Subalternity and representation: arguments in cultural theory

John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. xii+202 pages. John Beverley, one of the founding members of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, is also an undisputed authority on Latin American testimonio and is well known for his unflagging involvement in Central American solidarity politics. His most recent collection of essays, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory, further solidifies his already substantial contributions to the critical projection of subalternity into the field of Latin American studies. Further -more, this book also participates in the trend of self-reflexive questioning shared in recent years by those scholars of Latin American literatures and searching for new, self-critical ways of envisioning the project of the left in the conditions of globalization and postmodernity (3). Within this self-reflective vein that investigates the pitfalls of reading Latin American discourses from the perspective of the North American academy-and represented by books such as Roman de la Campa's Latin Americanism and Neil Larsen's Reading North by South: On Latin American Culture and Politics-Beverley's study stands out as a very personal-- yet not narcissistic-testimony, which often turns into a painfully frank engagement with the political and ethical dilemmas of his own critical agenda. Beverley explains, for example, that the origins of Subalternity and Representation are in defeat and failure, both collective and individual: the defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections in Nicaragua and the scholarly and commercial failure of a book, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, which Beverley coauthored with Marc Zimmerman in the late 1980s (3). Beverley's savvy style of arguing, which blends erudition with personal anecdotes and confessions, storytelling with arcane theoretical terminology, sweeping conclusions with witty textual insights, should engage a variety of readers in a meditation on such complex issues of Latin Americanist thought as Angel Rama's conceptualizations of lettered city and narrative transculturation (chapter ii, Transculturation and Subaltern-Lity: The `Lettered City' and the Tupac Amaru Rebellion), Nestor Garcia Canclini's notion of hybrid cultures (chapter v, Civil Society, Hybridity, and the 'Political' Aspect of Cultural Studies. On Canclini) and Antonio Cornejo Polar's heterogeneity. Beverley's impressive grasp of these questions, combined with his uncanny ability to interweave them with theories generated outside of Latin America (Homi Bhabha, Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Gayatri Spivak, among others), gives the volume its overall coherence. …