Foreword

Summary

The five interviews that make up The (Latin) American Scene offer to readers, however inadvertently, an especially timely if stark occasion for reflection on the current state and uncertain future of the field of Latin-Americanist criticism and humanistic scholarship in the North American university and public sphere.

Convened and guided with great acumen and rhetorical skill by Fernando Gómez Herrero, they were initially recorded between twenty and twenty-five years ago. In the course of conversations with Gómez Herrero, Walter Mignolo, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa, John Beverley and Roberto González Echevarría, then all senior, well-established academics and by now all well into retirement age—if in many instances still active scholars—reflect back on the state of the field dating from a point in time as early as three decades before that.

Meanwhile, however, as this is being written (ca. February 2025) the United States and with it the world are witnessing what will surely be remembered as one of the most signal and disastrous turning points in its modern, twenty-first-century history: Donald Trump's return to head a state over which he now makes good to exercise almost unlimited control. Whatever the particulars of the new, far-right, quite arguably neofascist, ethno-supremacist polity that now consolidates itself, joining similarly autocratic if nominally “democratic” regimes across the globe, from Italy to Argentina to India and from the Philippines to Hungary to Russia, the effect here is to cast an unaccustomed and lurid light over a subset of academic and intellectual life whose very chronological double remove suddenly makes it seem weirdly even more particular and remote: speaking from a generation ago at a point in the United States and global history when, whatever its own catastrophic and dystopian aspects, our contemporary civilizational collapse (surely the term is justified) would have been scarcely imaginable, the informants responding to Gómez Herrero's adroit and always provocative questions and prompts—often as illuminating and compelling as the words they elicit if not at times a good deal more so—reflect back in turn on a still earlier, preceding generation.