0.2 From transatlantic histories of “intoxication” to a hemispheric

Together with the eastern slopes of the Andes, the Amazonas and Orinoco regions offer the greatest richness of psychoactive plants in the world. They have been enlightening and tormenting conquerors, colonizers, chroniclers, merchants, the Catholic Church, transatlantic trading companies, chemists, biologists, artists, and writers for more than five hundred years—long before the twentieth century (culminating in the so-called “war on drugs”) introduced its international system for distinguishing illicit narcotics from licit ones.

Psychoactive substances provide a revealing postcolonial lens for looking into humans’ ecological and social relationships with plants and for reexamining the colonization of the New World. The prominence of these substances in history—substances eventually turned into transatlantic commodities and catalysts for new ways of life in the centers of “progress”—indicates the shifting conflict scenarios that bind modernity to a colonial past and a global present. Meanwhile, the Western hemisphere has become the center of controversy over narcotics.

Why, then, has critical cultural reflection (or, more specifically, such disciplines as Latin American literary and cultural studies, area studies, postcolonial or subaltern studies, and political philosophy) paid only fitful attention to the matter? While cultural critics are accustomed to thinking of globalization in terms of power configurations related to capitalism, coloniality, the nation-state, Otherness, gender, immigration, and the mass media, most have neglected the formative role of modern struggles over drugs in these regards.

As far as omissions in Hispanic literary and cultural studies are concerned, are we perhaps dealing with a phenomenon of disavowal—as, for example, the inclusion of Fernando Ortiz’s famous Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar into the academic canon might suggest? Ortiz’s 1940 book, labeled an anthropological and historical masterpiece by Malinowski, Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995); Bronislaw Malinowski, “Introduction,” in Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint , lvii-lxiv. became a cornerstone in the 1970s and 1980s for the reorientation of Latin Americanist literary scholars. At issue was the search for a new, non-metropolitan branch of cultural studies: transculturation studies (or the popularization of the anthropological term “transculturation,” as discussed in Ortiz’s book, in U.S. literary and cultural studies of Latin America), inspired by Angel Rama’s Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (1982). Angel Rama, Transculturación Narrativa en América Latina , (México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1982). However, there was one thing missing in numerous post-traditional approaches to the work of the Cuban anthropologist and his narrative reinvention of tobacco and sugar as “cultural personae”: an awareness that Ortiz’s declaration of tobacco and sugar as the allegorical couple representing a locally and globally informed, transcultural identity of Cubans and other Caribbean peoples was actually a reflection on two of modernity’s powerful psychoactive substances. His was an interest in a kind of Latin American epistemic, ethnographic, and economic protagonism in the global venture, in which such products from the “underdeveloped” world would stimulate and embellish the culture of the European and North American centers.