This edited volume, consisting of 15 chapters organised in four sections, is the outgrowth of a conference held in St Louis, Missouri, in 2008. While most of its contributors, including established scholars as well as PhD students, hail from a background in literature, other disciplines – history, sociology and anthropology – are marginally represented, too. What comes closest to a common denominator is that many chapters have something to do with Iberian colonialism and its legacies in Latin America in the broadest possible sense.
Even though several chapters are perfectly successful in their own terms, the volume as a whole lacks thematic and analytical coherence. In her introduction Mabel Moraña raises dozens of interesting questions about the role of intellectuals in Latin American societies, but she does not put forward a coherent framework of analysis for the chapters that follow. In fact, many of them deal with intellectuals only tangentially, insofar as every aspect of social, political and cultural life in every spatial and temporal context inevitably involves some sort of intellectual activity by someone. The volume's clarity suffers further from an all-too-frequent use of jargon and convoluted language, which may alienate readers from disciplines other than literature. As a result, the criteria for selecting the contributions as well as the volume's overall goals remain unclear.
The first two sections contain eight chapters, of which five deal with one or two individual writers: the sixteenth-century Peruvian Jesuits, Inca Garcilaso and Blas Valera; a nineteenth-century Afro-Uruguayan writer, Jacinto Ventura de Molina; an early twentieth-century Argentine nationalist, Manuel Gálvez; a French-Chilean poststructuralist, Nelly Richard; and an Argentine novelist, Ricardo Piglia. Among these, Ana del Sarto's chapter on Richard is the most polished, persuasive and relevant to ‘rethinking intellectuals’. The other four offer credible interpretations of aspects of their respective protagonists' works, but their focus on the literary production of individual writers who lived in strikingly different contexts makes it difficult for them, even cumulatively, to contribute something substantial to a more general debate about the role of intellectuals in Latin American societies. The two chapters dealing with Brazil, by John D. French (on left-wing politics since 1980) and Jan Hoffman French (about the recognition of land titles for former slave runaway communities), apply a wider lens. Yet, while both are highly readable and convincing pieces in their own right, studying intellectuals does not seem to be their foremost goal. By contrast, the musings by a Cuban writer, Arturo Arango, do have this aim, but, for those uninitiated in the names and debates of Cuba's current cultural and political affairs, his arguments are difficult to follow.
Like José Antonio Mazzotti's opening piece on the two Jesuits, the third section (consisting of chapters by Catherine Walsh, Ixq'anil, Judith M. Maxwell, Ajpub’ Pablo García Ixmatá and Walter Mignolo) is primarily concerned with the European/indigenous distinction. Most authors here tend to contrast the two in a rigid dichotomy, usually identifying anything that carries the label ‘indigenous’ as emancipatory. García Ixmatá, for example, opens with the assertion that ‘Maya knowledges are the foundation for the construction of a society that is inclusive and egalitarian’ (p. 227). Sitting uncomfortably with this conviction, Mazzotti expresses the hope that his research will render ‘ethnic nationalism’ (presumably, and hopefully, he does not mean all ethnic nationalisms) ‘even more powerful and persuasive’ (p. 29). Instead of championing ‘ethnic nationalism’, Mignolo prefers ‘decoloniality’, which he defines as a concept whose deployment ‘questions Occidentalism, racism, totalitarian and unilateral global decisions, imperialist principles of knowledge’ (p. 248).
Unsurprisingly, intellectuals pop up haphazardly on both sides of the binaries set up in these chapters, sometimes as agents of ‘Occidentalism’, racism and the other things questioned by ‘decoloniality’, sometimes as harbingers of ‘decoloniality’ themselves. Walsh summarily condemns unspecified ‘past intellectual projects' as ‘white-criollo-mestizo and oligarchic’, and opposes them to a present in which ‘ancestral movements of Indian and African descendent peoples … are leading and orienting the most significant intellectual projects’ (p. 200). Mazzotti, by contrast, claims that already in the sixteenth century ‘mestizo scholars … argued from an “organic” position based upon their ethnic origin’ (presumably the indigenous part of this origin) because the writings of the two (mestizo) Jesuits he examines criticised viceregal abuses of indigenous peoples (p. 43). The central analytical axiom here is not intellectuals but ethnicity, limned less as a construct than as a fixed category with cultural and epistemological corollaries. The authors thus tend to cast ethnicity as the most reliable predictor for the nature of intellectual activities.
The three chapters of the final section are more closely related to the volume's topic. Renato Ortiz mentions Latin America only in passing, but he does offer a thoughtful and stimulating comment on the globally rising use of English in (social) science publications. George Yúdice engagingly and persuasively considers the consequences of cyberspace and new forms of transnational political activism from the angle of Jürgen Habermas' concept of the public sphere. Finally, Abril Trigo detects a hidden agenda behind ‘Hispanic Transatlantic Studies’, which he diagnoses as ‘irrevocably tainted by the ideology of Hispanism and the geopolitical designs of Spanish capitalism’ (p. 345).
The ungrateful task of wrapping up the disparate contributions rests with the co-editor, Bret Gustafson. Instead of trying to establish some coherence, he mainly gives his opinion on current Latin American politics. He senses that ‘the networks of the intellectual Right’, which he apparently identifies with ‘scientists’ and ‘neo-neoliberals’, ‘are at work trying to dismantle or contain transformations like those represented in the Bolivian constitution’ (p. 368). As for the volume's overall goal, Gustafson holds that ‘the “rethinking” of intellectuals in Latin America must negotiate multiple scales and forms of intellectual activity’. For those to whom this does not amount to saying anything, he specifies that ‘in short, intellectual articulations are political networks’ (p. 358). If this statement really sums up this co-editor's belief, it might go some way toward explaining why the reader in the end learns precious little about this volume's professed topic in spite of the merits of several of its contributions.
