Cultural Agency in the Americas

"Cultural agency" refers to a range of creative activities that contribute to society, including pedagogy, research, activism, and the arts. Focusing on the connections between creativity and social change in the Americas, this collection encourages scholars to become cultural agents by reflecting on exemplary cases and thereby making them available as inspirations for more constructive theory and more innovative practice. Creativity supports democracy because artistic, administrative, and interpretive experiments need margins of freedom that defy monolithic or authoritarian regimes. The ingenious ways in which people pry open dead-ends of even apparently intractable structures suggest that cultural studies as we know it has too often gotten stuck in critique. Intellectual responsibility can get beyond denunciation by acknowledging and nurturing the resourcefulness of common and uncommon agents. Based in North and South America, scholars from fields including anthropology, performance studies, history, literature, and communications studies explore specific variations of cultural agency across Latin America. Contributors reflect, for example, on the paradoxical programming and reception of a state-controlled Cuban radio station that connects listeners at home and abroad; on the intricacies of indigenous protests in Brazil; and the formulation of cultural policies in cosmopolitan Mexico City. One contributor notes that trauma theory targets individual victims when it should address collective memory as it is worked through in performance and ritual; another examines how Mapuche leaders in Argentina perceived the pitfalls of ethnic essentialism and developed new ways to intervene in local government. Whether suggesting modes of cultural agency, tracking exemplary instances of it, or cautioning against potential missteps, the essays in this book encourage attentiveness to, and the multiplication of, the many extraordinary instantiations of cultural resourcefulness and creativity throughout Latin America and beyond. Contributors. Arturo Arias, Claudia Briones, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Denise Corte, Juan Carlos Godenzzi, Charles R. Hale, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Claudio Lomnitz, Jesus Martin Barbero, J. Lorand Matory, Rosamel Millaman, Diane M. Nelson, Mary Louise Pratt, Alcida Rita Ramos, Doris Sommer, Diana Taylor, Santiago Villaveces

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Wiggle Room / Doris Sommer 1 1. Media 29 Intervening from and through Research Practice: Meditations on the Cuzco Workshop / Jesus Martin Barbero 31 Between Technology and Culture: Communication and Modernity in Latin America / Jesus Martin Barbero 37 DNA of Performance / Diana Taylor 52 A City that Improvises Its Globalization / Nestor Garcia Canclini 82 2. Maneuvers 91 The Cultural Agency of Wounded Bodies Politic: Ethnicity and Gender as Prosthetic Support in Postwar Guatemala / Diane M. Nelson 93 Tradition, Transnationalism, and Gender in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble / J. Lorand Matory 121 The Discourses of Diversity: Language, Ethnicity, and Interculturality in Latin America / Juan Carlos Godenzzi 146 Conspiracy on the Sidelines: How the Maya Won the War / Arturo Arias 167 Radio Taino and the Cuban Quest for Identi...que? / Ariana Hernandez-Reguant 178 Olodum’s Transcultural Spaces: Community and Difference in Afro-Brazilian Contemporary Performance / Denise Corte 203 Political Construction and Cultural Instrumentalities of Indigenism in Brazil, with Echoes from Latin America / Alcida Rita Ramos 229 Questioning State Geographies of Inclusion in Argentina: The Cultural Politics of Organizations with Mapuche Leadership and Philosophy / Claudia Briones 248 3. Cautions 279 Cultural Agency and Political Struggle in the Era of the Indio Permitido / Charles R. Hale and Rosamel Millaman 281 The Crossroads of Faith: Heroism and Melancholia in the Colombian “Violentologists” (1980–2000) / Santiago Villaveces-Izquierdo 305 Afterword: A Fax, Two Moles, a Consul, and a Judge / Mary Louise Pratt 326 Afterword: Spread It Around! / Claudio Lomnitz 334 References 341 Contributors 371 Index 375

About the Author :
Doris Sommer is Ira Jewell Williams Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish at Harvard University. Her books include Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education, also published by Duke University Press.

Review :
"In titling itself as it does, Cultural Agency makes a foundational gesture. The thing to be founded is a scholarly praxis, a blueprint for academic work committed to advancing energetic, creative, non-harmonious but non-violent democratic relations."--Mary Louis Pratt, from her afterword