Fernando Gómez Herrero. I would like to touch on the idea of places John Beverley will not go now as opposed to places you might have gone or you indeed went twenty-five years ago. You told me that you wanted to present a series of panels entitled ‘Are Golden-Age Studies Obsolete?’ at the MLA [Modern Language Association of America]. Is that the direction you would see yourself going? How would you talk about the trajectory of your work on the Baroque?

John Beverley. I think I have gone in a circle, in the sense that I have come back from Cultural Studies, subaltern studies, testimonio, and the like —the moment of ‘theory’, if you will— to read and teach Baroque texts closely again. I have been pushed in that direction by my students. Not that they are particularly interested in Peninsular literature —most of them are from Latin America, and we are one of the few Spanish departments in the United States that is focused almost exclusively on Latin American literature. But they like very much the idea of the neo-Baroque, which they access through Sarduy, Carpentier, Lezama Lima, Perlongher's neo-barroso, and so on. And they are pushing against Against Literature, so to speak. That is their anxiety of influence. They want to make through the neo-Baroque a claim for literature in Latin America as having an aesthetic logic of supplementarity and excess that they see as emancipatory.

FGH. But your own reading of the Baroque still has little to do with the whole vindication of neo-Baroque in the fashion of Serge Gruzinski, let us say, and these kinds of celebrations of blending, mixings and mestizaje, Blade-Runner kinds of chaotic pastiche …

JB. My reading, yes. My suspicion of the Baroque as a literary ideologeme was that it was often connected in Latin American discussions with an ideology of cultural mestizaje, whereas I would say that my work is much more attentive to that which lies outside the possibility of being represented by mestizaje. But to tell you the truth, in what my students want to do there is a lot of that. They know I have been very critical of seeing the Baroque through notions like mestizaje or hybridity. But I suspect there is more of Sarduy than of me in their interest in the Baroque.