Arizona State University

I wish to discuss the need for the creation of a form of bibliographic access to contemporary Latin American literature and culture that will solve or overcome the serious deficiencies inherent in the resources that are currently available to researchers. My proposal is based as much on the limitations of extant tools as it derives from a high level of dissatisfaction -indeed, frustration- over the inability to make use of those tools in the pursuit of academic pursuits that I consider to be crucial in contemporary Latin American studies and -not quite the same thing, but intimately related- in the priorities that have been formulated for the analytical reflection on contemporary Latin American studies.

What I mean by the foregoing rather cumbersome affirmation is that there are two intersecting developments in Latin American culture that are difficult to pursue given the bibliographic resources currently at our disposal. In the first place, there are numerous phenomena in contemporary Latin American society (phenomena referring both to what is actually taking place at the present moment and to what current levels of consciousness understand about past Latin American culture and how that understanding is an integral element, in turn, of contemporary sociocultural issues). Such phenomena may be conveniently linked to high-profile topics like feminism, authoritarian oppression, various manifestations of dependency in peripheral societies, patriarchalism, redemocratization, liberation theology, alternate lifestyles, and the like.

Concomitantly, and as a natural projection of the currency of these issues in the sociocultural consciousness of the various Latin American micro and macrosocieties, there is an ethos of scholarly research that constitutes various ways of taking into account these details of said consciousness. It is certainly true that there is a fragmented match between what scholars are likely to concern themselves with and what the flow of consciousness and its concrete manifestations are in any society.

The various structures -institutional and informal- that may block an appropriate and good-faith scholarly reflection on sociocultural issues result in the emergence of many phenomena that may for years pass without adequate scholarly investigation. This is the case with one of my own current research interests, lesbian and gay writing in Latin America, including its other cultural manifestations: with very spotty exceptions, only countries like Argentina (especially since the return to institutional democracy in late 1983) and Brazil present serious, if at times not particularly rigorous examples, of academic analysis of the topic and an assessment of the sociocultural role of the texts involved. Put differently, despite a rather impressive inventory of actual textual examples, the subject continues to be a nonissue as far as scholarly research, academic or otherwise, is concerned. The result is a particularly acute lag between socio-cultural production and analytical reflection.

The problem, however, to which I am referring concerns the possibility of determining, of recovering bibliographically, whatever

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match does in fact exist between sociocultural production and analytical reflection. My hypothesis is as follows. Perhaps it is hyperbolically stated; but then, it is only interesting to work with strong assertions, for the greater latitude they allow us in the assessment of their validity or their deficiencies. My hypothesis is that, despite the abundant resources available to us, several of them of recent and much heralded creation, any research program in Latin American literature and culture that researches beyond traditional disciplinary limits (particularly the humanities/social science disjunction) or that is sensitive to an expanded or enhanced definition of culture, is going to find it difficult if not impossible to make much headway with existing resources. Indeed, the very ideological gesture of replacing terms like literature or culture with the seemingly jazzier, but in fact theoretically sounder, term of «textuality» is, from the very start, going to have problems, since it represents the sort of play of conceptual terminology that cannot easily be taken into account in rather rigidified and notably conservative bibliographic organizations.

Let me begin by alluding to the major sources one might turn to in pursuing some of the research topics, general or more narrowly defined, deriving from the aforementioned sociocultural issues. Three tools suggest themselves immediately:

1) The MLA International Bibliography. As is well known, this guide has been considerably revised and technically updated in the last five years or so, and many of us engaged in bibliographic accountability play a primary role in supplying the MLA's bibliographic team with input for this compilation, which seems to gain weight healthily each year. Nevertheless, despite a certain increase in the Latin American coverage (certainly, more usable organization of the sections along the lines of national literatures), MLA-IB continues to be of limited usefulness. This is owing first of all to the decision to continue to limit coverage to very narrowly defined «literary and linguistics» publications, with only occasional coverage for more generally cultural forums. Journals which he outside the strictly philological purview are excluded altogether.

This is significant when one bears in mind that some of the most important thinking in Latin American with respect to culture and to its manifestations in literature is to be found in specifically nonliterary journals. I refer, in the case of Argentina, to publications like Punto de vista or Crisis (in all three of its incarnations). By contrast, some of the more properly «literary» journals in countries like Argentina are either tied to representing the well-entrenched academic canon, whereby to speak of Julio Cortázar is to venture into the dangerous vanguard, or to wielding outmoded if not categorically discredited or repudiated critical methodologies; or it is a question of criticism pursued with insouciant atheoretical abandon, which may not be pernicious in and of itself, but is stridently disconsonant with currently acceptable modes of literary investigation, based so emphatically as they wish to be on complex theoretical considerations. Thus, from the point of view of a criterion of inclusion, MLA-IB is -allow me to be hyperbolic- woefully inadequate.

2) The Hispanic American Periodicals Index. I have a particular affection for this index, since it was initiated at my university, and I was one of the first contributors to its data base, continuing year after year to index some of my favorite journals for HAPI. What is notable about this tool is that it bridges the multiple disciplines of Latin American studies and is therefore capable of taking into account the many ways in which those of us who work in Latin American literature now insist that what we are really concerned with is culture defined in various dimensions and on various levels. Thus, the inclusion of a truly interdisciplinary spectrum of Latin American journals and the integration of a panorama of subject fields that cut across disciplinary provincialities makes HAPI a vital guide for the student of «textuality».

However, because of the enormous cost involved in producing HAPI, the coverage has tended to remain steady over the past ten years, with the decision being to record the output of a stable inventory of publications, typically those associated with major professional organizations and academic institutions. The so-called «little review» and the ephemeral journal have no place in HAPI's bibliographic universe. This is an understandable circumstance, but it does restrict the understanding of significant research to generally speaking establishment forums, with the subsequent silencing of the dissident fringe.

More importantly, although new headings may be proposed by the data collectors in

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response to new areas of research or new priorities and definitions, there is the tendency to try to accommodate as much diverse material as possible under generalized headings. One can turn to HAPI for general terms recognized by the Library of Congress like feminism or homosexuality, but I still have not figured out a good way of accessing what does exist on patriarchalism.

3) Greater subject precision is achieved by the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. Moreover, this labyrinthine resource is especially valuable because it integrates Latin American culture with culture in general, and culture in general with the many fields of social science research that impinge on sociocultural research. Leaving aside the overwhelming bewilderment one experiences when first consulting this guide, it does provide a level of access by subject -defined both topically and personally- that is not the case with MLA-IB or HAPI. Indeed, I have found this to be the most useful guide for pursuing some of the research interests that have most recently come to my attention. Yet, AHCI is even more limited than HAPI in its inclusion of academic journals, and the coverage for Latin America is limited to those journals that enjoy institutional support and wide prestige in the English-language community or to material on Latin America included in journals whose primary disciplinary allegiance lies elsewhere.

Thus, I can use AHCI to garner citational support from a broad spectrum of «serious» academic sources adjacent to Latin American studies, but I cannot extend my search to include the majority of the journals that I would assume to be specifically involved in the coverage of Latin American sociocultural investigations.

On the basis of the foregoing reservations about the three most important sources, it should be obvious that one does not find much of value in sources like the Handbook of Latin American Studies or the old Pan American Union's multivolume periodicals index, which is notorious for its technical imperfections, despite its respectable breadth of coverage. The Handbook is particularly lamentable in the narrow scope of its coverage. In the humanities, aside from pithy annotations about research published in the mainline journals, the synopses of content in primary cultural texts (i. e., what one calls «the literature itself») is the most useful feature of the Handbook.

Yet, the coverage here is unquestionably limited to what the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress receives for examination from publishers and other sources. Since there is much less than an uninterrupted flow of books and journals from Latin America to the U. S. for review purposes, coverage tends to be quite spotty. Also, since a fairly permanent staff of annotators examine this material, one often suspects that individual biases enter into the characterization of the content of primary sources, such that it is often difficult to ascertain if a particular novel or play is germane to a specific research interest beyond a general statement to the effect that it deals with «the struggle for women's rights», «concerns human rights abuses», or «focuses on marginal groups».

What, then, would I consider an appropriate bibliographic guide to look like, one that would take into account the limitations of the foregoing resources and one that would respond to the expanding horizons of Latin American sociocultural research? Obviously, it would have to be first and foremost a guide that would discern and install a bibliographic protocol for dealing with the many theoretical and practical subdivisions occurring in the interrelated core of disciplines I understand to be involved: sociological and historical analyses, theoretical postulates of a philosophical and philosophically derived nature, linguistic sciences as they reach out into successive layers of semiotic studies, a multigeneric conception of writing in Latin America today that can conjugate those texts which self-identify themselves with traditional labels like novel or play, those texts that evoke social-science categories, like autobiography or chronicle, and those texts that experiment with newer designations like testimony, denunciation, or declaration.

It would certainly have to involve a format that would pick out terms and concepts that merit promotion as discrete bibliographic headings -I am thinking once again of such an important topic patriarchalism, or of headings that respond to intersections like plays dealing with horizons of audience expectations (i. e., the works that challenge what spectators are likely to believe theater to be) or novels that pick up an issue of human rights

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violations and give it a particular treatment. If one subscribes to the belief that sociocultural texts exercise considerable ideological influence in Latin American societies, the ways in which the vast majority of contemporary writing in Latin America deals with issues that scholars may choose to define as social science in nature is completely lost in the bibliographic compilations one has at hand. Subject indexing of critical studies on these works may pick up some of the broader categories, but I continue to be amazed at how difficult it is to have any access to the primary cultural production that criticism deals with, short of the really not necessarily unproductive approach of going to the library and spending time reading the back covers or flaps of the texts on the shelf.

Finally, and this is the most serious overall limitation of our current efforts toward establishing computer-based archives of reference, we need to recover a sense of the urgency of collating the broadest spectrum possible of publications in Latin America, even those that seem hopelessly ephemeral. For it is all too often in these publications where some of the best opinions are to be found, free of the strictures of mainline academic publications and imbued with the rashness of freewheeling speculative commentary. Such commentary may not easily reduce itself to the academic discourse we choose to tout, but, coming as it does from some of the most grassroots levels of sociocultural experience in Latin America, it is a form of analytical commentary that must be heeded and assessed. Only when we can get down bibliographically to this level may we begin to feel that we are acquiring some sense of grasp of the direct flow of sociocultural production and analysis in Latin American societies.

I do not feel that at present, outside of the circumstantial and often ineffectual personal networking the individual scholar achieves for the purposes of capturing this essential level of cultural textuality, that Latin American bibliographic endeavor comes anywhere near fulfilling the demands I have described.

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 72, Number 4, December 1989