Arlene Dávila (2012)
New York: NYU Press, 231 p.
Reviewed by Jacob Lederman
Graduate Center, City University of New York
“Neoliberal Americas” as a term is a tempting target for
scrutiny. The Americas, in this case both North and South but also
the Caribbean, hardly present a coherent analytic unit. And
neoliberalism itself has become the subject of intense academic
criticism, rejected as a type of aphorism lacking specificity,
verging on meaninglessness, and applied to numerous capitalist
logics and political-economic constellations. Yet broad structural
change is invariably mediated by the messy realities of local
context. It is reshaped by the relative strength of social
movements, local nationalisms, and contentious politics.
Neoliberalism may indeed be an analytic essentialism, but Dávila
seems to suggest that it is a strategic essentialism worth keeping
around. And despite divergent contexts – New York City, Buenos
Aires, and Puerto Rico – the book holds together as a
demonstration of the way in which neoliberalism – as a set of
economic logics and a form of governmentality – structures space
and social life in profoundly uneven ways.
Culture Works deals with the way in which
value, space and mobility have become circumscribed in
the context of urban processes that legitimate certain kinds of
bodies in particular places. In general, this access is structured
by appeals to forms of culture. Economic sociologists have long
studied the social nature of markets and the institutional
organization of the art world. Dávila’s analysis recognizes that
exchange values rely upon interpersonal, relational processes, yet
she moves beyond this approach by turning a critical lens to the
nature of value itself. Powerful actors manipulate the process of
value production to serve their own symbolic and material needs,
such that “culture is often celebrated because it is seen as an
antidote to economic imperatives, rather than understood as a
central component for neoliberalism’s work” (5).
Culture Works is divided into seven chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 examine consumption in shopping malls in Puerto Rico, followed by a discussion of authenticity claims in the context of artisanal markets, often housed within mall complexes on the island. The local economy is at once lauded by shopping mall developers as a bastion of hyper-consumption, while at the same time chided for the indebtedness of its population and the wastefulness of consumption habits. Drawing upon interviews, Dávila unravels this contradiction, interrogating the way in which moralities of shopping operate in a context framed by the needs of investors on the one hand, and the ideologies of self- reliance and austerity on the other. In the same vein, chapter 2 examines the way in which artisan markets trade on the currency of authenticity, while excluding the very artisans that do not fit pre-established categories of state-sanctioned representation – categories that require artists to develop “Puerto Rican themes […] such as its history, its fauna, flora, and the symbols of the traditional life of our people” (56).
Chapters 3-5 discuss identity politics in the context of Latinos
in the United States. Dávila scrutinizes cultural policies and
arts funding in New York City, the somewhat peculiar identity
politics involved in the potential building of a national museum
of the American Latino, and the artistic interventions of New
York-based Puerto Rican artist Miguel Luciano, whose work
identifies and challenges the cultural order of the city’s art
market. It is remarkable how creative city policies are
accompanied by a focus on marketing the identities of minorities,
insisting upon a form of commodification that negates the
political aspects of these groups’ interventions.
This insidious form of stratification is generated by the very
nature of the contemporary art market. Dávila argues that only
those who can appeal to notions of “art for art’s sake” are
acknowledged as artists. This conception has intrinsically classed
meanings. Funding structures and elite institutions marginalize
neighborhood organizations whose creative activities are part of
broader political and social projects. Those who can make claims
to represent “art for art’s sake” take the lion’s share of state
financing. Thus, the chapter on Miguel Luciano emerges as a case
study of the work being asked of “ethnic art” within the broader
context of neoliberal institutional forms and funding structures.
Luciano’s work is both critical of, yet in part emboldened by, the
commodification of ethnic identity. Critics praise his work for
its political-ethnic context, yet criticize it for being “identity
trapped”.
Dávila skillfully perceives the systems of representation that
structure access to space and value in New York and Puerto Rico.
And it is this precision that is somewhat weaker in the chapters
on Buenos Aires. These two chapters examine tango tourism and
Western expat communities in the context of broader dynamics of
local exclusion, such as those produced by migration to Argentina
from comparatively less privileged countries. Dávila argues that
tango’s international success meant that its popularity became “a
medium for Argentineans to belong to the ‘first world’ while still
being recognized as Argentinian” (141). In analyzing the tourist
economy and its effect on urban spatial politics, Dávila notes how
visitors have contributed to an increase in gentrification,
evictions, and policing of the poor. The economic uncertainty in
the aftermath of Argentina’s financial meltdown of 2001-2002 meant
that real estate became an attractive investment for a local
middle-class skeptical of banks. In search of jobs and foreign
exchange, the local and national states have accompanied this
process of revalorization by upgrading the city center for
touristic production. In fact, land prices have more than tripled
in some areas of the historic center since 2001. Dávila explores
how marginal groups have experienced these changes, noting that
the tourist economy benefits relatively privileged sectors of the
city, while causing displacement among others.
Yet these chapters might have benefited from complicating the
antinomies that have long fascinated scholars of Argentina: the
trope of a “European” city finding its Latin American destiny. As
a number of local scholars have suggested, most notably urban
historian Adrián Gorelík, these imaginaries are hardly so
clear-cut. They are inflected with various modernity projects that
in different periods have situated “Latin- Americanness” as a
modernizing force, a fearful fate, or a return to some essential
“Argentineness”. While Dávila criticizes the romanticized notion
that foreign tourists may be accepted locally for their love of
tango, she fails to adequately elaborate upon the structure of
feelings that characterize the micro-environment of tango halls.
To this reader, it appears plausible that social distance is
bridged through knowledge of particular forms of cultural
production, bringing dancers together in ways that transcend
nation and class for particular, if limited, periods of time. Yet
Dávila does not elaborate upon the sensorial or affective aspects
of tango parlors, a gap that might have made her argument more
incisive.
Despite these issues, Culture Works successfully develops
themes that increasingly must be studied together. Culture, value,
and spatial access produce new urban politics in multiple, but
related ways. What connects these politics is the manner in which
“creative cities” structure forms of stratification in ways that
make them common to a quite diverse set of spaces. In this sense,
Dávila’s approach to studying the “neoliberal Americas” represents
a bold effort that urbanists in other contexts should replicate.
The text will be of use to a range of audiences, most notably
urban scholars, but also those interested in critical cultural
studies and anthropological approaches to the economy.