The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America

John Beverley, Michael Aronna, José Oviedo, John Beverley, Michael Aronna, José Oviedo

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN: 9780822316145, 9780822315865
• eBook ISBN: 9780822382683
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

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

Table of contents

• Contents
• Note to This Edition
• Introduction
• Our Identity Starting from Pluralism in the Base
• Notes on Modernity and Postmodernity in Latin American Culture
• Latin American Identity and Mixed Temporalities; or, How to be Postmodern and Indian at the Same Time
• Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures)
• The Hybrid: A Conversation with Margarita Zires, Raymundo Mier, and Mabel Piccini
• Postmodernism and Neoliberalism in Latin America
• Postmodernism and Imperialism: Theory and Politics in Latin America
• Founding Statement
• A Disenchantment Called Postmodernism
• Postwork Society and Postmodern Subjectivities
• Feminism: Modern or Postmodern?
• Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America
• Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Postmodernist De-centering
• The Peripheral Center of Postmodernism: On Borges, García Márquez, and Alterity
• Reading and Discursive Intensities: On the Situation of Postmodern Reception in Brazil
• Aesthetics and Post-Politics: From Fujimori to the Gulf War
• National by Imitation
• Postmodernism, Postleftism, and Neo–Avant-Gardism: The Case of Chile’s Revista de Crítica Cultural
• Reply to Vidal (from Chile)
• Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle
• Contributors
• Index