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It has now been 30 years since Ángel Rama first published his classic Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. In the interim, the Uruguayan critic’s extension of Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturation into the literary sphere has become seminal in Latin American cultural studies and cultural history. Even college freshman encountering Latin American history for the first time will receive an introduction to the concept in every new edition of John Chasteen’s Born in Blood and Fire (2001), where it serves as a central metaphor. Despite the reach of this analysis, Rama’s original collection of essays had not been translated into English. On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, Duke University Press corrected this oversight by including David Frye’s eminently readable translation of the collection in its Latin America Otherwise series.Frye’s introduction provides a brief biographical overview of Rama’s career. For those unfamiliar with Rama, Frye traces his birth in Montevideo and his development into the foremost champion of hemispheric Latin American literature. In 1973, around the same time he began exploring the idea of transculturation, Rama entered into exile and spent the next decade abroad before his tragic death in a plane crash in 1983. Historians perhaps best know Rama for his posthumous book The Lettered City (1984), which considers the staged expansion of the elite public sphere in urban Latin American history. As does that work, Writing across Cultures tackles the history of letters, in this case considering the development of transcultural narrative in twentieth-century Latin American fiction.Rama’s writing on transculturation coincided with his period of exile; however, an equally important impetus appears to have been his systematic exploration of Andean indigenista writing and, in particular, the writings of Peruvian novelist and critic José María Arguedas, which dominate the last two parts of the book. The opening essays of part 1, on the other hand, take a hemispheric approach to articulating a general theory of twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture. Though the specter of colonial violence and nineteenth-century nation building pervades his analysis, Rama focuses on the clash between tradition and modernity. He notes that regionalist literature originated in a conservative repudiation of the shifting conditions of modernity. However, given the integral resonance of regional distinctions in Latin American sociopolitical contexts, over the course of the twentieth century authors from Arguedas to Juan Rulfo created new literary forms in which local linguistic and stylistic elements altered both cosmopolitan and traditional local genres.The latter two sections of the book explore these arguments further in the context of Andean indigenismo. Rama provides a genealogy of this movement that reaches back to the costumbrista realism of the nineteenth century, travels through the socially conscious political literature of authors like José Carlos Mariátegui, and ends with Arguedas’s transculturation of the indigenismo genre. His primary arguments attend to the irony that a pro-indigenous literature had not only mestizo origins but also mestizo narrative sensibilities, which Rama blames for the genre’s initial failure to escape the formalism of nineteenth-century costumbrismo or Soviet-inspired socialist realism. Arguedas’s personal investment in Quechua language and indigenous culture, on the other hand, facilitated indigenismo’s transformation into a new form with increasing social relevance. Rama extends this argument in his close reading of Arguedas’s Deep Rivers (1958) in part 3, in which he offers an analysis of the novel’s operatic structure (complete with choral arrangements, arias, and melodic resonances taken from Quechua and conceptually translated into Spanish). Finally, he considers the intercalation of Andean and European myth within the novel as a signifier of its transculturation.Reading this work 30 years out, one is struck not only by its extraordinary creativity and clarity but also by the gradual transformation of Rama’s approach to categories like mestizo or indigenous. While almost essentialist in the early essays of part 1, these terms slowly become more nuanced and vibrant as Rama explores indigenismo and, especially, Arguedas’s novels. Unfortunately, the historical contextualization that Rama offers does not undergo the same transformation, largely due to the historiographical limitations of the moment when the essays were written. It would have been intriguing for the editor to note or even examine how some of the historical assumptions Rama makes, such as the unitary nature of colonialism in the Spanish empire, have been challenged in the past generation. Such a dialogical encounter with the text would make for an even more fascinating reading; however, perhaps it is best left to the vibrant discussions in graduate seminars on historiography or cultural studies, for which this book is an obvious candidate for inclusion.
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