Jean Franco in memoriam: a collection
Jean Franco in memoriam: a collection
Jean Franco, who passed away in December 2022 at the age of 98, was a founding figure of Latin American cultural studies –particularly but not exclusively in English-speaking academia– and one of the Journal’s most important interlocutors since its own inception in 1992. In fact, the Journal’s second issue of that same year, focused in its entirety on the concept of border, featured an essay-length review by Jean (included in this collection), in which she discusses the implications, methodologically and conceptually speaking, of Néstor García Canclini’s landmark book Culturas híbridas, published in Mexico only two years earlier, for the project of cultural studies as it was taking shape in the Anglosphere at the time. In what even now remains an impressively prescient and provocative reading, her analysis of Canclini zeroes in on his “tour” of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology and the way the latter’s construction of a “national heritage” effectively patrols the border –hence the essay’s title– between authenticity and kitsch, ancestrality and comodity, which Canclini’s notion of hybridity would challenge and complicate, Jean argued, in ways both similar and complementary to those in which scholars such as Susan Stewart and Mieke Bal were then rethinking objectness, space and scale in the museum, or those in which Donna Haraway was starting to rethink race, gender, and species barriers. It was this exceptional capacity for thinking outside the box (in particular, the one engineered by academic disciplines and their various forms of border patrolling) that set Jean Franco’s work apart for over half a century – first, by almost single-handedly re-inventing the peninsular-centered field of “Hispanic Studies” through her ground breaking trilogy The Modern Culture of Latin America (1967), An Introduction to Latin American Literature (1969), and Spanish American Literature Since Independence (1973). Following appointments at the Universities of London and Essex (where she held the first chair for Latin American literature in the UK), upon moving to Stanford in 1972 and eventually to Columbia University in 1982, and upon completing an authoritative monograph on the poetry of César Vallejo (1976), Jean became once again a leading voice in the field’s cultural turn, one that her own much broader interest and involvement with anti-imperialism, the women’s movement and the struggle against the wave of rightwing dictatorships rolling through the region (which she had experienced firsthand in the 1954, CIA-engineered coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala) had long anticipated. Her work on the emplotments of gender in literary representations, popular culture, and architecture (Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, 1989), and on the Latin American Cold War and the reconfigurations of the cultural field it ushered in (The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 2002; Cruel Modernity, 2013) were, once again, field-defining in both method and scope. This collection features an overview of Jean’s contribution to the project of Latin American cultural studies since the 1990s, the many legacies of which remain at the heart of critical endeavors today.
