The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (review)

Francine Masiello’s The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis offers a broad reflection on contemporary cultural production in Argentina and Chile, with particular attention to ways in which literature confronts problems associated with these two countries’ recent transitions from dictatorships to free market– based democracies. Masiello’s discussion presupposes that the transitions of the 1980s perpetuated—and in some respects deepened—the traumatic wounds suffered by Southern Cone societies in the 1970s under military dictatorship. Transition is experienced as crisis on at least two counts. On the one hand, these postdictatorship democracies have failed to pursue justice for the crimes committed under dictatorship, opting instead for the pragmatic mode of reconciliation evoked by Chilean president Patricio Aylwin’s axiomatic phrase, “justicia en la medida de lo posible.” Memories of repression and terror thus exist in an antagonistic relation with de facto and de jure impunity for military criminals. On the other hand, the total identification of democracy with a neoliberal model during the transition is seen by many as the ultimate political legitimation of a project initiated a decade earlier at gunpoint. The enforcement of free-market structural adjustments during the transition has been viewed as a principle cause of increasing social fragmentation, as well as the confirmation that previous generations’ dreams of social justice have been destroyed. For many, the transition is associated with a profound and sweeping loss of sense, a loss that casts its shadow on the very possibility of shared meaning. Masiello’s book should also be read in the context of recent academic debates about the status of “literature” today. In recent years there has been an increasing sentiment in Latin Americanist circles that literature