Colonialism Past and Present

Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America Today

Alvaro Felix Bolanos, Gustavo Verdesio, Alvaro Felix Bolanos, Gustavo Verdesio

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780791489765
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of essays offers alternative readings of historical and literary texts produced during Latin America's colonial period. By considering the political and ideological implications of the texts' interpretation yesterday and today, it attempts to "decolonize" the field of Latin American studies and promote an ethical, interdisciplinary practice that does not falsify or appropriate knowledge produced by both the colonial subjects of the past and the oppressed subjects of the present. Using recent developments in postcolonial theory, the contributors challenge traditional approaches to Hispanism. The colonial situation under which these texts were composed, with all its injustices and prejudices, still lingers, and most studies have consistently avoided the connection between this colonial legacy and the situation of disenfranchised groups today. Colonialism Past and Present challenges discursive strategies that celebrate only European cultural traits, dismiss non-European cultural legacies, and solidify constructions of national projects considered natural extensions of European civilization since independence from Spain.

Table of contents

• Colonialism Past and Present
• Contents
• Colonialism Now and Then: Colonial Latin American Studies in the Light of the Predicament of Latin Americanism by Gustavo Verdesio
• On the Issues of Academic Colonization and Responsibility when Reading and Writing About Colonial Latin America Today by Alvaro Félix Bolaños
• Pre-Columbian Pasts and Indian Presents in Mexican History by José Rabasa
• Confronting Imaginations: Towards an alternative reading of the Codex Mendoza by Cora Lagos
• Narrating Colonial Interventions: Don Diego de Torres, Cacique of Turmequé in the New Kingdom of Granada by Luis Fernando Restrepo
• (Post-)Colonial Sublime: Order and Indeterminacy in Eighteenth-century Spanish American Poetics and Aesthetics by Antony Higgins
• Gendered Crime and Punishment in New Spain: Inquisitional Cases Against Ilusas by Stacey Schlau
• Representing Gender, Deviance, and Heterogeneity in the Eighteenth-Century Peruvian Newspaper Mercurio Peruano by Mariselle Meléndez
• The Dragon and the Seashell: British Corsairs, Epic Poetry and Creole Nation in Viceregal Peru by José Antonio Mazzotti
• History and Plunder in El carnero: Writing, among Indians, a History of Spaniards and Euro-Americans in Colonial Spanish America by Alvaro Félix Bolaños
• The Literary Appropriation of the American Landscape: The Historical Novels of Abel Posse and Juan José Saer and Their Critics by Gustavo Verdesio
• “Writing with his thumb in the air”: Coloniality, Past and Present by Sara Castro-Klarén
• Index