Area, Ethnic, and Global Studies: Overlaps and Divergences

One of the conference’s goals was to bring Latin American studies into conversation with other area studies fields in order to overcome the geographically defined boundaries that have limited intellectual exchange between scholars of different regions of the former Third World: Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. The end of the Cold War has brought both institutional and intellectual challenges to this geographical configuration of the globe, pushing scholars to examine a variety of transnational spaces in diverse world regions. A number of important scholars have urged us to rethink the Atlantic and Pacific worlds in such terms, variously centering Africa in the Atlantic world (Reference GilroyGilroy 1993), or Asian diasporic communities in Latin America (Reference Schiavone CamachoSchiavone Camacho 2012; Reference SeijasSeijas 2014), and problematizing the kinds of definitions that link diverse cultural regions, like Hawai’i, Singapore, and Japan, into a common category of “Asian Pacific” (Reference Wesley-Smith and GossWesley-Smith and Goss 2010). Other scholars and theorists have developed entirely new critical frameworks, such as the global South, that allow us to understand overlaps and divergences in regions shaped by histories of the appropriation, colonization, and extraction of their knowledges, resources, and ways of life (Reference MahlerMahler 2018). Conference participants addressed the question of how we might interrogate critically the geographic boundaries of area studies disciplines and imagine different, historically produced spaces at a variety of scales from the local to the regional and transnational—including, and especially, the global South.

Colleagues in other area studies fields have developed innovative responses to the challenges of area studies’ entrenched regional boundaries. Scholars who work on the interconnected regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America have offered insightful reflections on Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff’s (Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2016) provocative Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. These global South theorists map “the conditions under which Africa (the South) and China (the East) are trying to weave the paths that tie both regions in the present and in the future” (Reference MbembeMbembe 2012) and analyze a truly “a global order that is a multiple-entry scheme, a variegated, textured canvass, where ‘global,’ ‘regional’ and ‘local’ are not scales but rather various interrelated entangled dimensions and folds” (Reference ObarrioObarrio 2012). We asked conference participants to consider how global South approaches revise, build on, and supplant Latin American studies’ long history of building regionally specific scholarship. Can newer models like the global South retain Latin American studies’ specialized knowledge rooted in local culture, language, and history, while always extending beyond Latin America to the postcolonial Third World? Do global South approaches provide new and fruitful ways of considering the linkages produced by commodity exchange, trade, and migration that can build on these previous Latin American/Latin American studies intellectual movements, bringing Latin American studies scholars into useful conversation with scholars located in African, Asian, and Middle Eastern studies?Footnote ¹

It is hard to dispute that area studies disciplines constituted political projects shaped by Cold War imperatives. However, we asked conference participants to consider how Latin American studies also contained counterhegemonic political possibilities often rooted in scholarship, methodologies, and artistic works produced in Latin America. Latin American studies became a disciplinary and institutional space for scholarship that was often leftist and anti-imperialist or identified with subaltern movements within Latin America, what Eduardo Mendieta (Reference Mendieta2005, 181) has referred to as “critical Latinamericanism.” In addition, while it is certainly true that area studies programs have operated in their distinct silos with diverse and often unarticulated intellectual projects, Latin American studies has not historically been regionally confined in its intellectual reach. From 1960s liberation theology and dependency theory to contemporary “decolonial” critical theory, Latin America and Latin American studies have generated radical alternatives to and critiques of the imperial and Cold War models of area studies. Although regionally rooted, this intellectual trajectory was articulated to the anticolonial and anti-imperialist projects of an emerging revolutionary “Third World,” in what today some scholars might describe as an iteration of the linkages and solidarities binding together the global South. For example, dependency theory and liberation theology shaped scholarship throughout the decolonizing world, focusing on Latin America’s place in the global capitalist order or “world system,” while works of criticism by Aníbal Quijano (Reference Quijano1992), Walter Mignolo (Reference Mignolo2003, Reference Mignolo2005, Reference Mignolo2012), Arturo Escobar (Reference Mignolo and EscobarMignolo and Escobar 2010), and Ramón Grosfoguel (Reference Grosfoguel2012) on “decolonial” thinking have influenced scholarship on indigeneity and indigenous knowledge not only in Latin America but transnationally, from the United States to South Asia and Australia, producing heuristic conversations among scholars writing from the standpoints of postcolonial criticism and subaltern studies. Latin American studies confronts the question of how to retain this long tradition of Latin America–generated multi- and interdisciplinary intellectual work, often produced as critique of North American and European social science and criticism, even as it expands in transnational directions.

Rethinking the Origins of Latin American Studies

Conference participants also considered how we can trace the genealogy of US Latin American studies as a disciplinary formation back from the Cold War to the period of US imperial expansion in the western hemisphere during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They examined its ties to the conquest and closing of the United States’ western frontier and analyzed new research on the development of American studies as a discipline focused on the United States’ hemispheric exceptionalism. Such work includes Ricardo Salvatore’s (Reference Salvatore2016) examination of US scholarship on South America between 1900 and 1945 as a “disciplinary conquest” of regional knowledge foundational to the United States’ hemispheric imperial projects and the formation of later Cold War Latin American studies.

In her article for this dossier, “Mexican Anthropology and Inter-American Knowledge,” Karin Rosemblatt demonstrates the vital links between Mexican and US anthropology during the 1920s–1940s, an experience not so much of disciplinary conquest but of mutual influence and “inter-American” collaboration. Rosemblatt shows how Manuel Gamio worked to develop a local Mexican approach to anthropology and culture shaped by the concerns of early twentieth-century indigenismo. Although Gamio had trained in the United States with Franz Boas, he departed from Boas’s focus on cultural “diffusion” by emphasizing in his research on Mexico’s indigenous peoples that their evolution responded to particular histories and geographies. In addition, Gamio used both his and his colleagues’ ethnographies and work for the state to build policies toward indigenous peoples that he viewed as a model for the United States and the Americas more generally. Even as he identified with the universalizing pretensions of North American and European social science, Gamio became increasingly dedicated to practicing ethnography at the local level. In so doing, his research methods recognized the diversity of indigenous society and even the diversity of possible paths to modernity. Gamio sought to produce research that would provide the foundation for a specific form of Mexican modernity rooted in its indigenous past. Among Gamio’s collaborators was John Collier, a US anthropologist who looked to Mexico and Mexican ethnography to understand and build policy toward indigenous communities in the United States. Collier traveled to Mexico to work with indigenistas and adapt their practices, especially their work with local communities, to North American institutional and research frameworks. But Colliers’s anthropological project became shaped by the imperatives of US military expansion during World War II. As a result, Collier’s collaborations with Mexican anthropologists led to the design of policies to regulate Japanese internees in detention camps and, later, to the territories that were occupied by the United States after 1945. Rosemblatt thus illuminates the tensions in Gamio’s ethnographic project of producing universally applicable, neutral social science and his embrace of the diversity of indigenous cultures in Mexico, as well as the ways in which Collier’s use of Mexico and Mexican ethnography became subordinated to the agendas of United States foreign policy during World War II.

The work of historians like Rosemblatt and Salvatore (Reference Salvatore2016) pushes the origins of Latin American studies back to early twentieth-century social scientific projects that were tied to crucial moments of nation-state formation and imperial expansion. (For a recent review of some of the literature in this area, see Reference DosmanDosman 2017.) But literary scholars, influenced by postcolonial theory, have traced the genealogy of Latin American studies even further back. Influenced by the work of scholars such as Edward Said on the discursive project accompanying European imperial expansion, literary and cultural critics have sought to trace the development of “the idea of Latin America” to 1492 (Reference MignoloMignolo 2005). In so doing they have linked Renaissance/early modern conquests of indigenous spaces and Afro-Latin communities to the hegemonic rise of written knowledge and alphabetized literacy, accompanied by the expanding importance of the book in a post-Gutenberg world (Reference MignoloMignolo 2003). Other scholars, such as Alberto Moreiras (Reference Moreiras2001) and Román de la Campa (Reference De la Campa1999), have written critical accounts of “Latin Americanism,” a Latin American variant of Said’s Orientalism. This approach has provided a helpful, critical unpacking of the very notion that there is a Latin America that can be studied by tracing the epistemic constructions of Latin America, and their operation in the institutions of colonial and imperial expansion.Footnote ³

A postcolonial critical focus on Latin Americanism or “Latin Americanisms” also permits an examination of ideas about Latin America built within the region itself, or what Moreiras (Reference Moreiras2001) refers to as “Latin American Latin Americanism” (Reference BeverleyBeverley 2011). We can trace genealogies of counternarratives of Latin America, its history, development, and modernity, produced within Latin America and often in opposition to the Latin Americanisms produced in the North American and European academies. This would be the case, for example, of José Martí’s (Reference Martí Pérez[1891] 1973) “Nuestra América” and the tradition inaugurated by José Enrique Rodó’s arielista writing directed explicitly at the idea of Latin America created during United States expansion in the western hemisphere during the late nineteenth century. Scholars like Alicia Ríos (Reference Ríos, Ana, Ríos and Trigo2004, 15–34) argue that the Latin American ensayista (critical essay) genre, with notable nineteenth-century examples in the work of Andrés Bello, Rodó, and Martí, among others, represents an example of a particularly Latin American interdisciplinary intellectual tradition.

This approach does not reduce Latin American studies to a North American imperial and Cold War project but instead emphasizes the intellectual projects and methodologies that are produced by thinkers from Latin America. We can locate the work of Gilberto Freyre (Reference Freyre and de Oniís[1936] 1986), José Vasconcelos (Reference Vasconcelos, Jaén and Gabilondo[1925] 1997), with their focus on mestizaje and racial mixture, or even Fernando Ortiz’s (Reference Ortiz1940) invention of the category of “transculturation” in a similar interdisciplinary vein, articulated against North American conceptions of race and national culture; in turn, we see how thinkers like Vasconcelos erased evidence of indigenous knowledge production in the region, even as he sought to develop a framework that was indigenous to Latin America. As Ríos (Reference Ríos, Ana, Ríos and Trigo2004, 15–34) argues, Ortiz’s (Reference Ortiz1940) use of “transculturation” and his invocation of musical forms in “Cuban Counterpoint” provides a well-known example of a Latin America–generated project for studying culture and identity, as well as innovation in form. Here, we might place Fals Borda’s radical sociological practice and innovations in form and methodology, described by Robles and Rappaport, or the anthropology of Manuel Gamio, described by Rosemblatt, in line with the long tradition of Latin American social scientific writing inaugurated by Ortiz (Reference Ortiz1940), Freyre (Reference Freyre and de Oniís[1936] 1986), and others, noting the moments in which such frameworks change over time and in response to local and global movements.

Subaltern Studies and Decolonial Scholarship

Finally, as scholars such as Mignolo (Reference Mignolo2003, Reference Mignolo2005, Reference Mignolo2012), Moreiras (Reference Moreiras2001), and Beverley (Reference Beverley2011) have pointed out, lettered Latin Americanisms or ideas of Latin America produced by urban intellectuals, including those writing in the nineteenth-century ensayista tradition, operated on a model of internal colonialism, silencing “subaltern” voices, especially indigenous people, campesinos, and migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These patterns are not limited to imaginative fiction, creative work, or aesthetic traditions. Mallon (Reference Mallon1994, 1492) sees them echoed in the scholarly practices of Latin Americanists who were “often Eurocentric in our borrowing from other historical or theoretical traditions.” An important exception is the work of La Rosca, as Robles and Rappaport argue in this dossier. In building from the work of scholars in subaltern studies, such as Partha Chatterjee and Gayatri Spivak, Mignolo’s (Reference Mignolo2012) proposal to “decolonize” knowledge or write criticism from the perspective of “subalternized knowledges” constitutes one approach to locating forms of knowledge production rooted in non-occidental, indigenous intellectual and cultural production (see also Reference MendietaMendieta 2005 and Reference Trigo, del Sarto, Ríos and TrigoTrigo 2004b, 347). As Mignolo argued in his keynote address at the University of Virginia conference, these decolonial practices can be traced to the moment of encounter between Africans, Amerindians, Asians, and Europeans in the colonial Americas. For example, in his study of New World writing systems and indigenous literacies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Mignolo (Reference Mignolo2003) contends that by combining visual and alphabetic writing in his Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, writer-artist Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (Reference Guaman Poma de Ayala1615–1616) provides an alternative definition of aesthetic, cartographic, and spiritual knowledges.

Writers such as Guaman Poma de Ayala, and their decolonial work, invite us to reconsider the relationship between Latin American studies and Spanish departments, which have often focused on literature written in Spanish, following Castilian conventions. Some sixty years ago, Enrique Anderson Imbert (Reference Anderson Imbert1954, 8) defined the field of Latin American literature in these terms: “We will not even concern ourselves with cultural phenomena that are adjacent to literature: folklore, oratory, journalism, philosophy, criticism. … Literature, only literature. And the literature that we are going to study is the literature that which in America was written in Spanish.” (“Ni siquiera nos ocuparemos de los fenómenos culturales próximos a la literatura: folklore, oratoria, periodismo, filosofía, crítica. … Literatura, solo literatura. Y la literatura que vamos a estudiar es la que, en América, se escribió en español.”) In recent years, critical work on Latin America, based on texts written in indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Huastec, Mixtec, Zapotec, Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní, and the thirty Mayan languages that form a single language family, despite varying degrees of mutual intelligibility, has challenged the field in needed ways. By focusing on creative and intellectual work produced in languages other than Spanish or Portuguese, indigenous artists, activists, and intellectuals have led colleagues across the disciplines to reconsider some of the foundational terms in Latin American studies, including the definition of Latin America itself. If scholars now more or less agree that language cannot define literary and cultural studies in the Americas, even though academic departments retain language-specific titles like the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, what might take its place?

Arturo Arias offers one such response in his essay “From Indigenous Literatures to Native American and Indigenous Theorists: The Makings of a Grassroots Decoloniality.” In the essay, published in this dossier, Arias analyzes the publication history of creative work in indigenous languages from 1992 to the present, showing how Native American decolonialists have developed theoretical concepts, political movements, and aesthetic traditions that go largely unacknowledged in decolonial scholarship produced in North American academies. Using Central American novels, short stories, and poetry as his starting point, Arias considers overlaps and divergences in artistic practices and theoretical frameworks in indigenous traditions around the world, including the works of Māori thinkers like Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Qhiswa philosophers like Fausto Reinaga, and Aymara scholars like Esteban Ticona Alejo. The research paradigms and practices advanced by Tuhiwai Smith (Reference Tuhiwai Smith2012) in Decolonizing Methodologies are different from the creative work of individual writers and collective authorial bodies, such as Kaqla, a collective of feminist Maya writers working from Iximuleu, Guatemala. And yet, while accounting for these differences, Arias shows a consistent through-line of decolonial aesthetics and philosophies that are rooted in local forms of advocacy and activism. In ways that recall the activist research methods of Fals Borda and La Rosca, the artists and intellectuals who Arias studies insist on a model of knowledge production that is grounded in indigenous cosmovisions, languages, and ways of being in the world. These decolonial movements raise an important question for the future of Latin American studies. If traditional categories like aesthetics, culture, geography, and language cannot define the field, what and where is Latin America? And how will we study it?