Marxist Literary Criticism

That the study of Latino/a literature should include materialist, historical, sociological, and political approaches is by no means a controversial claim in current academic discourse. Indeed, much critical production interrogating Latino/a literature falls into one or more of these categories. And even if we look at the relationship between literary critical production focusing on Latino/a literature and Marxism proper, it quickly becomes clear that Marxism occupies a central role in the field, both directly as well as indirectly as a (methodo)logical foundation for a number of critical approaches such as colonial and postcolonial studies, cultural studies approaches, and many more. Marxism enters the critical dialogue in a variety of forms. Critics frequently mobilize central concepts from the work of Karl Marx to analyze the ways in which Latino/a culture mediates matters of politics, subjectivity, and socioeconomic problems. The concept of mediation is one such concept lifted from the Marxian tradition that gives critics a sense of what we might call causality. That is, the concept of mediation provides us with a basis for how we might think the relationship between culture and material life in the first place, and the notion of mediation stresses that culture is not merely reflective of its material and historical context but that culture must be understood as occupying a much more functional, active, and ultimately important role in facilitating this reality in the first place. One central assumption of Marxist criticism, then, is to take seriously the notion that culture and material reality stand in a dialectical relationship, that is, that material reality shapes culture as much as it is in turn shaped by it. Marxist criticisms of Latino/a literature depart from this notion, often via the Marxist-based writings of the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School, which have further developed this materialist approach to the study of culture, and which have centrally shaped contemporary cultural studies and approaches to Latino/a culture. In such a context, questions of how a certain kind of material structure, how international migration and globalization, existence in an industrial and postindustrial world, and the material life of ethnic and racial difference shapes (and is shaped by) thought, culture, and subjectivity have taken a central place in the study of Latino/a culture, often without directly citing their allegiance to the Marxian tradition or Marxist logic. It may, therefore, seem surprising and potentially like an exercise in knocking on

open doors that this essay will attempt to stage a defense of sorts of Marxist literary

criticism of Latino/a literature. Yet, the necessity of such a defense does not simply focus on Marxism but instead on a twofold defense, which, in particular in the current historical moment, takes on a significant sense of urgency: the defense of the literary in Latino/a literary criticism and the connected defense of the literary in Marxist literary criticism. There is, in other words, no shortage of Marxist, postMarxist and Marxist-inflected criticism of Latino/a literature – but there exists a notable dearth of Marxist literary criticism of Latino/a literature. Indeed, one could even, not solely polemically, argue that we are confronted with a dearth of literary critical approaches to Latino/a literature in general, and that a turn toward Marxist literary criticism is able to address this problem and highlight the important work that is to be done in future Latino/a literary criticism as a whole. There are two main traditions of Marxist criticism that influence Latino/a studies, but only one of these traditions is at this point developed in detail. As suggested above, we frequently encounter a range of critical approaches that are interested in the intersection of culture and material reality. Yet, one of the particular strengths of Marxism in regards to its contribution to the study of culture is that it has generated a long line of criticism that is centrally interested in the medial specificity of its object of study. In particular theorists such as Theodor W. Adorno or Georg Lukàcs are fundamentally invested in asking not just how culture and materialism interrelate in general, but also more specifically how a different medium – literature, music, film – does so in its own, particular terms, which ultimately does not only push us to understand the relation between a cultural medium and material reality but also pushes us to ask how we might understand the specific ontology of an artistic medium as a consequence of this relation. A proper Marxist literary criticism of Latino/a literature would thus not only ask

what the relationship between a work of literature and material reality might be (a relation that is, in fact, under-examined in much existing criticism that often reduces the status of the literary work to that of mere reflection), but it is also simultaneously committed to asking the more fundamental questions: what is literature, how does literature relate to material reality differently from other cultural media such as, say, music, and how can we get an insight into what literature and its particular forms are by asking questions about what they do? And while there is much Marxist criticism of Latino/a literature that is interested in its material and sociopolitical life, there exist to date, and this will form the basis of the argument of this entry, virtually no such literary Marxist criticism of Latino/a literature – and in particular in a tradition such as Latino/a culture, the study of medial ontology must take a central role in order to foreground the heterogeneity of the tradition in general and of the heterogeneity of medial influences that shape individual artifacts such as the Latino/a novel in particular. In what follows, I will illustrate the stakes of insisting upon the importance of foregrounding the literary in the study of Latino/a literature that is often overwritten by materialist approaches that end up conflating the difference between cultural media, since they are based on very general notions of how culture relates to material reality. Indeed, I will argue that the turn toward the tradition of Marxist literary criticism can help add specificity to the study of Latino/a literature that is in fact in part erased by the influence of the Marxist criticism itself. I will outline the (trans)disciplinary urgency and the terms of a turn toward

a Marxist literary criticism of Latino/a literature that at each point begins, not with the question of how Marxism has informed critical discourse focusing on the literary field in question, but instead how Marxist literary criticism and Latino/a literature might be brought to bear on each other, hence beginning with a dialectical understanding of the relation between object and method. In particular since the 1980s and 1990s, we have seen an increase in attempts to

adequately represent the ever-growing, substantial body of Latino/a literature in academia. To be sure, this development is still in its early stages, and works such as this Companion are important contributions to what has to be understood as a stillemerging, ongoing process. Yet, as Latino/a literature and the associated forms of critical practice become increasingly important and influential parts of the academic humanities, the underlying scholarly activity must also find ways to insist upon itself through itself. That is, in order to avoid all-too-familiar processes of absorption and repressive integration that threaten to equalize the important, productive differences between methods and literary traditions, literary criticism of Latino/a literature must conceive of its ontology and function as arising to the same degree out of its Latino/a and its literary elements. In fact, seemingly paradoxically, a lack of emphasis on the literariness of the object of study ultimately contributes to the danger of subsuming all that is particular about Latino/a literature into the general. But what exactly does this mean, and what are the current conditions that make such a suggestion necessary? Scanning the body of work that constitutes Latino/a literary criticism reveals

quickly that the field is centrally determined by sociological, material, historical, and political approaches. Frequent topics of critical work include the construction of latinidad in particular or of ethnicity and (national, gendered, class, ethnic) identity in general; the politics of affect, experience, and (cultural) memory; examinations of Latino/a literature as a minor literature; problems related to migration, nation, (interstitial) space, and place; the crossing of a range of borders and boundaries; colonial and postcolonial history; issues of subalterity, marginality, and community; globalization and neoliberalism; as well as the history, sociological influence, and politics of the medial history surrounding Latino/a literature (including, for example, music, oral culture, and performing arts). Yet, while there is an abundance of such critical approaches, there is a distinct lack of criticism that confronts literature on its own terms. If we want to maintain the necessary commitment to historical, material, and sociological approaches to Latino/a literature, we must do so in a manner that is aware of the risk such an approach has traditionally always brought with it: emptying the literary object of its immanent ontology through the very process of attempting to describe it. A significant portion of Marxist-influenced studies of Latino/a literature produces not Marxist readings but instead a variety of instances of reading for Marxism. Common examples of this practice are found in erasing the difference between, say, a novel and a film or a painting by placing the artifacts sideby-side and describing how they thematize issues of economic inequality, labor, or globalization, in a manner that reduces the works to their mere content, since the analysis lacks direct interest in how each artifact may do so in its own, (historically) specific terms. And it is this latter interest that, as Adorno and Lukàcs argue, yields the truly substantive answers.