The Critical Work of Ricardo Roque Baldovinos and Central American Literary and Cultural Studies

Abstract

The association of literary studies with cultural studies has represented a significant event for the reconfiguration of these fields of knowledge and their contributions within the region. In previous works, I have discussed the emergence of a “critical spring”—a movement that primarily entailed shifting the reading of literary and non-literary texts toward social life in order to explore symbolic, subjective, and intersubjective realities through interdisciplinary theoretical elaboration and a political intervention edge (Leyva 2015, 2025). In this work, I propose considering the trajectory of Ricardo Roque Baldovinos’s critical body of work—which has engaged with, distanced itself from, and raised questions regarding this process. A reading of the essays collected in Arte y parte. Ensayos de literatura (2001) and Niños de un planeta extraño (2012), as well as the more comprehensive studies El cielo de lo ideal. Literatura y modernización en El Salvador (1860- 1920) (2016) and La rebelión de los sentidos. Arte y revolución durante la modernización autoritaria en El Salvador (2020), allows us to recognize and draw upon the conceptual contributions and methodological frameworks that underpin the consideration of literature within sociocultural processes—contributions and frameworks that would lead the author to radically rethink critical work: “…today we can take a further step and assert that the challenge of a new aesthetics as the foundation of culture lies in the study of sensibility—of the conditions of experience—as a socially and historically constituted reality where the production of social subjects takes place; that is, the production of individuals and collectives acting in consonance with, or in resistance to, configurations of power” (Roque Baldovinos, 2015, p.190).