Page 90 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

INTERVIEW AND TRANSLATION BY
PATRICK D.MURPHY

CONTRASTING PERSPECTIVES:
CULTURAL STUDIES IN LATIN
AMERICA AND THE UNITED STATES: A
CONVERSATION WITH NÉSTOR GARCÍA

CANCLINI 1

ABSTRACT
In this interview Latin American scholar Néstor García Canclini
discusses the emergence of Latin American cultural studies. García
Canclini argues that the development of cultural studies specific to Latin
America has merit because it provides a multidisciplinary tool for
exploring regional relationships between folklore, the rural and the
indigenous, the urban and the mass media, and the intersections of social
structures and traditions. Differentiating the Latin American perspective
from other, more textual orientations, he fields questions concerning the
emerging enterprise’s theoretical influences, the role of ethnographic
enquiry, the place of multiculturalism, the contribution of feminism, its
relationship to Chicano scholarship, the influence of changing cultural
policies and frustrations of democracy, and its roots in anthropology and
sociology.
KEYWORDS
cultural analysis; García Canclini; hybrid cultures; Latin American
cultural studies; multiculturalism; postmodernism
Néstor García Canclini has written extensively on the cultural transformations of
contemporary Latin America, His prolific production of books, research articles
and essays focusing on popular, urban and transnational cultures has established
him as one of the most important cultural theorists in Latin America. Moreover,
García Canclini’s multidisciplinary approach (anthropology, sociology,
philosophy, art criticism and economic analysis) to the analysis of contemporary
cultural formations has become the calling card of Latin Arnerican critical/
cultural research, and has situated him as perhaps the central figure in the
emergence of ‘Latin American cultural studies’.

Cultural Studies 11(1) 1997:78–88 © 1997 Routledge 0950–2386