John Beverley

Latinamericanism after 9/11

Luis de Góngora y Argote

La defensa de las "Soledades" de Góngora, que levantó polémicas desde su aparición, se ha hecho en nombre de lo que Dámaso Alonso llamó "el puro placer de las formas". Esta edición sugiere otra lectura basada en el desengaño de la corte y el destino político de España. En cuanto al texto, sólo se aparta levemente de la edición de Dámaso Alonso en la restauración de algunos elementos barrocos.

Soledades

Marc Zimmerman

“This book began in what seemed like a counterfactual intuition . . . that what had been happening in Nicaraguan poetry was essential to the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution,” write John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman. “In our own postmodern North American culture, we are long past thinking of literature as mattering much at all in the ‘real’ world, so how could this be?” This study sets out to answer that question by showing how literature has been an agent of the revolutionary process in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The book begins by discussing theory about the relationship between literature, ideology, and politics, and charts the development of a regional system of political poetry beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in late twentieth-century writers. In this context, Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, Roque Dalton of El Salvador, and Otto René Castillo of Guatemala are among the poets who receive detailed attention.

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

José Oviedo

Michael Aronna

Postmodernism may seem a particularly inappropriate term when used in conjunction with a region that is usually thought of as having only recently, and then unevenly, acceded to modernity. Yet in the last several years the concept has risen to the top of the agenda of cultural and political debate in Latin America. This collection explores the Latin American engagement with postmodernism, less to present a regional variant of the concept than to situate it in a transnational framework. Recognizing that postmodernism in Latin America can only inaccurately be thought of as having traveled from an advanced capitalist "center" to arrive at a still dependent neocolonial "periphery," the contributors share the assumption that postmodernism is itself about the dynamics of interaction between local and metropolitan cultures in a global system in which the center-periphery model has begun to break down. These essays examine the ways in which postmodernism not only designates the effects of this transnationalism in Latin America, but also registers the cultural and political impact on an increasingly simultaneous global culture of a Latin America struggling with its own set of postcolonial contingencies, particularly the crisis of its political left, the dominance of neoliberal economic models, and the new challenges and possibilities opened by democratization. With new essays on the dynamics of Brazilian culture, the relationship between postmodernism and Latin American feminism, postmodernism and imperialism, and the implications of postmodernist theory for social policy, as well as the text of the Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle of the Zapatatista National Liberation Army, this expanded edition of boundary 2 will interest not only Latin Americanists, but scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern. Contributors. Xavier Albó, José Joaquín Brunner, Fernando Calderón, Enrique Dussel, Néstor García Canclini, Martín Hopenhayn, Neil Larsen, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, Norbert Lechner, María Milagros López, Raquel Olea, Aníbal Quijano, Nelly Richard, Carlos Rincón, Silviano Santiago, Beatriz Sarlo, Roberto Schwarz, and Hernán Vidal

The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America

These four germinal essays by John Beverley sparked the widespread discussion and debate surrounding testimonio--the socially and politically charged Latin American narrative of witnessing--that culminated, with David Stoll's highly publicized attack on Rigoberta Menchu's celebrated testimonial text. Challenging Hardt and Negri's "Empire, Beverley's extensive new introduction examines the broader historical, political, and ethical issues that this literature raises, tracing the development of testimonio from its emergence in the Cold War era to the rise of a globalized economy and of U.S. political hegemony. Informed by postcolonial studies and the current debate over multiculturalism and identity politics, "Testimonio reaches across disciplinary boundaries to show how this particular literature at once represents and enacts new forms of agency on the part of previously repressed social subjects, as well as its potential as a new form of "alliance politics" between those subjects and artists, scientists, teachers, and intellectuals in a variety of local, national, and international contexts.

On the Politics of Truth

Testimonio

Gaze Into Holidaze

DIVA discussion of current debates in cultural and subaltern studies, with a particular focus on Latin America, that offers the possibility of constituting new political practices./div

Arguments in Cultural Theory

Subalternity and Representation

Is there a way of thinking about literature that is 'outside' or 'against' literature? In Against Literature, John Beverley brilliantly responds to this question, arguing for a negation of the literary that would allow nonliterary forms of cultural practice to displace literature's hegemony.

Against Literature

The term “subalternity” refers to a condition of subordination brought about by colonization or other forms of economic, social, racial, linguistic, and/or cultural dominance. Subaltern studies is, therefore, a study of power. Who has it and who does not. Who is gaining it and who is losing it. Power is intimately related to questions of representation—to which representations have cognitive authority and can secure hegemony and which do not and cannot. In this book John Beverley examines the relationship between subalternity and representation by analyzing the ways in which that relationship has been played out in the domain of Latin American studies. Dismissed by some as simply another new fashion in the critique of culture and by others as a postmarxist heresy, subaltern studies began with the work of Ranajit Guha and the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective in the 1980s. Beverley’s focus on Latin America, however, is evidence of the growing province of this field. In assessing subaltern studies’ purposes and methods, the potential dangers it presents, and its interactions with deconstruction, poststructuralism, cultural studies, Marxism, and political theory, Beverley builds his discussion around a single, provocative question: How can academic knowledge seek to represent the subaltern when that knowledge is itself implicated in the practices that construct the subaltern as such? In his search for answers, he grapples with a number of issues, notably the 1998 debate between David Stoll and Rigoberta Menchú over her award-winning testimonial narrative, I, Rigoberta Menchú. Other topics explored include the concept of civil society, Florencia Mallon’s influential Peasant and Nation, the relationship between the Latin American “lettered city” and the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780–1783, the ideas of transculturation and hybridity in postcolonial studies and Latin American cultural studies, multiculturalism, and the relationship between populism, popular culture, and the “national-popular” in conditions of globalization. This critique and defense of subaltern studies offers a compendium of insights into a new form of knowledge and knowledge production. It will interest those studying postcolonialism, political science, cultural studies, and Latin American culture, history, and literature.

The continuing importance of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American culture.

Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America

This study of Góngora's Soledades is intended to summarize and discuss some of the problems which seemed important for a better understanding of these poems. Special attention is paid to the two opposing 'camps' that developed over time; one mainly focussing on the form and the other on the content of Soledades. In this volume the authors tries to integrate the methods and results of both of the 'camps'.

John Beverley

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