{"id":1802,"date":"2023-03-08T19:10:01","date_gmt":"2023-03-08T19:10:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jlacs-travesia.online\/?p=1802"},"modified":"2023-03-17T20:50:47","modified_gmt":"2023-03-17T20:50:47","slug":"jean-franco-in-memoriam-a-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jlacs-travesia.online\/en\/2023\/03\/08\/jean-franco-in-memoriam-a-collection\/","title":{"rendered":"Jean Franco in memoriam: a collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jean Franco, who passed away in December 2022 at the age of 98, was a founding figure of Latin American cultural studies \u2013particularly but not exclusively in English-speaking academia\u2013 and one of the Journal<\/em>\u2019s most important interlocutors since its own inception in 1992. In fact, the\u00a0Journal<\/em>\u2019s second issue of that same year, focused in its entirety on the concept of border, featured an essay-length review by\u00a0Jean\u00a0(included in this\u00a0collection), in which she discusses the implications, methodologically and conceptually speaking, of N\u00e9stor Garc\u00eda Canclini\u2019s landmark book\u00a0Culturas h\u00edbridas<\/em>, 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 \u201ctour\u201d of Mexico\u2019s National Museum of Anthropology and the way the latter\u2019s construction of a \u201cnational heritage\u201d effectively patrols the border \u2013hence the essay\u2019s title\u2013 between authenticity and kitsch, ancestrality and comodity, which Canclini\u2019s notion of hybridity would challenge and complicate,\u00a0Jean\u00a0argued, 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\u00a0Jean\u00a0Franco\u2019s work apart for over half a century \u2013 first, by almost single-handedly re-inventing the peninsular-centered field of \u201cHispanic Studies\u201d through her ground breaking trilogy\u00a0The Modern Culture of Latin America\u00a0<\/em>(1967),\u00a0An Introduction to Latin American Literature\u00a0<\/em>(1969), and\u00a0Spanish American Literature Since Independence\u00a0<\/em>(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 C\u00e9sar Vallejo (1976),\u00a0Jean\u00a0became once again a leading voice in the field\u2019s cultural turn, one that her own much broader interest and involvement with anti-imperialism, the women\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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<\/em>, 2002;\u00a0Cruel Modernity<\/em>, 2013) were, once again, field-defining in both method and scope. This\u00a0collection\u00a0features an overview of\u00a0Jean\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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