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 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 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. An exceptional capacity for thinking outside the box (in particular, the one engineered by academic disciplines) 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, 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 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 (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, the many legacies of which remain at the heart of critical endeavors today.