Cuban author and musicologist Alejo Carpentier wrote that Latin American music is a phenomenon like an explosion whose history and evolution, unlike the history of European music, cannot be traced in a linear or coherent pattern. According to Carpentier, Latin American music arises from nowhere as a series of accidents, unplanned events and startling surprises. One might argue that all culture is an accident, but Carpentier's point is intended to emphasize the arbitrary and even violent roots of Latin American music. The music now associated with the countries and regions of Latin America originated from three cultural formations: indigenous American, European and African, but the genealogies of the many products of these sources are not easily traced. Once the Europeans had arrived in the Americas, followed later by the Africans they brought as slaves, the three traditions began to mix and alter, so that it was no longer possible to speak in terms of pure forms, whether European, African or indigenous.

The history of Latin American music is therefore a complicated affair. There are conflicting versions of the origins of many forms, often the result of calculated speculation from uncertain evidence or the consequence of a particular politics of identity. Some musicologists have sought the origins of Argentinian tango in English country dancing of the mid-seventeenth century and have offered a genealogy that passes through the Cuban dance forms, the habanera and contradanza. Their genealogy exemplifies the accidental transformations likely to be undergone by any genre, but overlooks important local phenomena, including the wave of European immigration to South America in the late nineteenth century and the earlier significant presence of black communities in the River Plate republics where tango first appeared.

In this passage from the novel Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Gabriel García Márquez depicts the impact of 'modernity' on the previously isolated town of Macondo. New technologies of light, speed and sound - 'so many marvellous inventions' - are brought in on what is described as an 'innocent' yellow train, though this innocence is revealed to have more sinister implications as the imperial powers, in the form of the banana company, soon arrive and take charge of the region. A local merchant offers the first movie projection in town, with films and equipment bought in from outside: the very technology of cinema, its cost and sophistication, is seen to reflect and exacerbate the unequal development between 'peripheral' places like Macondo and the metropolitan centres. The new audiences would gradually learn the conventions of documentary and narrative cinema, but the immediate impact of the medium was thrilling, ‘dazzling’, ‘amazing’. The people of Macondo have an immediate empathy with filmic melodrama – and melodrama would be one of the main structuring forces of Latin American cinema – but find the developing ‘star’ system, with celebrated actors in different roles, somewhat less believable. Cinema, which Macondo’s mayor calls ‘a machine of illusions’, is here seen as a most powerful form of entertainment, instruction but also obfuscation.

One main theme in Quine’s philosophy, one that emerged in the very early article “Truth by Convention” (1936), was skepticism toward the notions of meaning and analyticity. These were key notions in the work of Carnap and other philosophers whom Quine regarded highly. His criticism soon spread to the notions of logical necessity and possibility, which, following Carnap and C. I. Lewis, he regarded as closely connected with the former notions. Carnap and Lewis subscribed to the so-called linguistic view on necessity, which Quine formulated this way: “[A[ statement of the form 'Necessarily … ' is true if and only if the component statement which 'necessarily' governs is analytic, and a statement of the form 'Possibly … ' is false if and only if the negation of the component statement which 'possibly' governs is analytic” (RAM 143).

Quine saw two kinds of problems connected with the modal notions. First, like the notions of meaning and analyticity, they are unclear: It is hard to draw a line between what is necessary and what is merely accidental. This is the case with many other notions, too. Where does one draw the line between mountains and mere hills, and when does a man cease being thin haired and become bald? However, the obscurity affecting the modal notions and the notions of meaning and analyticity is of a different and more malignant kind. There is not just vagueness, a problem of difficult borderline cases; even in the seemingly most clear-cut cases, it is difficult to understand what distinguishes the necessary from that which is merely possible. One can, of course, “explain” necessity in terms of possibility: What is necessary is what cannot possibly be otherwise.

Hispanic people in the United States are no longer on the fringes of society. According to the US Census Bureau, 38.8 million lived north of the Rio Grande in 2002. That is only a record of those who are legally present. Many more, perhaps millions, are also part of the United States, although they are not yet full-fledged citizens. Not even the words used to define them are unproblematic. Too many educators, administrators and general readers are unclear as to what exactly the term 'Latino' means. Does it encompass all people with a Hispanic background, regardless of where they are born or currently live? Is the category of race a defining factor? Or is it class, nationality and language? Is Latino literature written exclusively in Spanish and delivered in translation? These misunderstandings are a symptom of a collective need to delineate - to some, simplify - a community that is only recently being considered, in statistics, by politicians and the media, as a single, semi-homogenized group.to journalists like Roberto Suro and Juan González, the definition is becoming more concrete in the public sphere, but not rapidly enough to dispel the scores of questions that abound concerning the background and unity of the minority. The term Latino has come to be used to refer to people of Hispanic background born and/or living in the United States. In terms of their size and their history, they are a minority group made of various national subgroups. The three largest are Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans on the mainland, followed by smaller groups such as Dominican-Americans and Colombian-Americans. In the general imagination, for decades this minority has been addressed in a myriad of ways, from the ‘Spanishspeaking people’ to hispanos to Latins.

In an essay written in 1928, the Peruvian radical intellectual José Carlos Maríategui reflected on literary nationalism:

In recent decades the concept of the nation has been under scrutiny in ways similar to Mariátegui’s critique. But in Spanish America, the creation of nations is inextricably intertwined with literarydevelopment, and no single historical narrative can account for the multiple developments in the literary sphere. National political projects shaped historiography as well as the history and concept of literature because, despite similarities of language and formation within the Spanish heritage, vast geographic extensions and striking cultural differences made Spanish America difficult to conceive without national categories. The dominance of the national framework did not, however, preclude other visions of the future. From the early years of the nineteenth century, independence leaders like Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar envisioned a unified Spanish America joined together by a common linguistic and occidental cultural heritage.

INTRODUCTION

Quine’s doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation has been described as “the most fascinating and the most discussed philosophical argument since Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.” Yet it has proved extraordinarily hard to state clearly without trivializing it. An illustration will give a preliminary idea of what it is about.

Suppose a German physicist remarks, 'Das Neutrino hat keine Masse'. Then any English-speaking physicist with a knowledge of German will translate that sentence by 'Neutrinos have no mass'. That meshes perfectly with the going scheme for translating between the two languages and raises no problems at all. However, if Quine is right, it would be possible to devise an alternative scheme for translating between German and English that fitted all the relevant objective facts yet offered as its own version of 'Das Neutrino hat keine Masse' an English sentence that we should all agree was not even loosely equivalent to 'Neutrinos have no mass'. I cannot say what such an alternative translation would be like. The trouble, according to Quine, is that to produce a complete alternative scheme for translating between a given pair of languages would require too much time and effort to be seriously considered. (The project seems unlikely to attract a grant.) Attempts have been made to construct simple examples, but they are not compelling (see §11). Still, that illustration will serve to convey the general idea – except that without further explanation it is likely to create misunderstandings. I will try to forestall the commonest ones straight away.

Popular culture is a term used to refer to a very broad and diverse array of forms and practices such as salsa, samba, religious ritual and magic, carnivals, telenovelas (television soaps), masks, pottery, weaving, alternative theatre, radio, video and oral narrative as well as the 'wholeway of life', the language, dress and political culture of subordinate classes and ethnic groups. It covers a whole spectrum of cultural practices, which are seen as lying outside the institutionalized and canonized forms of knowledge and aesthetic production generally defined as 'high' culture. These practices have in turn been studied within different disciplinary frameworks and variously defined as 'folk culture', 'mass culture', 'the culture industry' and 'working-class culture'. To gain an understanding of popular culture in Latin America is therefore a challenge to our sociological imagination: it entails examining particular cultural manifestations while simultaneously being aware of how the very object of study, and hence our knowledge of it, is framed in a certainway by a given intellectual tradition or disciplinary framework.

In the 1920s a group of Brazilian intellectuals produced an 'Anthropophagite Manifesto', arguing that they should devour the arts of Europe in order to nourish themselves and to produce a new Brazilian culture, vital and powerful. This image is a helpful way of articulating much of Latin American culture in the twentieth century, as artists and intellectuals have actively soughtways of affirming their strength and autonomy while still acknowledging Europe as an important source of ideas. The cannibal metaphor is also a useful way of approaching the art of earlier centuries: much of the best of colonial art and architecture is not a weak and belated echo of European innovations, as conventional notions of centre and periphery would have it, but a translation or transformation of imported ideas to suit a different context. This chapter will argue that the art and architecture of Latin America are interesting for their selective appropriations and manipulations, for their originality rather than for their dependence.