In Memory Of Jean Franco

There are several firsts in Jean Franco’s life. She was the first professor of Latin American literature in the UK; the first scholar to undertake a sustained study of Latin American literary production;¹ and in 1968 she became the first female professor at the University of Essex. As readers of this journal will know, she was also the first scholar to seriously consider a conception of Latin American literature that incorporates counter-hegemonic discourses, including those of oral and popular cultures. In this capacity, Jean was one of the first academics to lay the foundations for the field of Latin American cultural studies, making it extremely fitting for this journal to celebrate her life, her work, and her legacy.²

In this piece, however, I want to reflect on my own firsts with Jean.

I first met Jean twice.

The first time I met Jean was at the University of Glasgow in 1993. I was in the final year of my undergraduate degree in Hispanic Studies and was taking a class on modern Latin American literature. It was in looking for critical texts for that class that I first encountered Jean, specifically through her landmark book, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (1989). In a degree that largely focused on canonical authors and canonical texts (mainly by men), Plotting Women opened a new world of learning for me, radically expanding the landscape of who and what I thought could be seriously studied and theorised. Moving beyond written elite culture to encompass oral history, court trials, hagiographies, letters, paintings, and films to explore the ways in which women struggled to assert their own experiences in Mexican society, Jean’s broad-ranging and multi-layered text presented me with a profoundly new definition of culture – one that affirmed gender as an ineluctable category of consideration and one that took seriously all spheres of cultural production. Writing years later, when cultural studies is so dominant in our field, generating a wealth of significant work and distinct intellectual positions, it is difficult to convey how revolutionary, illuminating, and exciting this was to me at that time, when the study of literary texts still held sway; and how it configured – indeed shaped – my entire academic trajectory.

In retrospect, it is clear that one of Jean’s first achievements as a scholar was to provide a move away from the strategic containments and delimitations of the field of what was then Hispanic Literature, which had initially ignored or even suppressed Latin American literary texts as well as non-literary forms of culture and histories. Jean’s attention to the non-canonical and non-literary, as seen in Plotting Women, was matched by methodological experimentation and a resistance to abstract codification that, whilst not rhetorically explicit, reveals the deconstructive ethic of her work. Writing in 1980 on the study of Latin American literature, Jean herself remarked on the need for different methodologies given the “emergent interest of literature to political philosophers, anthropologists and historians, as well as literary critics” (1980, 25). New practices, she observed and argued, must go far beyond “the study and evaluation of a small number of canonised literary texts and close textual reading practices to encompass broader socio-criticism, in order to understand how literary and non-literary texts construct social meanings” (1980, 33).

This attention to the social was, as Jean herself and others have noted, in part indebted to the perspectives associated with British Marxists, like Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E.P. Thompson, and with British cultural studies, which extended textual readings to encompass contextual analysis, insisting that the study of literature had to take into account the history in which it was created (Dopico 2002, 174). The vitality of Jean’s dialectical thinking lies, precisely, in its power to re-historicise texts, to re-situate them in the history of Latin American society. This is evident in Plotting Women, which takes a “long historical view” to understand the different discursive positionings of woman within a Mexican society formed by conquest and colonisation (Franco 1989, xii). If this historicisation recalls the work of British cultural studies, it also carries significant weight in the Latin American context where, as Jean observed, cultural, and especially non-literary, texts were “sharply divided from history”, which constituted a discourse of power essential for maintaining the metropolis’s hegemony (“Narrator, Author, Superstar”, in Franco 1999, 148). Jean’s historicisation is, then, a profoundly political act, one that underscores her social commitment.

Here, Jean’s encounter with Indigenous cultures and above all her attention to questions of gender and sexuality, as well as her interest in everyday life, popular culture and social movements, attends to the blind spots of British cultural studies, in ways that parallel and even anticipate the work of Stuart Hall. Jean’s work is significant in this respect as it effects a distancing from traditional culturalist Marxism and its reduction of the social to questions of class and modes of production, which excluded other perspectives as merely ideological. Stressing the “usefulness” of questions of ideology – “I don’t want to throw out the idea of ideology”, she noted in an interview (Mathews 1993, 156) – and pointing to the radically different styles of thought between the UK (where the concept of ideology played a crucial role in literary analysis) and the Americas (where it had initially been largely absent until the 60s) – Jean’s work recognises how bodies of institutionalised knowledge are inflected by the nuances and importance of gender, sexual orientation, and race; in doing so, it also crucially demonstrates a “politics and poetics of transgression”, looking at the creative and imaginative resistances of marginalised peoples within dominant discursive formations (Franco 1989, 31).³ At its broadest implications, Jean’s scholarship reveals the interrelationship of culture, power and politics – including a politics of resistance – and exposes a heterogeneous notion of ideology that undoes neat oppositions between determinism and free will.

For Jean it was particularly important to “bear upon cultures of resistance, especially by peoples, groups and even medias that have been dominated by passive assumptions” (1980, 33). This was evident to me years ago, when reading Plotting Women and its explorations of the experiences of different women in Mexico: Ana de Aramburu’s menstrual blood, Frida Kahlo’s mutilated body, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo demonstrations, Sor Juana’s multiple subjectivities… Far from retrieving and appropriating the histories of exceptional women, her study exposes woman’s struggles for interpretive power, illuminating various configurations of gender and knowledge within master narratives in ways that mapped feminist forms of struggle and historical transformations. Plotting Women was and remains an important study not just of the representation of gender, as the subtitle says, but for the politics of representation and of textualisation.

Plotting Women thus unearthed resources for a different kind of criteria and critical lens for study and identified the impetus of change and transformation in cultural production and analysis. Discovering this as an undergraduate, inevitably and invaluably led me to other texts by Jean: to her wonderful study of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1976) and to her superb The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (2002). These books became important companions in my studies. Their methodologies and approaches did more than introduce me to Latin American literature; they showed me how cultural texts are alive and dynamic, how they are historical sites of struggles, and crucially how literary and cultural analysis can serve as a point of reference for historical, social, and political engagement.

The second time I met Jean was in 2006 at Columbia University in New York. I had just started a job as an assistant professor there and was attending the annual comparative literature conference organised by Professor Gayatri Spivak. It was at this event that Jean presented some work in progress: a paper titled “Rape: A Weapon of War”. The paper would appear as an article in the journal Social Text (Franco 2007) not long after the conference and would go on to constitute a chapter – the third – in her formidable book Cruel Modernity (2013).

Jean’s presentation was not easy to listen to. I remember the stark silence that followed her talk as the audience digested its harsh contents. The presentation haunted me for a long time afterwards, just as the book that followed haunts me. Her talk that day alerted me to something that I had not considered before as a reader of Jean Franco: the emotion in her work. Few people discuss Jean as a writer of emotions, even though she often cites Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling”. But emotion registers in Jean’s texts as a way in which the body of the reader encounters a world of peoples’ struggles, injustices, and violence. I am reminded here of Stuart Hall, who wrote that the task of the Marxist scholar is “to move us, to touch people in places that hurt, that express a rage with what is” (in Proctor 2004, 19). It is impossible for anyone who listened to Jean speak at Columbia in 2006, and for anyone who has read Cruel Modernity not to be moved, not to feel… hurt, rage.

For some reason, at the reception that followed the conference, Jean came to speak to me. To this day, I don’t know why. Perhaps she felt sorry for the newly arrived young professor from the UK who knew no one in New York. We talked about her paper, and she asked about my research. We spoke about films, and about England. Within minutes of talking, she had invited me to her birthday party that weekend at her apartment on Riverside Drive. That party introduced me to several New York academics. It also allowed me to get to know Jean, with whom I became good friends. We met most Wednesdays to go to the movies, after which we discussed them over dinner. We watched an array of films: I remember some distinctly – Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas trilogy,⁴ Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (2008), Paolo Sorrentino’s films (especially those with Toni Servillo), Dream Girls (2006), and anything starring Johnny Depp. The mixture of art house films, foreign movies, and Hollywood blockbusters says much about Jean – her absence of cultural snobbery, her anti-elitism, and her embrace of all dimensions of culture.

Something occurred on one of those Wednesdays that is especially vivid in my memories of Jean. It took place on a subway when we were returning home after having had dinner. Whilst we were talking, an elderly man made his way through our carriage, clutching what seemed to be his worldly belongings in a cluster of carrier bags, two or three to each hand. He attempted to speak to various passengers, all of whom shunned him, ignored him, or turned away. When he reached us, Jean began a lengthy conversation with him; he spoke with us for the remainder of our journey. He told us of his background, recounted the circumstances of his current situation, and outlined his hopes and plans for the future. There was something special about this encounter, about getting to know a stranger on a train, that resonated with me at the time and that today speaks to me about Jean and her work, in a way that reminds me of what Sylvia Wynter refers to as “the re-enchantment of the human” (in Scott 2000).

My mention of the re-enchantment of the human in Jean’s work may seem misplaced, since much of it explores how a divestment of the human has led to the marginalisation and exclusion of women and Indigenous peoples in Latin America. Her book Cruel Modernity especially seems to reveal a complete abandonment of humanity in its examination of orchestrated acts of mass cruelty in modern Latin America – kidnapping, torture, rape, and dismemberment. Whilst contemporary, these atrocities – Jean repeatedly suggests – point back to the gendered and racially motivated violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples and women of the New World by the conquering Spaniards. This reference to the colonial period can be understood as a critique of the idea of Europe’s birth as synonymous with humanism, a critique that points to how the celebrated concept of Man depended upon the systematic and inhuman degradation of non-European men and women.

Such a critique of humanism was evident in the 1950s anti-colonial movements. It was brilliantly articulated in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where he writes: “When I search for Man in the technique and style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man and an avalanche of murders” (2001, 312). This context was formative for Jean and her work on Latin America. It was during that decade that, having met the painter Juan Franco in Florence, she accompanied him to live in Guatemala City, arriving there in 1953 at the height of the Cold War. She recounts her time there at the very start of her book The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. “I was living [in Guatemala] when the Arbenz government was overthrown by a mercenary army subsidised by the United States. From one day to the next the city became a hostile territory.” “Close friends”, she noted, “disappeared or were killed or sent into a situation of impossibility. It happened to people I knew. I was personally involved” (2002, 1).

In Guatemala Jean became aware of “an avalanche of murders”. This awareness stayed with her and for me it is at the heart of all of Jean’s work, as it examines and seeks to understand the violence of Latin American society – a society in which, as Cruel Modernity harshly exposes, racialised and gendered peoples have been deemed closer to nature than to culture and history, and as such have been readily exploited and excluded from the human so that their lives might be disposed of with impunity. Yet if Jean deals with this cruelty in her work, she also consciously goes beyond this. While reflecting on sustained patterns of exclusion and violence, her work presents us with a specific, deliberate, and patient overcoming of the claims of patriarchy and raciology, of a gendered and racialised sovereignty, and in doing so manages to rehumanise its victims. Jean’s attending precisely to the ex-centric, the disappeared, the violently excluded and expunged and to the writing of their histories, is an important step in a critical analysis that involves a de-naturing, a move that Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter both recognise as the premise of disalienation (in Scott 2000, 206, and Fanon 2001, 312). Cruel Modernity shows us how this move involves an obligation to the bloody archive of suffering under colonial and imperial nomoi, which, whilst difficult to read or listen to, is necessary. Jean’s work thus presents us with a combative humanism, which rather than turn away from, shun, or ignore the ex-centric finds stories that – to cite Hall again – “move us”. This humanism is, I believe, part of Jean’s writing itself. She managed to communicate her ideas clearly and without jargon, while producing work that Roland Barthes would call a writerly text, demanding a commitment from the body of reader (2009, 5).

Jean’s and my encounter with a stranger and his stories on the New York subway moved me. Reflecting on it, years later, it reminds me of how reading and listening to Jean also moved me.

It goes without saying that Jean Franco will be remembered as one of Latin American culture’s foremost thinkers – as the first person to make possible a more expansive vision of the field as an interdisciplinary and committed discipline. My own firsts with Jean allowed me to experience this. They changed everything for me and, although she is no longer here and I miss her, I know that these firsts, like Jean, remain with me and in my own work, always.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maite Conde

Maite Conde is Professor of Brazilian Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge. She is the author of Foundational Films. Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil and Consuming Visions. Cinema, Writing and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro.

Notes

1 This was Jean Franco’s first book, The Modern Culture of Latin America (1967), referred to by Alfredo Roggiano as “the first serious work on Latin American culture” (in Arias 2016, 703). Jean followed this book with two others on Latin American literature – An Introduction to Latin American Literature (1969) and Spanish American Literature since Independence (1973). By mapping and exploring literary production in Latin America, these books re-invented the Peninsular-centred field of “Hispanic Studies”.

2 See the collection of Jean’s contributions to this journal in its on-line blog: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cjla20/collections/Jean-Franco-in-memoriam.

3 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s seminal book The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986) is, as Jean Franco notes, key to Plotting Women. See the introduction.

4 Ossos (1997), No quarto da Vanda (2000), and Juventude em marcha (2006).