One

My subject is cultural relations and, in particular, relations on the global North/South axis. I am going to consider the multiple and challenging factors at play in the contemporary reading and analysis of Latin American cultures from positions within the metropolitan nations. The context for my approaching this subject is the postcolonial world in which such readings now necessarily take place, a world acutely conscious of the ethical and political dimensions of dealing with the Other. It is a context which has been explored intensively over the last ten years and in which there has developed a productive questioning of how the methods used in analysis in one context are exported to others, a process which may lead to the problematic reduction of the Other to the Same. My aim is to avoid such a reduction and yet to achieve a position in which metropolitan critical practice can be brought into ethical engagement with postcolonial Latin American cultures. The problems inherent in such cultural engagements are pithily encapsulated by the Cuban- American critic, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, who signals the acute sensitivity of Latin Americans to the ‘contribution’ of non-Latin Americans to their cultural debates: