Historias en curso: reconfiguraciones de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos

Abstract

This essay examines the relationships between the politics of criticism, the sociohistorical conditions and the processes of institutionalization of Latin American cultural studies both in Latin America and in the US. In the US, Latin American cultural studies are materialized, with few exceptions, within the academic field. In Latin America, on the other hand, due to the history of academic intervention within the public sphere and civil society, Latin American cultural studies are generated from individual or collective, academic or para-academic, intellectual and artistic practices, which present diverse forms of institutionalization. If Latin American cultural studies, which emerged simultaneously in Latin America and the US in the 1980s, produced a great deal of commotion among the traditional disciplines of the Humanities and the Social Sciences, its later programmatic institutionalization is relatively insubstantial. Nevertheless, the impact of globalization, which started in the 1970s, brought into question the functions both fields had, exposing the limits of their respective interpretative theories and revealing the need for inter- and transdisciplinary practices. Even when these complex and polemic connections, on the one hand, question the existence of Latin American cultural studies as a transdisciplinary field, on the other hand, they keep it alive, always reconfiguring it according to the local contexts of intervention.