important sampling, highlighting suggestive literary, musical, and performative flows and entanglements from pre-colonial times to the present and inspiring additional thought.

The chosen entries also strove to take the concepts out of their conventional frames of reference. Entries like Plantation Literature (→ III/15) and Slave Narratives (→ III/20), for example, are characteristically framed as exclusively of the United States, but the editors sought to demonstrate the ways that they traverse geopolitical boundaries. Life Writing (→ III/11), too, describes a genre usually considered only from a U.S. perspective, but here is explored through its incarnations in Latin America, Canada, and the Caribbean. Similarly, the essay on Magical Realism and the Fantastic (→ III/12) pursues the comparison and entanglements of two genres typically explored as exclusive to their regions and cultures (Latin America and Anglo-America, respectively).

Ultimately, the editors consider the selected terms to best illustrate so-far neglected elements of Inter-American cultural productions in writing, oral narratives, and performances. Since this section covers cultural productions from precolonial times to the present, the editors decided against a “hotspot” approach, as discussed in the section of the volume dedicated to Media and Communication. Instead, we chose an approach that promoted comparisons by “cluster,” which allows for thematic bundling and focus. One possible cluster comprises African-descendant Literatures (→ III/2), Indigenous Literatures (→ III/10), Migration Literature (→ III/13), Plantation Literature (→ III/15), Slave Narratives (→ III/20), Silencing (→ III/19), Travel Writing (→ III/22), and brings light to oral and literary cultural productions by individuals on the margins and communities in flow. A second cluster addresses the spatial dimension in cultural production and includes Borders (→ III/3), Plantation Literature (→ III/15), Migration Literature (→ III/13), Travel Writing (→ III/22), and Cosmopolitanism (→ III/5); these essays investigate translational flows of people across physical space. A third cluster emerges from entries related to temporalities or various progressions of time: Foundational Discourses (→ III/8), Modernism and Postmodernisms (→ III/14), Utopias (→ III/23), Life Writing (→ III/11), Children’s Literature (→ III/4), Cronicas and New Journalism (→ III/6), Magical Realism and the Fantastic (→ III/12), and Trauma Literature (→ III/21) enable us to understand complex relations between people, their social, cultural, and political experiences of time and history. Non-canonical cultural expressions are reflected in the cluster involving Public Intellectuals (→ III/18), Silencing (→ III/19), Crónicas and New Journalism (→ III/6) and the Graphic Novels (→ III/9). And yet another cluster addresses sonic and kinesthetic expressions, as seen in entries like Dance (→ III/7), Protest Music (→ III/17), Popular Music Flows (→ III/16), and Cosmopolitanism (→ III/5), which discuss the importance of sound and rhythm for musical and literary cartographies of inter-American connectedness.

The Literature and Music section of the handbook aims to encourage students and scholars alike to think relationally. This relational approach encourages a reassessment of traditional and rigid definitions of canons, standards, norms, and knowledge. The editors hope the entries open venues for rethinking, pose questions for future interrogation, and offer new sites for the enunciation of mobile and translational, rather than fixed, readings of literature and music in the Americas. In other words, it is anticipated that this handbook will mobilize readers to employ dialogical, postcolonial and anti-colonial approaches to the history of terminology and knowledge production. It provides a blueprint for further differentiation of locally and culturally contained strategies for contextualizing, analyzing, and teaching literature, music, and performance arts, fostering methods that reflect the complex interrelations within the Americas suggesting avenues for further exploration into the Americas from transnational and transcultural perspectives.

Works cited

D’haen, Theo, Damrosch, David, Kadir, Djelal, eds. 2012. The Routledge Companion to World Literature. New York and London: Routledge.

Fitz, Earl E. 2004. “Inter-American Studies as an Emerging Field: The Future of a Discipline.” Vanderbilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies 1: 13–28.

Jameson, Fredric. 1998. “Preface.” In Th...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Academic advisory board
• Acknowledgements
• General introduction
• PART I: Literature and music in the Americas
• PART II: Media and visual cultures
• Index