The Swan Song of the Latin American Tradition

Abstract

The Latin Americanist critique of the 1970s brought to its peak of tension the imperatives of breaking down the cultural heterogeneity of the continent and postulating at the same time its fundamental unity. A process of critical mourning for the lost place of literature and of writers and intellectuals in society took place after the dictatorships, although it was charged with ambivalence with respect to both the integrating project and the Latin American project. This article proposes that the main features of the Latin Americanist cultural integration project (which was the last version, in the region, of an imaginary that could be called the Paradigm of Tradition) allow us to think, in contrast, some differences of the current critical imaginary, which has allowed in recent years to re-politicize the arts and criticism in a different way and thus come out of the melancholy of mourning.