Abstract
This is an opportune moment, I believe, to debate the future of Latin American studies journals, given their variety and well-established nature. My own standpoint derives from a long-term membership of the Latin American Perspectives advisory panel and a brief stint as chief editor of the Bulletin of Latin American Research (UK) as well as membership of around a dozen editorial boards of journals dedicated to labor and globalization studies. And, of course, as has any other active researcher I have faced the demands made by the powers that be on where we should publish and what we should publish.
I am also in a liminal position as someone born in Latin America but resident and working in Europe. It is noteworthy that Ronald Chilcote’s call for comments on publishing and politics in Latin American studies specifically mentions this category of people who are neither clearly from the North or from Latin America. While this is sociologically interesting, I do wonder if we should also avoid any forms of essentialism that might make one’s epistemological position somehow dependent on one’s place of residence (or of origin, for that matter).
Indirectly I will be taking up some of the questions that Chilcote raised:
Can our journals act as a forum for debate and dialogue between “Northern” and “Latin American” researchers? My brief answer would be yes, of course, but then I would wonder about the term “dialogue” (maybe rather UN-speak?) and also about the danger of essentializing these two constituencies.
To what extent does the politics of Latin America set the empirical and theoretical agendas of our journals? Well, it all depends on how that politics is translated into the professional academic milieu within which these journals operate. But, in terms of the new issues and new theories emerging then reflected in these journals, it can and it has.
3. To what extent is the research agenda on/in Latin America set by the citation-index mania of Northern academia? Hugely, I would say, and I cannot think of any journal that seeks to escape that professional imperative under which all academics in most of the world now operate. Of course, that pressure can be negotiated and not just blindly reproduced.
It would seem quite clear and easy to demonstrate that the dominant research agendas in Latin American studies (and its journals) are set in the affluent and dominant Northern centers of learning. Those who control research funding and research publication outlets are clearly in a position to set the research agendas that are then taken up by those seeking to enter these worlds. In Latin America there is a long history of U.S. funding agencies’ establishing priority issues and research frameworks in a way that clearly benefits those in power. Fernando Henrique Cardoso was fond of saying “Dependency is what we call imperialism when we apply for a Ford Foundation grant.” We are all familiar with the fact that the funding agencies helped shift attention away from social movements and the politics of transformation to a concern with a vaguely defined “civil society” in the 1980s. Academic journals will, unless they wish to be outside of the “system,” tend to follow these trends even if they are not conscious of it.
What I would like to do now, however, is to slightly unsettle this Northern–Latin American dichotomy. One place to start would be through the Latin American resident in the North and the North American resident in Latin America. Things are never as simple as the binary oppositions we tend to use, especially if we are critical of the dominant powers and paradigms. If postcolonialism has taught us anything, it is to beware of the tendency to see bad/foreigner vs. good/native and to understand power in purely negative ways. What I am saying is that, at least in part because of this liminal category of academics, there is more complexity to Latin America’s relationship to the world than a simple view of the North setting research agendas for a powerless South.
The issue of how research agendas are set is inseparable from the academic profession and its politics. Thus, for example, the North-South divide implicit in the questions asked would need to be unsettled through the introduction of many other power differentials, such as those of age, “seniority,” and gender above all. Those who are established in their careers as researchers and publishers can very easily crowd out those seeking to establish their role in the profession. Journals can reproduce this tendency or choose to fight against its power by encouraging early-career researchers in their publishing. To this day many reviewers for journals seem to use their role in a strangely sadistic way that does them no good, never mind the person they are damaging.
My own experience here is not so much in relation to Latin America as, rather, in terms of the relations between Irish and sub-Saharan African universities as coordinator of the Irish-African Partnership for Research Capacity Building. We were linking one Northern university system (nine universities) with four universities in Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Malawi with a view to enhancing research capacity through partnership rather than the traditional technology transfer mode. Overcoming barriers to publishing in Northern journals was one issue we took up, and here the barriers were probably greater than those faced by Latin American scholars in the Northern publishing world. I found that the Irish academics were not all prepared to forgo their competitive advantages or to really collaborate among themselves beyond some small-scale initiatives. More interesting perhaps is that the dialogue that was considerably enhanced was that among the African institutions and that our project led to the creation of an East African Research and Innovation Association.
At this stage the simple sharing of information across journals of Latin American studies seems a valuable exercise in its own right. We can, I hope, assume that most journal editors do not see themselves as in competition with one another and the journal as a business. (Maybe I am wrong on this.) For me there are two key questions or, rather, factors to consider in taking this debate forward. The first is the primacy of politics and the second is the issue of complexity.
Academic journals are set within very clear and influential fields of power dynamics. There is no neutral “professional” ground that editors can plausibly claim, as all their actions and inactions are dictated by their politics in my view. It is a political choice what we prioritize in our journals, how we organize the editorial boards and the review process, and where we promote our journals. Do Latin America studies journals publish articles in Spanish and Portuguese? Most do, I think, but this is not a simple antidote to Northern dominance. The practical politics of how we democratize the review process and deal with submissions is also, of course, a political question.
Complexity is, also, I believe, crucial to an understanding of the social and political impact of Latin American studies journals. They exist, at least in part, to further the academic careers of powerful Northern academics, and that is not meant as a critique necessarily. To what extent, after that, are they democratic in terms of their responsibility toward less powerful members of their profession? To what extent do they work with those in the region of the world that their area studies approach has set as their problematic, namely, Latin America? Again, we have political choices here and an element of agency.
If I were to add a third conclusion, as is my custom, I would say that we need to return to the deconstruction of “Latin American studies” itself if we are to better understand the politics and complexity of publishing within that field. I can see how it might be hard to be constantly interrogating the raison d’être of a journal if someone is very busy making it happen, but that very geographical focus inevitably has consequences for those in the same line of business (academia, research) in that region. When I was coordinating the Irish-African Partnership for Research Capacity Building I would often reflect on the odd status of “development studies” in Mozambique or Tanzania or Uganda. What was not “development studies” for a sociologist, an economist, or a political scientist in those countries? And yet none of the Irish and few of the African academics saw anything odd in that situation, which could only be the result of colonialism and its impact on higher education.