ISSUE #13: THE LATIN AMERICAN ISSUE 13 nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668 EDITORIAL BOARD Bridget Alsdorf Ruth Leys James Welling Jennifer Ashton Walter Benn Michaels Todd Cronan Charles Palermo Lisa Chinn, editorial assistant Rachael DeLue Robert Pippin Michael Fried Adolph Reed, Jr. Oren Izenberg Victoria H.F. Scott Brian Kane Kenneth Warren FOR AUTHORS ARTICLES: SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Please direct all Letters to the Editors, Comments on Articles and Posts, Questions about Submissions to [email protected]. Potential contributors should send submissions electronically via nonsite.submishmash.com/Submit. Applicants for the B-Side Modernism/Danowski Library Fellowship should consult the full proposal guidelines before submitting their applications directly to the nonsite.org submission manager. 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ISSN 2164-1668. 2 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #13: THE LATIN AMERICAN ISSUE (FALL 2014) ISSUE #13: THE LATIN AMERICAN ISSUE FALL 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS ISSUE DESCRIPTION Issue #13: The Latin American Issue . 8 ARTICLES Making it Visible: Latin Americanist Criticism, Literature, and the Question of Exploitation Today . 12 By Eugenio Di Stefano (University of Nebraska at Omaha) and Emilio Sauri (University of Massachusetts Boston) The Question of Cynicism A Reading of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s La diáspora (1989) . 46 By Alberto Moreiras (Texas A&M) demanding the impossible… Literature and Political Imagination (Amuleto, 1968 in the Nineties) . 66 By Susana Draper (Princeton University) From Posthegemony to Pierre Menard . 86 By Charles Hatfield (The University of Texas at Dallas) Towards an Art of Landscapes and Loans: Sergio Chejfec and the Politics of Literary Form . 102 By Steve Buttes (Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne) Reading for Affect, from Literature and Film to Facebook and #Occupy: Why an Epistemological Lens Matters in the Criticism of Capitalist Cultural Politics . 120 By Dierdra Reber (Emory University) FEATURES Cinematic Irony: The Strange Case of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar . 146 By Robert Pippin (University of Chicago) 4 EDITORIALS Response to Jay and Sustar & Bean . 178 By Adolph Reed, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania) 5 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #13: THE LATIN AMERICAN ISSUE (FALL 2014) ISSUE DESCRIPTION ISSUE DESCRIPTION 6 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #13: THE LATIN AMERICAN ISSUE (FALL 2014) ISSUE DESCRIPTION ISSUE #13: THE LATIN AMERICAN ISSUE In nonsite’s thirteenth issue, we turn to the contemporary relationship between literature and politics in Latin America today. Edited by Eugenio Di Stefano and Emilio Sauri. 8 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #13: THE LATIN AMERICAN ISSUE (FALL 2014) ARTICLES ARTICLES 10 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #13: THE LATIN AMERICAN ISSUE (FALL 2014) ARTICLES MAKING IT VISIBLE: LATIN AMERICANIST CRITICISM, LITERATURE, AND THE QUESTION OF EXPLOITATION TODAY EUGENIO DI STEFANO AND EMILIO SAURI Vision is meaning. Meaning is historical. —True Detective (2014) The Missing Frame At the center of Pedro Mairal’s novel The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (2008) is an enormous painting, “four kilometers long” (MY31/S38), which the eponymous, mute artist, Juan Salvatierra, painted over the course of sixty years. 1 Recalling various styles of art, including “art brut,” post-impressionism, and Japanese “emakimono” (MY8/S9), the painting chronicles Salvatierra’s life in Barrancales, a fictional village located on the Argentine side of the River Uruguay. The narrator, Salvatierra’s son Miguel, returns with his brother Luis to Barrancales two years after their father has passed away to decide what to do with the painting, now stored as more than sixty individual rolls of canvas hanging from the roof beams of the shed where he painted every day. The brothers quickly realize “It would have been impossible to exhibit the entire canvas in one place” (MY21/S28) because the “canvas had no borders, even at the end of each roll: they all fit exactly with the start of the next one.” “If he could have,” Miguel continues, “Salvatierra would have kept them all together in one vast scroll, although it would have been impossible to take care of it or transport it” (MY24/S30). But if the size of what Salvatierra had intended to be grasped as “one vast scroll” complicates any decision about exhibiting the painting, the absence of any “borders” also raises larger questions about the nature of the work itself and its relationship to the beholder. Where could one stand to look at the painting in its entirety? How could one begin to understand this scroll if one could never see the work in its totality? Can these scrolls really be understood as a painting if they can never be observed together? When do paint and canvas become a painting? 12 EUGENIO DI STEFANO AND EMILIO SAURI - MAKING IT VISIBLE: LATIN AMERICANIST CRITICISM, LITERATURE, AND THE QUESTION OF EXPLOITATION TODAY These questions have everything to do with painting as a specific medium, though we will see that, in raising such questions, The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (from here on, Salvatierra) gestures to a concern that has been crucial to the development of Latin Americanist literary criticism and theory for some time now: the concern with the text’s relationship to the world and to its reader. This concern becomes all the more apparent in Mairal’s novel when Salvatierra’s son tells us that, “Possibly because of this sense of the limitless flow of nature that the canvas had, I find it hard to call it a painting, because that suggests a frame, a border that surrounds certain things, and that’s precisely what Salvatierra wanted to avoid” (MY54/S67-8). Importantly, the expansiveness of a canvas that appears “to flow on forever” (MY18/S21) gives rise to an impression of boundlessness that not only compels Mairal’s narrator to wonder whether the four kilometers of canvas are, in fact, a painting, but also precipitates the sensation that “you might plunge headfirst into the canvas” (MY76/S99). 2 Mairal’s novel thus presents the conception of an artwork for which representing reality is less appealing than consuming or even becoming it, thereby calling to mind something like Borges’ cartographers who create a “Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it”; a map, in other words, for which the difference between the Empire and a representation of it ceases to matter altogether. 3 This conception of art, however, is not just limited to fiction; and indeed, it also underlies a dominant strain of Latin Americanist thought that comprises the focus of this essay, and for which this unframing has been conceived as a point of departure for a host of theoretical positions not just on art, nor on literature alone, but on politics as well. These positions include the testimonio criticism, affect theory, postautonomy, and posthegemony. Despite apparent differences between these, we argue that what has unified Latin Americanist criticism and theory at least since the 1980s, is this question of the frame, or more precisely, the effort to imagine how the text dissolves it. We can begin to see what this looks like, for example, in Néstor García Canclini’s claim that art “became ‘unframed’ because…the attempts to organize it in terms of aesthetic prescriptions or a theory about the autonomy of the fields (Bourdieu) or of worlds (Becker) hardly work.” 4 The frame is posed here as a matter of categories or criteria that have long defined literature and literary criticism, but primarily with an eye to marking their obsolescence.