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Franco, Jean. 2002. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $52.00 hc. $22.95 sc. 352 pp.
In The Sociology of Music, Theodore Adorno paints a dour picture of advanced capitalism's deleterious effect on music (e.g., the imposition of a culture industry which subverted creative genius and privileged repetition and replication), yet he consistently demonstrates a faith in the avant-garde to escape the ravages of capitalism and arrogate a space for creativity and exploration. In The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War, Jean Franco writes a similar kind of cultural history for Latin America since the Cold War. The book is framed by a pessimistic evaluation of the lose-lose effects of the Cold War for Latin America, yet throughout the book Franco consistently turns to exemplary cultural figures, texts, art, and film to demonstrate how a creative work or an aesthetic practice was able to escape the pitched ideological battles of the Cold War, find its own voice, and preserve a Latin American particularity in the face of homogenizing global forces. Admitting, at best grudgingly, some sense of hope in the face of an otherwise grim analysis of Latin American society since the 1950s, Franco finds continued evidence of an "exuberant creativity" in Latin America that can liberate itself from imposed ideological boundaries, adapt and master foreign imports to its own ends, and successfully assert its inexorable difference in a globalized economy.
In the initial chapters, Franco lays out how binary Cold War ideologies invaded Latin America to its detriment. Seen as a prize by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Latin America became a battle-ground in the struggle of the two superpowers,...