National Culture, Globalization and the Case of Post-War El Salvador

Lopez, Silvia L.

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 41, Number 1, 2004,

pp. 80-100 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/cls.2004.0006

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cls/summary/v041/41.1lopez.html

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 NATIONAL CULTURE, GLOBALIZATION AND
THE CASE OF POST-WAR EL SALVADOR

Silvia L. López

“Yo llegué a la revolución por la vía de la poesía. Tú podrás

llegar (si lo deseas, si sientes que lo necesitas) a la poesía por la
vía de la revolución).”1
—Roque Dalton

In 1998, Roque Dalton, Latin America’s most famous leftist guerrilla poet,
was voted El Salvador’s national poet by the right wing national assembly
of that country. The news made the front cover of the New York Times and
puzzled the world. This happened at a time when the way in which we
talked about Latin America had found itself in crisis since the collapse of
Soviet socialism, the proclamation of the end of the cold war, and almost
ten years after the end of traditional guerrilla warfare in Central America.
The discursive spaces opened by the Cuban revolution that permitted
the flourishing of Latin American social thought and revolutionary praxis2
have been increasingly threatened as the final victory of the market forces
and of western liberal democracies sweep the globe. As Edgardo Lander
has argued, “we have moved from a world of two superpowers whose stra-
tegic equilibrium gave some maneuvering options to countries not directly
submitted to their spheres of influence to a world with one hegemonic
center of political and military power. The geopolitical and military restric-
tions of economic powers like Germany and Japan only consolidate the
political-military hegemony of the United States.”3 Beyond the tensions
that emerged from the economic restructuring of the world, the industrial-
ized countries have managed to maintain their internal political coherence.
Through a number of mechanisms that permit not only political agree-
ments (Group of Seven) and military agreements (NATO) but primarily
economic control of international economic and financial institutions (IMF,

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES , Vol. 41, No. 1, 2004.

Copyright © 2004 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

80
 NATIONAL AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION 81

World Bank, IDB, GATT, etc.), the industrialized countries of Europe and
Japan begin to consolidate their interests according to the new world order.
For the rest of the world, the margins of freedom have been reduced
drastically. The international criteria of economic restructuring are prescribed
to all countries, and Latin American countries have at this conjuncture no
other option but to comply with the new economic order.4 The hegemony
of the United States in the ideological-cultural terrain is even more pal-
pable as now the consumption of alternative products to U.S. mass culture
becomes practically impossible. Neoliberalism is accompanied by its ideo-
logical pronouncements of the end of ideology and of history. In the midst
of all these transformations, Latin America experiences the worst economic
crisis of the last fifty years and struggles to compete in the global economy
by offering to the transnational corporations what it can: labor power and
natural resources for exploitation. The dilemma faced by Latin American
countries today is how to participate in this world economy while at the
same time protect the rights and interests of its citizens, at least of those
who will remain active within the current economic structure5. It is within
this context that the question of modern national culture takes on a par-
ticular significance. In spite of the claims of globalization, the problems of
culture continue to be bound by situations, institutions and actors that find
as their setting the nation. The nation is part of a collective imaginary,
supranational in character, that we name “Latin America.” The study of the
phenomenon of literature under the described conditions illuminates the
reality of the predominance of a literate and modern project of national
construction, that is a project that finds its grounding along national lines
and according to modern models of culture, even today in the early twenty-
first century and regardless of the ideological signs of the governments in
power. In this article, I present the case of post-war El Salvador to illustrate
this phenomenon.
Before treating more in detail the case of El Salvador, I will frame in
more general terms the problem of the discussion of national culture in a
peripheral setting in order to better understand why in a globalized world,
the national context continues to be of such importance.

I. Differential Modernities: National Culture in the Peripheral Context

The institutionalization of the study of “Third World Literatures” in the

United States says more about the status of the institution of literature in
82 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

this part of the globe than about the cultural processes of those countries
considered under the rubric “Third World.” Far from a rejoicing in the
diversity of our new curricula where every color and gender has been as-
signed a cubicle, permitting everyone in the academic community not only
to claim a shared sense of diversity, but also to sanction appropriate ways of
thinking otherness and of representing it, our task should be to move be-
yond the ghettoization of cultural studies. Contrary to popular belief, the
ideology of diversity, as framed today in our institutions of higher educa-
tion, reinforces the prevalent European notions of culture and modernity
precisely through a gesture of inclusion.6 The rapid and intensified process
of sanctioning and canonizing cultural products from these “other” cultures
is preempting the possibility of posing important questions about the “rest
of the world” in a more radical way, by this I mean questions that would
illuminate the coeval economic, cultural and political processes of moder-
nity that would throw some light into the relationality of these processes,
rather than remaining at the level of the construction of their otherness.
I see the alternative to the current diversification process as being lo-
cated in the study of national cultures under conditions of modernity. The
basic premise of this undertaking is the assumption of the coevalness of
cultural processes under global capitalism. Modern cultures are neither “be-
lated” nor “underdeveloped”; neither are they to be assumed as a priori
belligerent, revolutionary, or soothingly utopian loci. Their own specificity
can be found in the historical experience of modern capitalism and in their
specific colonial histories.
What I would call the differential study of culture in modernity does
not follow Fredric Jameson’s proposition of the study of “third-world lit-
erature in the era of multinational capitalism.”7 While I share with Jameson
the concern for a global placing of cultural processes given the globaliza-
tion of multinational capitalism, I disagree with the premises underlying
his “first world” vs. “third world” distinction and what results from those
distinctions. Among the most serious objections that one can pose to
Jameson are the generalizations regarding the problem of nationalism and
the “necessarily allegorical character” that he attributes to these literatures.
Aijaz Ahmad, in his well-known reply to Jameson’s “Third-World Litera-
ture in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” points to these and other
important problems in Jameson’s proposal.8 One of his criticisms is that the
term third world has no theoretical status whatsoever because its definition
is so broad that the most fundamental issues that delimit the problem of
literature—such as those of social and linguistic formations, political and
ideological struggles within the field of literary production, periodization,
 NATIONAL AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION 83

and cultural institution—cannot be posed at that level of generality. Not

only is this category an epistemological impossibility, but also the attempt
at formulating it is empirically ungrounded. As Ahmad points out, how is
one to classify countries like India or Brazil given their level of capitalist
economic activity? What are the empirical criteria for classification? Obvi-
ously, on the basis of conditions of production, the world is not as easily
classified anymore as it was in the nineteenth century.
In light of the merely empirical problems for such classification,
Jameson’s recourse to the experience of colonialism and imperialism as the
basis for setting up this division is just as problematic. His binary world is
entangled in an essentialist politics, whereby the diverse experience of colo-
nialism necessarily leads to a nationalist response as the only alternative to
the postmodern ideological formation of first world nations. The essential
binary that runs through Jameson’s proposition not only trivializes the prob-
lem of nationalism in peripheral contexts, but also explains nothing about
the different experiences of colonialism and imperialism in different parts
of the world. Jameson’s general assumptions about nationalism lead him to
believe in allegory as a main form of cultural expression in the “third world.”
As Ahmad pointedly notes, this can only be sustained if no inquiry is made
into the way writers enter into commerce with the institutions of culture in
a peripheral context. The actual experience of “third world” intellectuals in
highly contradictory societies may actually inhibit any kind of capacity for
allegorization and exhibit a more profound experience of alienation and
desolation than any of their postmodern counterparts in the “first world.”9
The presence of certain forms of writing in different cultural contexts
does not depend on some essential quality of the experience of the writers
but rather these forms vary in direct relation to the institutionalized tradi-
tions and conventions of their contexts. Writers choose forms consciously
depending on the social and historical circumstances that define the insti-
tutional space from which these writers produce. It is clear that any attempt
to theorize globally about literary production in terms of the “third world”
is doomed to failure. However, Jameson’s claim about the preoccupation
with nationalism in the third world deserves important consideration be-
cause the history of its theorization provides a good example of how the
logic of “difference” has been inscribed in world historical terms. The dis-
cussions of nationalism prove precisely how the first/third world classifica-
tion has justified itself over time. In other words, the very conditions of
possibility of such a dichotomy can be found in the historical treatment of
the problem of nation formation and nationalism available to us since the
Enlightenment.10
84 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

Against Jameson’s hypostatizing of “Third World Literatures,” and in

spite of the strategic claims that such a rubric may have on the politics of
the American academy, the task of articulating a project of the study of
national cultures under modernity remains crucial to Latin American in-
tellectuals. This kind of project would permit a negation of the logic of
alterity that makes the cultural products of “lesser developed regions of the
world” necessarily this or that (i.e., allegorical readings of the nation, anti-
canonical, revolutionary, anti-representational, emergent, etc.), and would
confront the provincial understanding of modernity supporting these
schemas of classification.
The coevalness of modernity as experienced by the globalization of
monopoly capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century, poses the chal-
lenge of a differential theory of modernity that can account for the status of
cultural production under conditions of modernity in the periphery of the
industrialized world. It is only through these comparative and differential
understandings that European cultural modernity can be shown to be the
exception rather than the rule in the global context. As far as the political
repercussions of such a stance, which is what seems to concern Jameson so
much, they would prove to be far more radical than the ghettoization of
diversity in the American university where, through the visible marking of
gender and race, a “different” form of knowledge is institutionalized. This
“difference” and its current recognition through classifications as “Third
World Literature” (as just one example) reinscribe the racism of alterity
politics. It is perhaps the fear of places and peoples all too contemporary
and coeval, the disavowal of global capital relations, and the denial of the
minority status of “first world” culture that prevents a different kind of
politics in the institutionalization of new ways of understanding modern
cultural developments on a global scale.
A presentation of the status of national culture in a country like post-
war El Salvador may shed some light on the specificity of the process of
construction of national culture today. The centrality of literature in this
process may not come as a surprise given the discussion presented above.

II. Differential Modernity and the Question of Literature in El Salvador

The end of a ten-year civil war in El Salvador was reached in 1992 through
a negotiated settlement between the national army of that state and the
guerrilla forces. The slow and complex steps towards the reform and purg-
 NATIONAL AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION 85

ing of the army on the one hand, and the disarming of the guerrilla forces
on the other, were fairly complex and highly monitored by the United Na-
tions. Social and institutional spaces had to be created for all these indi-
viduals who had been killing each other and now were supposed to live in
harmony in a new civil society. The prospects for the success of such an
agreement were slim, but the optimism and enthusiasm the people exhib-
ited was quite extraordinary. In his essay, “Los Intelectuales y la Transición”
(“Intellectuals and the Transition Period”), Horacio Castellanos Moya,
former head of propaganda for the largest guerrilla group, explains:

In a country that recently leaves civil war behind—with its conse-

quences of physical and moral destruction—in a country that faces a
gigantic task of reconstruction in all realms, the work of the intellec-
tual would be incomplete if it were limited to the critique of power.
The need for a national effort to “refound” the nation poses unusual
challenges. A willing spirit is indispensable to give impulse to the
reconstruction tasks that pertain not only to the intellectuals, but
makes demands of all political, economic, social and cultural forces.
Nonetheless, “rethinking” the country, participating in its redesign
is a challenge and a concrete responsibility of all intellectuals; to
leave this task to the politicians would entail too many risks.11

This citation gives a sense of the political tone of the left during the transi-
tion, and gives an indication of how intellectuals viewed their role in the
reconstruction of the nation. On the streets of San Salvador, the sentiment
was echoed in particular cultural practices, such as reading national au-
thors.
Books, books, books—that is a striking feature of postwar culture in El
Salvador. The explosion of fiction is palpable on university campuses, in
the newspapers, in the proliferation of presses both small and artisanal, and
in the weekly political and literary magazines. When I visited El Diario
Latino, the only workers’ owned newspaper, the cultural supplement was
coming hot off the press, workers passed by the newspaper office to get
their copy to make sure they didn’t miss it. Many came with their stained
hands, work tools and their colón12 (about twelve cents), hoping to see what
the latest issue had to offer. The cultural supplement reprinted stories and
articles by old Salvadoran writers not available during the war, as well as
book reviews, historical pieces on the city’s history, a children’s section and
a space for women writers. Those who sold the paper on the street returned
86 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

often to get more copies, until within a few hours the modest newspaper
had been sold out for the weekend. During my visit, I saw the old machin-
ery saved from the many bomb attacks and fires of the war years and the
struggle to meet payroll every month. When I asked how I could be of help,
they said: send articles about literature. People want to read about that. The
cultural supplement keeps us afloat.
Historically, Latin American literature has been a space where politics
and memory meet and allow societies to process their experience. It has
been a space where reflection, debate and cultural critique happen and where
the individual encounters him/herself with history. Literature is not the
realm of facts, of data, of counting bodies, of political organizing, but it is
all about that experience. In the postwar era (1992–present), where the
different realms of civil society have begun to be separated and to function,
the realm of culture becomes a place of processing historical experience
subjectively and collectively.
Literature speaks of its time. Postwar literature, in all its diversity, shares
some common narrative features. Contradiction, both political and per-
sonal, structures most of the plots. While many of the plots rework histori-
cal events or figures, the storytelling is imbricated in a complex presentation
of the everyday and the personal. Rather than didactic or testimonial state-
ments, we hear intensely personal voices that weigh historical detail along
with observations on gender relations, family politics, sexuality and social
relations.13 This speaks to the building of a civil society that strives to en-
gage its own history without taboos and prescriptions. Each writer has a
story to tell, and people want to read it, criticize it, and respond to it with
their own stories. Personal dissent and space for its reception is what takes
place in San Salvador’s modest cafes, bookstores and buses. It is about re-
spect for someone’s opinion. Hector Silva’s election as San Salvador’s mayor
reflects not only what political analysts may tell us about the FMLN’s (Frente
Farabundo Martí para la Liberación) support, but also how the internal
dynamics of a society are changing in peacetime, and it is this that cultural
critics help us understand. This may sound not very radical. People are
picking up a book or a paper, not a gun. But the true radical nature of that
simple event is that a population once afraid and terrorized now feels con-
fident to say, write, and read what it thinks about its own history. This in
turn allows for the political imagination and its organization to conquer
new rights and spaces.
This phenomenon is not new in Latin American history. After the
Sandinista triumph, and within the first five years of the revolution, Edito-
 NATIONAL AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION 87

rial Nueva Nicaragua published two hundred titles. In El Salvador, in one

year alone (1996), twelve new novels were published; one of them, Walter
Raudales’s Amor de Jade, became a bestseller, with two editions sold out
within a year of its publication.14 Unfortunately, most texts are inaccessible
in English, which explains to some extent a misperception among Ameri-
can readers about Latin American literature. The heavy marketing of the
“Boom” writers that satisfied an appetite for the exotic and the magical on
the part of both European and American readers has dominated these mar-
kets for a long time. Many of the new Salvadoran texts are neither realist
nor magical; they simply demand of the reader the recognition of an equal
with concerns maybe not so far from the reader’s own, while at the same
time maintaining a cultural specificity that requires the reader to be famil-
iar with the historical events being processed. That is quite novel and chal-
lenging, although perhaps not as entertaining as what a non-Latin American
world of consumers of magical realism are used to.

III. The Literary Sphere and the Public Sphere in Postwar El Salvador

The fact that reflections on the state of culture of a country are made from
outside merits if not a justification, then at least an explanation appropriate
to the object to be discussed. As with all historical realities, that of litera-
ture in postwar El Salvador is not exempt from becoming an object of study,
and the intention of this intervention is to examine this object from a per-
spective that is committed to this reality, from and for itself.
Within the North American context, my intervention attempts to
achieve two things: 1) revive interest in the literary production in Central
America, and more concretely in El Salvador, now that our small countries
have disappeared from the newspapers and, as a result, from the North
American imagination, and 2) to present an approximation which does jus-
tice to the complexity of the Salvadoran cultural process, which has always
been so little studied and understood. In El Salvador today this can be of
interest from the moment in which it is situated as an intervention in the
dialogue about the future of the culture, its institutions and the nation, and
it is understood as a contribution from a Salvadoran citizen who, as one of
the one million who live outside the country, understands Salvadoran real-
ity mediated by the prism of displacement.
In the United States, once the revolutionary processes ended their cycles
of armed struggle, the attention once given to the cultural processes that
88 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

accompanied them diminished significantly. During the period of insur-

gency, the North American academy showed great interest in the phenom-
enon of testimonial literature. We all remember the paragraph that closes
the influential book by John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman (Literature
and Politics in the Central American Revolutions):

We return, therefore, in closing to the paradox that has been with us

from the beginning of this book; literature has been a means of na-
tional-popular mobilization in the Central American revolutionary
process, but that process also elaborates or points to forms of cul-
tural democratization that will necessarily question or displace the
role of literature as a hegemonic cultural institution.15

In 1990, it seemed to Beverley and Zimmerman, the role of the writer as it

had been conceptualized up until that point had ended. Slightly a decade
after these statements, nothing could be further from the reality of Central
America. In retrospect it is always easy to judge the analyses of the past and
identify their historical limitations. But that is not what I intend to do here
in trying to sketch the reconfiguration of the literary sphere in El Salvador
and in attempting to theorize the function of literature at that conjuncture.
Rather, I am interested in entertaining a dialogue in which we might dis-
cern why there has been a resurgence of a traditionally conceived literature
in postwar Salvadoran society that has escaped the predictions made so
many times about the end of literature as an institution. I propose here to
understand the function of literature as a vital institution in the constitu-
tion of the postwar public sphere, and attempt to situate the literary object
as a locus of negotiation of historical memory and the construction of iden-
tity in a society in which literacy continues to be valued as a right and a
means of access to the benefits of that society.
These reflections might seem counter-intuitive to us given that, in the
particular academic conjuncture of revalorization of marginal and oral cul-
tures and of democratic multiculturalisms, it is difficult to situate ourselves
within the historical predicaments in societies in which culture and litera-
ture are defined in much more ambiguous ways. In order to emphasize this
point, allow me to quote the most important writer of the postwar period,
an important representative of the culture and an ex-militant of the left,
Horacio Castellanos Moya:

The prestige of a nation, the demonstration of its maturity, is rooted

in large part in its capacity to integrate its history, to recover the
 NATIONAL AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION 89

different political, social and cultural phenomena with an integra-

tive and not an exclusive spirit. Another indicator of the vitality and
maturity of nations is their capacity for creation. A sign of cultural
development would be precisely the fact that a nation has recovered
and assumed its history to such an extent that it serves as a source of
fiction for its writers. The disdain for fiction is inseparable from
totalitarian and authoritarian mentalities. Fiction as an exercise of
freedom, as a practice of invention, frightens those who want to con-
trol it, those for whom the imagination must adjust itself to the ne-
cessities of the revolution. A left which seeks to renew itself, which
puts itself forward as a liberating project, should understand that
fiction is a rich source of knowledge and national influence [. . .]. A
revealing aspect of the stagnation signified by the war is the absence
of works of fiction. The terror, the desolation of the cultural pan-
orama, the inexistence of stimuli, the generational discontinuity, the
scattering, cut off the possibilities of literary expression, and espe-
cially in the elaboration and dissemination of works of fiction.16

Here we find a classically liberal position with regard to literature. It is not

surprising, then, that there is no conflict in the fact that culture promoting
institutions of the state have leftist ex-militants as important contributors
or even directly in charge of their publications (we have the examples of
Roberto Turcios, ex-member of the ERP [Ejército Revolucionario del
Pueblo] in charge of the magazine Tendencias, and Castellanos Moya and
Miguel Huezo Mixco on the editorial board of Cultura). This phenom-
enon has been discussed by Roberto Schwarz in the chapter “Culture and
Politics in Brazil, 1964–1969” in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Cul-
ture, in which he analyzes the cultural hegemony of the left during the
Brazilian military dictatorship and explains how, once the left becomes dis-
connected from the popular bases and isolated in its cultural project, its
intervention does not contradict the project of the nation carried out by the
rightist government.17 Is this happening in El Salvador? Has the end of the
war brought an end to the organic relationship that the left intelligentsia
had to the population during the war years? This is something up for dis-
cussion and that I am going to analyze below in relation to the concept of
civil society. It is not a question here of political judgments, but rather an
analysis of how the construction of a nation is negotiated and on what
intellectual frameworks one relies for this.
Allow me to give a general panoramic view of the literary situation
and of the publishing market in El Salvador at the end of the nineties in
90 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

order to give an idea of the terms to be discussed. Since the signing of the
Peace Accords in 1992, there has been resurgence in El Salvador of cultural
journals, new novels and reprints of Salvadoran classics, as well as of cul-
tural supplements in all periodicals. Examples that stand out here are the
journal Tendencias, which at one time had a printing of 5000 and which
continues to have a regional impact by not limiting itself to cultural issues,
but principally constitutes a forum of political debate at the level of Central
America and whose distribution network includes supermarkets, drugstores,
and bookstores. It is the first time in the history of the country that a jour-
nal of the left not only circulates, but is also marketed on a mass scale by
Salvadoran standards. I also must mention here the Suplemento Cultural
Tres Mil of the Diario Latino, the worker-owned periodical I mentioned
before, which is distributed on Saturdays with a printing of up to 1000
issues and which has developed a more critical line in relation to culture
and with clearer educational objectives than those of the other periodicals
in the country.
At the beginning of the transition, that is the first two years after the
signing of the peace accords in 1992, the presence of NGOs and foreign
financing to a certain extent allowed for an encouragement of literary con-
cerns. Nevertheless, at this point in the transition, the main actor in the
area of publications continues to be the state. An aggressive program of
publications has been launched by the Ministry of Culture Press. At the
end of the 90’s, it had published more than fifty titles in accessible collec-
tions aimed at the general public and it has dedicated itself to the republi-
cation of classics of Salvadoran literature. This is an effort at recovering the
golden age of the Press during the 1950s under the direction of Ricardo
Trigueros de León, which at the time came to be the most important press
in Central America. It is worth remembering here that the elite that directs
this project under the aegis of the right-wing ARENA government is a
left-wing elite. The director of the General Office of Publications, the prin-
cipal organ of publication of the state, is Miguel Huezo Mixco, who during
the war period was head of propaganda for the main guerrilla group, the
FPL (Frente Popular de Liberación). It is clear that the project of literary
reconstruction is a national project to which the most ideologically diverse
sectors have committed themselves, and that have found in the redefinition
of tradition, a project over which they must do battle. The right has had the
intelligence to see that it does not have the intellectual lights required to
carry out this project and has conceded this space to the moderate left,
 NATIONAL AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION 91

which is really doing a very liberal and almost traditional labor of recon-
struction.18
Other private sources of publication include Clásicos Roxil Press, which
is dedicated for the most part to schoolbook classics, but which also sup-
ports little-known young writers. It counts among its achievements the
publication of the first Salvadoran bestseller: Walter Raudales’s novel, Amor
de Jade, with a printing of 10,000 copies. Considering that many copies are
passed around and thus each one is read by more than one person, this is a
considerable number of copies for El Salvador. The María Escalón de Núñez
Foundation also has an ambitious publication program, which is financed
entirely by the private fortune of the Núñez-Arrué-Escalón family. The
FMLN has the Arcoiris Press, which has published testimonies of the war
and testimonial literature, as well as the second best-selling novel in recent
years, El Asco, by Horacio Castellanos Moya, with a printing of 6000 cop-
ies.19 The Central American University Press has been in existence for more
than twenty years, and did not cease publishing during the war. It contin-
ues with its wide-ranging program of publications, but somewhat more
erratically in recent years due to economic problems and a lack of editorial
vision. There are other small, almost artisanal, presses that publish local
authors in small quantities. It is not difficult to imagine that without the
presence of the state or private sponsorship, the publishing market would
not be able to sustain itself. This is logical in a country which has barely
begun the reconstruction of the literary sphere and which has not yet inte-
grated this project into the publishing market of Central America, let alone
that of Latin America. This has always been a problem for Central Ameri-
can publishers. Distribution problems have diminished but small editions
make commercial success impossible.
One of the most successful educational efforts that can contribute to
the expansion of the literary sphere in El Salvador is the reduction of illit-
eracy and an increase in the educational level of the majority of the popula-
tion. El Salvador has reduced its level of illiteracy from fifty to sixteen percent
since the Peace Accords were signed. It has achieved an increase in the
percentage of children who attend primary school from seventy-seven to
ninety-five percent. This has been possible thanks to an educational re-
form, which like all reforms has had its problems, but which has achieved
very concrete results. In rural areas, the EDUCO program has returned
schools to the parents who participate in the hiring and supervision of teach-
ers and has created structures of internal regulation in which all sectors of
the school are represented. This decentralization not only makes educa-
92 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

tional reform viable, but also involves the population in its own education
and develops the kind of cooperative and democratic behavior that is needed
at all levels of society. The literacy program for adults has taught reading
and writing to more than 300,000 Salvadorans in the past three years. The
most immediate problem is that of secondary school, given that many young-
sters cannot, for economic reasons, continue their studies after primary
school, and thus only thirty-seven percent of adolescents attend secondary
school. Higher education is in need of regulation, but the priorities are to
maintain the current level of attendance at primary school and to raise at-
tendance at the high school level.20 This in itself, of course, guarantees nei-
ther the survival nor the expansion of literary culture, but it is a prerequisite
if literary culture is to have a significant impact in the future on the social
imaginary and to serve the sphere of consolidation of postwar national iden-
tity.21
Other projects of cultural reconstruction that contribute to the devel-
opment of the literary sphere are the projects of the Ministry of Culture
that include the redefinition of the David J. Guzmán National Museum,
the architectural and urban-planning project of the city, to rescue the his-
toric center of San Salvador promoted by the administration of Mayor
Héctor Silva. The Museum of the Word recovers artifacts and manuscripts,
and presents exhibits on Salvadoran writers. As these examples illustrate, in
a country of few resources there is much being done to consolidate a liter-
ary and cultural sphere that rescues the patrimony which for so long has
been neglected, buried, and even vilified in a society that was considered
not only immature in cultural terms, but almost unviable given the enor-
mous structural problems which brought it to war. Independently of the
critical judgments that we might make about these projects, their existence
is a healthy sign of the maturity of a society that tries to advance toward the
establishment of a public sphere never before achieved in the small repub-
lic. The challenge for the twenty-first century is to succeed in maintaining
and developing these institutions and to work toward a real legitimation
when democratic institutions have been established on a solid base. It can-
not be forgotten that not only the literary sphere, but also the public sphere
in its totality, depends on this political development. It is here that the
critical and democratic spirit of a leftist project needs to be articulated.
In a democratic country, civil society is, according to Jürgen Habermas
understood as:

those non-state, non-economic and voluntary associations which an-

chor the communicative structures of the public sphere in the social
 NATIONAL AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION 93

components of the life world. Civil society is composed of associa-

tions, organizations and movements which emerge in a more or less
spontaneous manner and which absorb and condense the resonance
that the problems of society encounter in the fields of life, trans-
porting it in an amplified form to the public sphere.22

In other words, although the process of transition requires foreign inter-

vention and an intense participation by the state, and will continue to need
these resources to maintain mechanisms of political legitimation before the
civil population, it is very important for the development of a truly demo-
cratic public sphere that there be an articulation of opposition independent
of the national project of the state. This is impossible to accomplish from
the cultural realm alone, and requires the articulation of the social forces
that should and must intervene in the development of democracy. Accord-
ing to Habermas, it is “the communicative flows of a vitalized and estab-
lished public sphere in a liberal political culture which carry the weight of
normative expectation and without the actual innovative force of social
movements nothing changes, nor do the utopian energies that drive these
movements.”23
The lesson here for the left is to not make the mistake of believing that
because there is a pluralism of elites, there is no need to legitimize itself.24 It
must reconstruct the bases of opposition, and I do not refer here to elec-
toral opposition, but to that organization of social groups that can discern
the limits of late capitalism and struggle against the stabilization of a soci-
ety done at the expense of those who are its citizens. As Habermas points
out, theory itself does not have to take the place of utopias. Democracy is
constructed in the midst of the contradictions of enormous social inequali-
ties and it is the right and the obligation of citizens to develop multiple
political alternatives and to articulate them within social groups that will
claim the rights and visions for which they have paid the very high price of
a civil war. It is only then when citizens participate in a civil society worthy
of being called that—and only then—that the literary sphere can truly flour-
ish as an aesthetic space of reflection and as a dialectical space, in which the
construction of national culture also groups together culture in its negativ-
ity and intellectuals as indispensable agents of this process.
94 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

IV. Globalization and National Culture: or Why the National State Matters

In light of the brief sketch presented on the status of Salvadoran culture

and society, the current insistence on the culture of globalization as a more
precise way of discussing the postmodern question ignores the most evi-
dent of facts. All basic economic transactions are still mediated at the level
of the nation-state.25 This is why the situation in El Salvador, while at first
it may seem paradoxical given what we are used to hear about globalization,
is not. This is not to disavow the trends exhibited by late capitalism and the
characteristics that have come to be associated with it. The enthusiasm that
seems to have overtaken the humanities about the possibilities of a politics
that is truly global and horizontal in nature contrasts with the economic
realities of globalization and its relationship to the nation-state.26 The way
in which the debates over the nation have taken place occlude the signifi-
cance of its twin term, “the state,” and their interrelation. As Timothy
Brennan has pointed out:

While debates over the nation have battled their way through ques-
tions of origin, definition, and cultural creation, most critics have
failed to reconceptualize the debates’ terms. One discusses whether
or not the idea of the modern nation-state in its many shades origi-
nated in Europe; whether the nation amounts to a common lan-
guage, common history, or contiguous territory; whether or not
developments such as print-capitalism and the decline of religion
spawned new forms of imagined community. In this still important
terrain, and from very different quarters, lie a series of doubts about
the continued viability of the state-system—entailing, as it did, forms
of continued national-popular loyalty, legal obligations, and sym-
bolic pride.27

The economic reality is that global corporations continue to rely heavily on

domestic state structures that fall within the traditional bounds of indi-
vidual governments that preside over bordered territories, advance domes-
tic agendas and regulate national economies. A cohesive nation-state
regulating the free market seems to be essential as Michael Mann has most
convincingly argued.28 Yet the financial institutions of global capitalism differ
from those of the early part of the twentieth century. Finance moves across
the world with a velocity guaranteed to satisfy the most enthusiastic
transnationalist. According to Mann, “movements of liquid capital between
 NATIONAL AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION 95

foreign exchanges exceed by thirty times the total value of international

trade, and these move fairly independently of the more regulated trade flows”
(118) and the majority of this flow is investment in aggregated assets (like
currencies, government bonds, etc.) which in turn has the biggest impact
on commodity sectors and the individual state. The point to stress here is
that while, yes, this is a new configuration of financial institutions, the pres-
sure on states to conform to the working of capital and to these changes are
not uniquely threatening.
While in the humanities classroom discussions on the decline of the
nation state take place, governments discuss how they can regain some con-
trol over the state. Latin American and African governments face the crisis
of neoliberalism by asking for a “market economy but not a market soci-
ety.”29 The former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, along
with Nelson Mandela, publicly declared his opposition to neoliberalist ide-
ology and defended the need for the workings of the state in countries as
poor as theirs. The increasing economic inequality, the incapacity of the
state to consolidate itself and to act as promoter and supporter of institu-
tions, its inefficiency in the control of corruption, the pressures of
transnational capital, all put pressures on governments that are not new.
What is new is the pressure that the collapse of a “recuperative moderniza-
tion” (nachholende Modernisierung) has put on the national bourgeoisies,
according to German political economist Robert Kurz.30 His argument is
that “local, neo-national attempts to complete the phase of primitive accu-
mulation are doomed by ‘beginning at the end’ of global capitalism’s own
history of expansionary accumulation.”31 Capitalism, according to Kurz,
enters yet a more intensive phase of crisis, as the process of accumulation
becomes shorter. The result is masses of “unutilizable human capital” that
live in conditions worse than those under conditions of exploitation. The
pressure to consolidate a state that can somewhat govern the people re-
quires an integrated civil society that can produce citizens not only aware of
the perils of the national economy, but also willing to sacrifice some of their
access to goods for the well-being of the nation.
In some Latin American countries, part of the strategy involves simple
things like making sure governments recover at least thirty percent of the
internal national product through taxation.32 In other words, by educating
citizens about the financial responsibilities they have toward the nation,
states can implement and secure the well-being of their citizens. The double
task of reforming the state, which has been in a state of legitimation crisis
since its post-independence days in the nineteenth century, and building a
96 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

national culture that produces a cohesive population may prove impossible.

But there is no other alternative to globalization, as Aijaz Ahmad has re-
minded us:

For human collectivities in the backward zones of capital, however,

all relationships with imperialism pass through their own nation-
states, and there is simply no way of breaking out of that imperial
dominance without struggling for different kinds of national projects
and for a revolutionary restructuring of one’s own nation-state. So
one struggles not against nations and states as such but for different
articulations of class, nation and state [. . .] one strives for a ratio-
nally argued understanding of social content and historic project for
each particular nationalism. Some nationalist practices are progres-
sive; others are not.33

This is the context of the complex process of rebuilding national culture in

post-war El Salvador. The strengthening of what we can term the literary
institution at this particular moment, given the explained conditions above,
must be seen as a necessary and welcoming development. One hopes that
nature of this case study helps in the redefinition the field of Latin Ameri-
can Cultural Studies, which by too quickly jumping on the globalization
bandwagon, has lost track of the mediations of national culture and its in-
stitutions. In the process the entire understanding of national cultures un-
der conditions of peripheral modernity was the baby that got thrown away
with the bath water.

Postscript

In an era when we are bombarded by the discourses of globalization, of the

failure of the nation-state, and of the triumph of electronic mass media, the
idea that today literature as an institution may have anything to tell us
about an even more outdated notion like the nation may have struck the
reader at best as a romantic proposition, and at worst as an uninformed one.
However, after a close look at societies like El Salvador or Nicaragua that
emerged out of the civil wars of the 70s and 80s with projects of nation-
building, it is clear that these societies continue to exhibit a stunning alle-
giance to traditional literate models of culture. If one considers that in these
societies the right to read and write has only recently been concretized for
the majority of the population, it becomes understandable that the rela-
 NATIONAL AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION 97

tionship to literature diverges from what we are accustomed to seeing in

places like the United States today.
A return to the study of national culture through its cultural institu-
tions, like the literary institution, will under the current predicament ail the
current crisis of Latin American studies, which under the pressures of glo-
bal culture and the particular circumstances of U.S. identity politics seems
unable to recognize the very modern character that continues to character-
ize the building of national cultures in Latin America. The highly specula-
tive turn of the field took with the advent of postmodern theories in the
early eighties and that generated many readings of the postmodern charac-
ter of Latin American literature, has now been replaced by an over enthusi-
astic multicultural, populist, and globalized way of reading that leaves
unconsidered the specific historical configuration of national cultures.
So while both left-wing and right-wing governments seem to share
the literate model of culture and a modern sense of nationhood, the future
character of national culture will be profoundly shaped by the ideologies
that come to bear upon their construction. This is why Roque Dalton can
mean many things ranging from oppositional guerrilla poet and martyr to a
symbol of Salvadoranness, and why his canonization as “national poet”
should not have been a surprise. The way in which national governments
secure the cohesion of national identity seems absolutely at odds with the
globalization discourses to which we have grown accustomed. The way in
which a cultural figure circulates and what he/she signifies is not a simple
matter of different appropriations, it proves that in the case of Latin America,
the stakes of culture are higher than ever before. The survival of its people
may depend on the possibility of these nations to imagine themselves as
coherent units and not on the embracing of a fragmentation and
transnationalism proclaimed by those who apologize for globalization as
the new form of imperialism.
Carleton College

Notes
The fieldwork research for this article, carried out in the summer of 1998, was possible
thanks to a summer faculty grant awarded by the Dean of the College at Carleton College.
1. “I arrived at the revolution by way of poetry. You can (if you so wish or if you feel you
need to) arrive at poetry by way of the revolution”, this is part of the epigraph to his book
Taberna y otros Lugares. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1969. This book was written in
Prague when Roque Dalton lived behind the Iron Curtain and prepared to return to El
Salvador to help found a clandestine group that would become the first urban guerrilla
98 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

group in 1972. The full epigraph was written as a short note to a friend asking him not to
forget that if he took pleasure in Dalton’s company in armed struggle, he owed his thanks for
this to some degree to poetry as well.
2. The sixties sees the emergence of dependency theory, liberation theology, the analectic
philosophy of Enrique Dussel, etc.
3. Lander, Eduardo. “Retos del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano en la década de los
90” in Modernidad and Universalismo, ed. Edgardo Lander (Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad,
1991) 146.
4. Unlike major oil producers in the Middle East, the Latin American economies could
never survive economic penalties such as the Iran embargo.
5. According to German economist Robert Kurz the crisis of over accumulation leaves
more and more an increased proportion of the world’s labor power de valorized and, there-
fore, outside the economy altogether. Cf. Robert Kurtz, Der Kollaps der Modernisierung: Vom
Zusammenbruch des Kasernensozialismus zur Krise der Weltökonomie (Eichborn Verlag: Frank-
furt am Main) 1991. For further thoughts on Kurz see Neil Larsen’s MLA talk (1998):
“Dialectics and ‘Globalization,’ or, the Problem of How (not) to Think about a New Inter-
nationalism” (unpublished manuscript).
6. Slavoj Zizek, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,
1997). To what degree that problematic relationship between the conceptualizing of the
center vis-à-vis the object of the periphery can escape a constitutive racism is, perhaps, a
question worthy of another article but must be brought up here briefly. Could it be, as Zizek
maintains, that “postmodern racism is the symptom of multiculturalist late capitalism, bringing
light to the inherited contradiction of the liberal democratic ideological project and without
the element of the real jouissance, the Other remains ultimately a fiction, a purely symbolic
subject of strategic reasoning exemplified in rational choice theory?” (27). For that reason,
he maintains in a provocative fashion, that one is even tempted to replace the term
multiculturalism with multiracism: multiculturalism suspends the traumatic kernel of the
Other, reducing it to an aseptic folklorist entity. Zizek’s critique about the impossibility of a
non-traumatic relationship to the other is something that must be somehow taken into
account when reflecting upon the sites of knowledge production.
7. Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,”
Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. See also “A brief response,” Social Text 17 (1987): 26–27.
8. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory,” Social Text 17 (1987):
3–25.
9. Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London: Verso, 1992).
According to Schwarz, Machado de Assis’s literary production points to this increased aware-
ness of cultural contradiction between the liberal ideas of a political elite and the slavery-
based economy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Brazil.
10. An analysis of the different theories of nationalism that would prove this point is
beyond the scope of this paper. One can, however, point to important debates of the past
twenty years. The work of Benedict Anderson, for example, questions previously held as-
sumptions about the origin of nationalism, and as consequence puts into question the devel-
opmental logic that has characterized the thinking of nationalism in metropolitan centers in
the past.
11. All translations of Castellanos Moya are mine, unless otherwise indicated. Horacio
Castellanos Moya, “Los Intelectuales y la Transición,” Recuento de Incertidumbres: Cultura y
Transición en El Salvador (San Salvador: Ediciones Tendencias, 1993) 59.
12. Since I last visited the newspaper, the country has “dollarized” its economy eliminat-
ing the colón as its national currency
13. A few examples include the fiction of feminist writers like Jacinta Escudos (see her
Cuentos sucios [San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones, 1997]) and Amada Libertad (see
her Larga trenza de amor [San Salvador: Editorial Sombrero Azul, 1994]); or writers who
take distance from the war to explore the unconscious and the surreal like Rafael Menjívar
 NATIONAL AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION 99

Ochoa (see his Los héroes tienen sueño [San Salvador: Dirección General de Publicaciones,
1998]) and Ricardo Lindo (see his Tierra [San Salvador: Dirección General de Publicaciones,
1996]). The most scandalous novel of repudiation of the entire process and of the fact of
being Salvadoran is Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El Asco (San Salvador: Editorial Arcoiris,
1997). Shortly after the publication of his book, this writer exiled himself voluntarily to
Canada closing in this way the key role he had played in the intellectual life in the immedi-
ate post-war period.
14. Walter Raudales, Amor de Jade (Santa Tecla: Clásicos Roxil, 1996). The case of this
book is fascinating, given that it is considered the first erotic novel in the Salvadoran tradi-
tion. The story follows the life of Rosina del Mar, a woman raised in San Salvador by her
grandmother. Rosina obtains, after a series of complicated circumstances, a charm made of
jade. This charm controls all passional forces of humans that come in contact with it. Rosina
decides to use her beauty and this charm to end the country’s civil war. She gets a job as a
news anchor and from there moves from bed to bed, sleeping with those she deems powerful
enough to stop the war. Her main lovers are the main guerrilla commander, Benjamin
Buenaventura, and the main general of the army, Salomón de León. After a series of events
the novel ends with the birth of a child the day the Peace Accords are signed.
15. John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American
Revolutions (Austin: U of Texas P, 1990) 207.
16. Horacio Castellanos Moya, “De historia, ficción y lenguaje,” Recuento de Incertidumbres:
Cultura y Transición en El Salvador (San Salvador: Ediciones Tendencias, 1993) 69.
17. See specifically “Culture and Politics in Brazil, 1964–1969” in Schwarz, 126–159.
18. Dr. Ricardo Roque Baldovinos, various emails to the author, September 1998. I thank
Dr. Roque Baldovinos, editor of the journal Cultura and professor of literature at the
Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas” (UCA), for the information in this para-
graph and for sharing with me his opinions on this development.
19. This novel deals with the return of Thomas Bernhard, once known as the Salvadoran
Edgardo Vega, to El Salvador. Vega’s return is imposed by the death of his mother. He takes
refuge in a literary cafe; literally the only place that doesn’t nauseate him in the entire city.
Vega, who is a professor of art history, detests El Salvador and had sworn never to set foot in
the country again in his lifetime. The novel is basically a monologue of Vega defaming
everyone and everything in El Salvador in a visceral, confrontational, and bitter way. The
style is slightly imitative of the Austrian writer. The reactions to the novel involved mostly a
discussion of how far should a writer go in deconstructing the Salvadoran sense of national-
ity.
20. Information obtained from Laura Vargas, “El Salvador: Investing in Education Pays
Off,” InterPress Service (11 September 1998).
21. This should not be surprising to us, nor seem to be a new and modern idea. We must
remember that already in 1913 Alberto Masferrer wrote in Leer y Escribir that literacy should
take priority in the construction of the nation, not to mention his ideas about the decentrali-
zation of education.
22. Jürgen Habermas cited in Fernando Haddad, “Habermas: herdeiro de Frankfurt?,”
Novos Estudos CEBRAP 48 (1997): 67–84. Translation from the Portuguese is my own.
23. Jürgen Habermas, interview with Mikael Carleheme and René Gabriels, “Uma conversa
sobre questoes da teoria politica: entrevista de Jürgen Habermas,” trans. Marcos Nobre and
Sérgio Costa, Novos Estudos CEBRAP 47 (1997): 85–102.
24. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1975).
25. On globalization, see Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Glo-
balization (Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 1998); on economics, see Linda Weiss’s
illuminating book The Myth of the Powerless State (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1998).
26. Cf. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital
(Durham: Duke UP, 1997).
100 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

27. Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts: Harvard UP, 1997) 126.
28. Michael Mann, “As the Twentieth Century Ages,” New Left Review 214 (1995): 104–
124.
29. Felipe González, “Después del neoliberalismo: un nuevo camino,” Nexos: sociedad, ciencia,
literaratura 243 (1998): 57–65.
30. Cited in Neil Larsen’s “Imperialism, Colonialisn and Postcoloniality,” A Companion to
Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sageenta Ray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
31. Cited in Larsen.
32. As recently discussed in a meeting of Latin American economists and politicians in
London.
33. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992) 11.