Afterword: Postmodernism, Politics and Culture in Latin America

Abstract

A decade after María Conceçao Tavares wrote these words, we can look back on the 1990s with a similar feeling that things are moving faster than social and political scientists can grasp. There is a revival of rural insurgency which recalls the 1960s (Petras 1997). And, as in the 1960s, we see a coming together of cultural and political spheres to the point where (as the Introduction to this volume underlines) their analytical separation seems, at times, problematic. Yet the cultural and political paradigms influential in the 1960s — and above all social realism and revolutionary marxism — seem less convincing today. This is linked to the changes in culture and politics, and in the modernist models used in their analysis, that are explored in this volume. It is suggested in the Introduction that the essays in Part I focus chiefly on the cultural/symbolic impact of these changes, while those in Part II illustrate some of their implications for politics, sociology, anthropology, eco nomics and their analysis. Behind this resolutely provisional distinc tion is the realization that even broad analytic distinctions of this type are increasingly unsustainable as ‘practical’ politics, for example, becomes progressively more symbolically mediated and more reflexive.

Throughout the 1980s we witnessed demonstrations of discontent, gigantic elections, rage, joy and creativity of the young urban masses. ‘A land at a critical junction’, Glauber Rocha would say. ‘Deep rivers’ would be Arguedas’ description. The poets are, as always, in the vanguard.

(Tavares 1990: 219)