Britain in Latin America

In the 19th century, foreigners had unprecedented access to Spanish America, as the newly independent nations welcomed travelers as readily as they accepted foreign loans and investment capital. Britons were able to freely travel into the South American interior, and commercial ties between Britain and Latin America grew quickly. Cultural and economic exchanges proceeded in two major waves: the first occurred during and in the immediate aftermath of the Wars of Independence, and then, after a cooling-off period, during the second half of the century, when infrastructural and technological advances opened up the Latin American hinterlands to capitalist expansion. International trade grew after 1850, along with Britain’s role in Latin American culture. Britain remained the hegemonic foreign power in Latin America until the First World War. These relationships left their mark on both British and Latin American literatures. In addition to a vast number of travel books about Latin American countries by adventurers, explorers, and tourists, British poets, novelists, philosophers, and historians also drew inspiration from this still relatively unknown territory. Toward the end of the 20th century, Victorian studies began to focus more insistently on British and Latin American exchanges, often making use of historical analyses that interpreted the British-Latin American relationship in terms of dependency theory and world-systems theory. These analyses have generally characterized Britain’s enormous economic, cultural, and political influence in terms of informal imperialism, a strategy for establishing domination over a territory without ruling it directly; however, the nature of British imperialism in Latin America, and its implications for cultural analysis, remain much debated. Currently, literary studies of Britain’s role in Latin America, and Latin America’s role within the British literary imaginary, constitute a large and growing body of scholarship. This bibliographic introduction offers an overview of important texts produced in the 19th century, as well as major currents of scholarship in literary studies and related humanities disciplines.

Bangla Translations of Latin American Poetry: A Critical Study

The aim of this study is to map the reception of Latin American Poetry within the corpus of the Bangla world of letters for three decades, from 1980 to 2010. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the influence and reception of Latin American Literatures in Bangla was reflected primarily in the introductions to translations, preludes, and conclusions of translations. During the late 1960s and the early 1970s Latin American poets like Pablo Neruda, Victoria Ocampo, Octavio Paz, and Jorge Luis Borges had caught the attention of eminent Bangla poets like Bishnu Dey, Shakti Chattopadhyay, and Shankha Ghosh who started taking interest in their works. This interest soon got reflected in the form of translations being produced in Bangla from the English versions available. The next two decades saw the corpus of Latin American Literatures make a widespread entry into the world of academic essays, journals, and articles published in little magazines along with translations of novels, short stories and poetry collections by leading Bangla publication houses like Dey’s Publishing, Radical Impressions, etc. This period was marked by a proliferation of scholarship in Bangla on Latin American Literatures. By the 21st century, critical thinking in Latin American Literatures had established itself in the Bangla world of letters. This chapter in particular studies the translations of Latin American poetry by Bengali poets like Shakti Chattopadhyay, Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Bishnu Dey, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Shankha Ghosh, Biplab Majhi among many others. The analysis relates to issues they focus on including themes like self, modernity, extension of time and space, political and poetic resonances, and untranslatability. Through a step by step research of the various stages of translation activities in Bengal and Bangla, it traces how translations of Latin American Literatures begin to take place on literary grounds that had already become sites of engagement with these issues. The chapter further explores the ways in which all these poet-translators situate their translations in relation to the issues of concern. In addition, it also addresses the question of what they hence contribute to Bangla literature at large. I first chose to explore the ways in which these issues are framed in the reflections and debates on translation in India and Bengal in the 20th century. Thereon I have tried to show how these translations of Latin American poetry developed their own thrust in relation to these issues and concerns.

Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo: The Colonial Matrix and the Latin American Literatures

This chapter examines Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s literary history, which describes the literatures of Latin America as an extension of Spain. Menéndez Pelayo proposed, in the Antología de poetas hispano-americanos, a narrative that was primarily aimed to recover the literary production of the colonial times. This recovery was not only limited to archival research, but also included the symbolic redistribution of the Spanish cultural capital, assigning texts to the new Latin American literatures that had previously been exclusive parts of the Spanish literature. The consequence was a broadening of Latin American literary canons to embrace the colonial tradition as a foundational moment in their cultural production. But what did Latin Americans have to gain by embracing a cultural discourse like Menéndez Pelayo’s, not without colonial anxieties? Alongside Spanish efforts to achieve cultural hegemony over the new national realities of Latin America, we also find a local quest, one that attempted to formulate a foundational discourse for the cultural production of each of the young countries. Through Hispanism the Creole elites renewed their arguments to establish their own national hegemony against the less Hispanicized sectors of the population.

JUAN G . RAMOS AND TARA DALY, EDS. Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 235 pp.

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