It is not often observed that the current status of Latin American literary studies closely corresponds to the arrival of new theoretical paradigms in humanistic research. Today, the widening scope of Latin Americanism claims the attention of a growing body of English-writing critics and scholars, including a considerable number of diasporic, postcolonial, and new immigrants from Latin America and other parts of the world. More than a field of studies, or the literary articulation of a hybrid culture, Latin American literature and criticism are perhaps best understood as a transnational discursive community with a significant market for research and sales...

Metanarrative critique has taught us to look at the epistemic organizations of history, to unhinge their discursive anchors, and to probe how power is produced and reproduced through them. Revolution could be one of those narratives. It has come under increasing scrutiny as a key chapter in the postmodern reading of Latin America’s modern history as a failed narrative. It is also seen, often, as part of the Creole neocolonial order that has perpetuated itself for nearly two centuries through chronic cycles of violence, obsessive claims of national or ethnic identity, and deeply ingrained patriarchical impulses that have stood in...

The twentieth century’s fascination with the problems of signification and representation could well be its most stable narrative. Since the discovery of Saussurean epistemology, the allure of the sign has only intensified. We have grown accustomed to its multiple turns as part of a largely Western legacy, less concerned or aware of the ways in which the same legacy has been read or introduced in other parts of the world. The growing body of metacriticism and its authorial corpus—Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida, for instance—are now part of a new indispensable body of theory....

Mapping Caribbean culture has always conjured images of hybridity, mimicry, syncretism, and transculturation. Long before the advent of postmodern troping, the names Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Nicolás Guillén, C. L. R. James, and Fernando Ortiz gave meaning to such categories. But these very terms are now used to designate an imploded sense of otherness in a late-capitalist culture seeking to understand itself amid the cultural shifts of globalization, mass migrations, and a generalized condition of diaspora. Contemporary Euro-American discourses of self-critique, deconstruction, and epistemological unfixity display a tantalizing ambiguity. Unsure whether to celebrate the end of the Cold War or...

Although Ángel Rama was introduced in chapter 3 for his contribution to Latin American transculturation theory, most Latin Americanists would agree that he does not require an introduction. His earlier work on Latin American modernism charted the field for Latin America’s literary specialists in the sixties and seventies, and his entire oeuvre, which includes two books published posthumously (he died in an airplane crash in Spain in 1984), continues to accrue value today as point of reference in debates over cultural studies and postcolonialism. Yet, even as his stature continues to grow in Latin America, Rama’s work remains for the...

“Globalization” strives to name our current epoch, to signify it with a grandiosity and imprecision available to no other term. New investment and communications frontiers, more opportunities and markets for everyone, mass culture across national borders—globalization conjures utopian images as if guided by remote control and inexhaustible benevolence. Beyond that propitious surface, globalization also signals an intensified fusion of cultural, political, and financial interests that closely correlates with postmodern constructs in the cultural terrain and neoliberalism in the political sphere. Each term accentuates a different angle, yet all three—globalization, postmodernism, and neoliberalism—have come to occupy the same...