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A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and postcanonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

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A COMPANION TO LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

SECOND EDITION

This second edition first published 2022 © 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Edition History

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Castro-Klarén, Sara, editor.

Title: A Companion to Latin American literature and culture / edited by Sara Castro-Klaren.

Description: Second edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2022. | Series: Blackwell companions to literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021042908 (print) | LCCN 2021042909 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119692539 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119692607 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119692614 (epub) | ISBN 9781119692591 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Latin American literature--History and criticism. | Latin America--Intellectual life. | Latin America--Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC PQ7081.A1 C555 2022 (print) | LCC PQ7081.A1 (ebook) | DDC 860.9/98--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042908

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042909

Cover image: © DeepGreen/Shutterstock

Cover design by Wiley

Set in size

10.5/12.5pt and Garamond 3 LT Std by Integra Software Private Ltd, Pondicherry, India

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my grandchildren, Eleanora and Theodore Hass

21 Machado de Assis: The Meaning of Sardonic

Todd S. Garth

22 The Mexican Revolution and the Plastic Arts 353

Horacio Legras

23 Anthropology, Pedagogy, and the Various Modulations of Indigenismo: Amauta, Tamayo, Arguedas, Sabogal, Bonfil Batalla 371 Javier Sanjinés C.

24 Cultural Theory and the Avant-Gardes: Mariátegui, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Pagú, Tarsila do Amaral, César Vallejo 384

Fernando J. Rosenberg

25 Latin American Poetry 399

Stephen M. Hart

26 Literature between the Wars: Macedonio Fernández, Jorge Luis Borges, and Felisberto Hernández 415

Adriana J. Bergero, translated by Todd S. Garth

27 Narratives and Deep Histories: Freyre, Arguedas, Roa Bastos, Rulfo 434 Adriana Michèle Campos Johnson

28 Alterity and Absence Brazilian Representations of Difference in Guimarães Rosa, Callado, and Lispector 451

Elizabeth A. Marchant

29 Feminist Insurrections: From Queiroz and Castellanos to Morejón, Poniatowska, Valenzuela, and Eltit 464

Adriana J. Bergero and Elizabeth A. Marchant

30 Caribbean Philosophy

Edouard Glissant

31 Uncertain Modernities: Amerindian Epistemologies and the Reorienting of Culture 507 Elizabeth Monasterios Pérez

32 Testimonio, Subalternity, and Narrative Authority

John Beverley

33 Affectivity beyond “Bare Life”: On the Non-Tragic Return of Violence in Latin American Film 537

Hermann Herlinghaus

34 Photography in Latin America: The Case for Another Photography 555 Jorge Coronado

Notes on Contributors

Jerónimo Arellano is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature at Brandeis University. He is the author of Magical Realism and the History of Emotions in Latin America (Bucknell University Press, 2015) and the editor of “Comparative Media Studies in Latin America” (2016), a special issue of Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. He is currently working on a book on Latin/x American screenwriting, its cultural history and creative practice.

Adriana J. Bergero (University of California at Los Angeles) has published El Debate político: Modernidad, poder y disidencia en Yo el Supremo de Augusto Roa Bastos (1994); Haciendo camino: Pactos de la escritura en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges (1999); Memoria colectiva y políticas de olvido: Argentina y Uruguay (1997, with Fernando Reati); (1970–1990) Estudios literarios/Estudios culturales (2005, with Jorge Ruffi nelli). She has published on cultural studies with a focus on the Southern Cone, urban and sensuous geography, gender studies, and postcolonial studies. Her Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900–1930 is forthcoming.

Orlando Betancor is an associate professor at Barnard College/Columbia University. He received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad de la República (Montevideo, Uruguay) in 1997 and his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) from the University of Michigan in 2005. Before joining the Barnard faculty he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (2005–2008) and he also held a visiting appointment at the department of Comparative Literature at Princeton (2007–2008). He is the author if The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Perú (2017), published by Pittsburgh University Press. His current interests are world-ecology, eco-Marxism, and speculative fiction. Bentancor has published articles in Hofstra Hispanic Review, Revista Iberoamericana, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

John Beverley is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of Pittsburgh and an advisory editor of boundary 2. His publications include Del Lazarillo al Sandinismo (1987); Literature and Politics in Central American Revolutions (1990, with Marc Zimmerman); The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (1995, coedited with Michael Aronna and José Oviedo); and Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (1999).

The late Álvaro Félix Bolaños was Professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at the University of Florida. His publications include Barbarie y canibalismo en la retórica colonial: Los indios Pijaos de Fray Pedro Simón (1994) and Colonialism Past and Present: Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America Today (2002, with Gustavo Verdesio).

Matthew Bush is Associate Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies at Lehigh University. His research examines contemporary Latin American literature and culture, focusing primarily on Mexico, Peru, and Argentina. He is the author of  Pragmatic Passions: Melodrama and Latin American Social Narrative (2014), and coeditor of Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin

America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era (2016) and  Un asombro renovado: Vanguardias contemporáneas en América Latina (2017). His writings have appeared in the journals Modern Language Notes, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and A Contracorriente, among others.

Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she directs the Migration Studies minor. She is past president of the international Latin American Studies Association. She specializes in contemporary narrative and performance from the Spanish-speaking world (including the United States), gender studies, comparative border studies, and cultural theory. Her most recent books include South of the Future: Speculative Biotechnologies and Care Markets in South Asia and Latin America (with Anindita Banerjee) and The Scholar as Human (with Anna Sims Bartel).

Sara Castro-Klaren is Professor of Latin American Culture and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. She has been the recipient of several teaching awards. Most recently the Foreign Service Institute conferred upon her the title of “Distinguished Visiting Lecturer” (1993). She was appointed to the Fulbright Board of Directors by President Clinton in 1999. Her publications include El Mundo mágico de Jose Maria Arguedas (1973); Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa (1990); Escritura, sujeto y transgresion en la literatura latinoamericana (1989); and Latin American Women Writers (1991, coedited with Sylvia Molloy and Beatriz Sarlo).

Jorge Coronado is Professor of modern Latin American and Andean literatures and cultures at Northwestern University. He is the author of  The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity and Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900–1950 and the coeditor of Visiones de los Andes: Ensayos críticos sobre el concepto de paisaje y region. He is currently interested in how Latin America and its regions have cohered in the cultural imagination; the lettered practices that racialized activists produced by appropriating intellectuals’ tutelage to their own ends; and expanding the archive of the continent’s lettered and cultural production.

Rocío Cortés is a Professor of Colonial Latin American Literature and co-Chair of the Department of Global Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Her research interests focus on the Indigenous intellectual agency through official chronicles and mundane documents, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Mexico. She has published El Nahuatlatlo Alvarado y el Tlalmath Huauhquilpan (2011); Narradores Indígenas y mestizos de la época colonial (siglos XVI–XVII) Zonas andina y mesoamericana (2016), and several articles on the Indigenous writer don Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc.

Lúcia Helena Costigan teaches Luso-Brazilian and Spanish American literatures and cultures at the Ohio State University. She has published articles and books on colonial and postcolonial Brazil and Latin America. Many of her publications focus on comparative analyses between Brazil and other Latin American countries. Some of her recent publications include Diálogos da conversão: Missionários, índios, negros e judeus no contexto ibero-americano do período barroco (2005), and with Russell G. Hamilton, “Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian Literatures,” Research in African Literatures (Spring 2007). Her forthcoming Literature and the Inquisition in the New World elaborates on migratory movements from Europe to the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and on the institutionalization of religious violence and censorship in the New World.

Fernando Degiovanni is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Los textos de la patria: Nacionalismo, políticas culturales y canon en Argentina (2007). His work has been published in Revista Iberoamericana, Journal of Latin American

Cultural Studies, and Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, as well as in several edited volumes. He specializes in issues of cultural politics and canon formation in the Latin American fin de siècle. He is currently working on a book-length project that examines the emergence of Latin American literature as a fi eld of study.

Lisa DeLeonardis is Austen-Stokes Professor in art of the ancient Americas at Johns Hopkins University. She has authored several works on the art, architecture, and cartography of vice-regal Peru. Her current project, “A Transatlantic Response to Worlds that Shake,” was undertaken as the Charles K. Williams II fellow in Historic Preservation and Conservation at the American Academy in Rome (2018). The Rome Prize was inspired by an earlier study of the architecture of Santa Cruz de Lancha, published recently as “Paredes ingrávidas de efecto teatral” in El arte antes historia (eds. Curatola et al., 2020). Her book project explores Jesuit, Indigenous, and AfroPeruvian influences on eighteenth-century architecture and material culture.

Peter Elmore is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is the author of Los muros invisibles. Lima y la modernidad en la novela del siglo XX (Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2015), La estación de los encuentros. Ensayos y artículos (Peisa, 2010), El perfil de la palabra. La obra de Julio Ramón Ribeyro (Fondo de Cultura Económica-Fondo Editorial de la PUCP, 2002) and La fábrica de la memoria. La crisis de la representación en la novela histórica latinoamericana (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997). His latest book, Los juicios finales. Mentalidades andinas y cultura peruana moderna, is forthcoming. He has published four novels: Enigma de los cuerpos (Peisa, 1995), Las pruebas del fuego (Peisa, 1999), El fondo de las aguas (Peisa, 2006), and El náufrago de la santa (Peisa, 2013). He has coauthored several plays with Yuyachkani, Perú´s premier theatre group.

Sibylle Fischer (Ph.D. Columbia) is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature, and Africana Studies at New York University (NYU). Before joining NYU, she taught in the Literature Program and Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. Her Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (2004) received the Frantz Fanon Award (Caribbean Philosophical Association), the Singer Kovacs Award (Modern Language Association), and the Bryce Wood Award (Latin American Studies Association), and in 2007 was the cowinner of the Sybil and Gordon Lewis Award (Caribbean Studies Association). She is the editor of a new translation of Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (2005), and is currently working on a project about political subjectivity and violence.

Gustavo Furtado is Associate Professor of Latin American literature and cinema at Duke University and the author of Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil: Cinematic Archives of the Present (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Todd S. Garth is Associate Professor of Spanish at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. He is the author of The Self of the City: Macedonio Fernández, the Argentine Avant-Garde, and Modernity in Buenos Aires (2005), along with articles on Borges, Horacio Quiroga, and Machado de Assis. He is currently writing a study of seven interwar authors in the Río de la Plata region and their interrelated quests for pioneering, autochthonous ethical discourses. His ongoing research on Machado de Assis similarly examines that author’s efforts toward a transformation in Brazilian ethical thought.

Edouard Glissant has been a Visiting Professor of French Literature at the City University of New York (CUNY) since 1995. His publications include Le discours antillais (1981); The Ripening (1985); Mahagony: Roman (1987); Faulkner, Mississippi (1999); and Une Nouvelle région du monde (2006).

Leila Gómez in an Associate Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies and Director of the Latin American Studies Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research interests include Latin American and Indigenous literature, film, and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, with emphasis on the Andes, Mexico, Paraguay, and Argentina. Among her books are Impossible Domesticity: Travels in Mexico (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Teaching Gender through Latin American, Spanish and Latino Literature and Culture (coeditor, Sense Publishers, 2015), Darwinism in Argentina: Major Texts 1845–1909 (editor, Bucknell University Press, 2011), and Iluminados y tránsfugas: Relatos de viajeros y ficciones nacionales en Argentina, Paraguay y Perú (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2009). For her book project Impossible Domesticity, Leila Gómez was the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for Advanced Researchers 2014–2015. As director of the Latin American Studies Center, Gómez is the Principal Investigator in the US Department of Education Grant (IFLE) to develop and implement the Quechua Language Program at CU-Boulder, since 2020.

Stephen M. Hart (PhD, Cambridge, UK, 1985) is Professor of Latin American Film and Latin American literature at University College London. He is Director of the Centre of César Vallejo Studies at UCL. He has published a number of books, including A Companion to Spanish American Literature (1999) and A Companion to Latin American Film (2004). He holds an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional Mayor of San Marcos in Lima and the Orden al Mérito from the Peruvian Government for his research on César Vallejo.

Hermann Herlinghaus is Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Globalized South will be published in 2008. Among his recent publications are Renarración y descentramiento: Mapas alternativos de la modernidad en América Latina (2004); Narraciones anacrónicas de la modernidad: melodrama e intermedialidad en América Latina (2002); and Modernidad heterogénea: Descentramientos hermenéuticos desde la comunicación en América Latina (2000). He has edited a variety of volumes on the history of concepts, and on contemporary literary and cultural debates.

Adriana Michèle Campos Johnson is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at UC-Irvine. She is currently fi nishing a manuscript on the subalternization of Canudos. Her recent publications include “Everydayness and Subalternity,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 106:1 (2006); “Two Proposals for an Aesthetic Intervention in Politics: A Review of Nelly Richard, Masculine/Feminine and The Insubordination of Signs and Doris Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics,” New Centennial Review, 5:3 (2005); and a translation of Ticio Escobar, The Curse of Nemur: On the Art, Myth and Rituals of the Ishir Peoples of the Paraguayan Great Chaco (2007).

Hendrik Kraay is professor of history at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Bahia’s Independence: Popular Politics and Patriotic Festival in Salvador, Brazil, 1824–1900 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), Days of National Festivity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1823–1889 (Stanford University Press, 2013), and Race, State, and Armed Forces in Independence-Era Brazil: Bahia, 1790s–1840s (Stanford University Press, 2001). He is also the editor or coeditor of five books, including Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics: Bahia, 1790s–1990s (M.E. Sharpe, 1997), and has published numerous articles on Brazilian history.

Horacio Legras teaches Latin American literature and culture at the University of California-Irvine. He has published articles on the Mexican Revolution, Andean literature, and nineteenth-century Argentine culture. His forthcoming book, Literature and Subjection, explores the historical role of the literary form in the incorporation of marginal subjectivities to representation in Latin America.

Carlos M. López is a professor and researcher in the Department of Modern Languages at Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia. His specialization is in the study of the Popol Wuj and the production of texts under conditions of colonization. Among his publications is Los Popol Wuj y sus Epistemologías: Las diferencias, el conocimiento y los ciclos del infi nito (1999). He is the academic director of the online edition of the manuscript of the Popol Wuj in the collaborative project developed by Ohio State University Libraries and the Newberry Library (http://library.osu.edu/ sites/ popolwuj) and also the academic director of the online site The Popol Wuj and Mayan Culture Archives (http://sppo.osu.edu/latinAmerica/archives/PopolWujLibrary/) hosted by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Center for Latin American Studies at Ohio State University.

Franklin W. Knight is Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He has published extensively on Latin America and the Caribbean, including Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (1970) and The Caribbean: Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (1990). He served as president of the Latin American Studies Association as well as of the Historical Society.

Elizabeth A. Marchant is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at UCLA. She is the author of Critical Acts: Latin American Women and Cultural Criticism (University Press of Florida) and coeditor of Comparative Perspectives on the Black Atlantic, a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies (48.2). She is currently writing a book on enslavement and counter-memory in Brazil.

Kathryn Joy McKnight is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of New Mexico. Her book The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671–1742 (1997) was awarded the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Award. In 2009, she coedited with Leo Garofalo Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812. Her health humanities text Para vivir con salud: leyendo la salud y la literatura (2021) co-authored with Jill S. Kuhnheim is available as an Open Educational Resource. Her ongoing research focuses on narratives of Afrodescendants in the early modern period and on teaching Hispanic literature to pre-health majors. She was awarded UNM’s Teacher of the Year Award in 2017.

Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature at Duke University. He has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and has in past years worked on different aspects of the modern/colonial world exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. His publications on these topics include: The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization (1995, winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs prize from the Modern Languages Association) and The Idea of Latin America (2005), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000). He is co-author with Catherine Walsh of On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (2018) and The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021). He is editor and coeditor of Capitalismo y geopolítica del conocimiento: El eurocentrismo y la filosofía de la liberación en el debate intelectual contemporanáneo (2000) and The Americas: Loci of Enunciations and Imaginary Constructions (1994–95). His works have been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Estonian, Polish, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Rumanian, Italian, and Turkish.

Elizabeth Monasterios is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Andean Studies in the Department on Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh. Her teaching and research focus on Andean epistemologies, critical posthumanities, colonialism, and anticolonialism. Her most recent authored book,  La vanguardia plebeya del Titikaka. Gamaliel Churata y otras

insurgencies estéticas en los Andes (IFEA, 2015), received the 2016 Roggiano Prize for Latin American Literary Criticism, awarded by the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature. She is also coeditor of the Bolivian Studies Journal, founding member of JALLA (Jornadas Andinas de Literatura Latinoamericana), and has published widely on Andean and Indigenous literatures.

Juan Poblete is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Literatura chilena del siglo XIX: Entre públicos lectores y fi guras autoriales and the editor of Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (both 2003.) He is currently at work on a project on forms of mediation between culture and the market in the context of the neoliberal transformation of Chilean culture. He recently edited interdisciplinary Special Dossiers on the Globalization of Latin/o American Populations and Studies for the journals Iberoamericana (Germany), LASA Forum, and Latino Studies Journal. He is coediting two forthcoming volumes: Andres Bello (with Beatriz Gonzalez-Stephan) and Redrawing The Nation: Latin American Comics and The Graphic Construction of Cultural Identities (with Héctor Fernández-L’Hoeste).

José Rabasa teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. His publications include Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (1993) and Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of New Mexico and Florida and The Legacy of Conquest (2000). He is in the process of collecting together into one volume his numerous articles on postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, and is completing a study of the intersection of pictography, orality, and alphabetical writing in Nahuatl colonial texts.

Juan G. Ramos is an associate professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA) where he teaches courses in both Spanish and English on Latin American and world literature. He is the author of Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts (University of Florida Press, 2018) and coeditor of Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures (Palgrave, 2016). He has also published on twentieth-century Latin American poetry, fiction, and film with a particular emphasis on the Andes. He has received a fellowship at the National Humanities Center (2021–2022) to continue working on his current book project on Andean modernismos.

Luis Fernando Restrepo is university professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he directs the graduate program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. His areas of research are colonial Latin America, Indigenous literatures, and literature and human rights. Among his publications and editions are Un nuevo reino imaginado, Antología Crítica de Juan de Castellanos, El Estado impostor, Narrativas en vilo entre la estética y la política and El malestar del posconflicto. His current book project examines early modern humanitarianism. He has received a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana Literary Criticism Award.

Fernando J. Rosenberg is Professor of Romance Studies, Latin American and Latino and Caribbean Studies, and Film and Television Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Avant-garde and Geopolitics in Latin America (Pittsburgh UP, 2006) and After Human Rights. Literature, Visual Arts and Film in Latin America (1990–2010) (Pittsburgh UP, 2016). He is currently working on contemporary literary and artistic production at the intersection of posthumanism and gender theories.

Javier Sanjinés C. is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He has also been a visiting professor at Duke University and at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, in Quito, Ecuador. Sanjinés has published three books. His most recent is Mestizaje Upside-Down (2004). He has just fi nished a manuscript on the crisis of historical time in the Andean region.

Freya Schiwy is Professor of Media Cultural Studies and a cooperating faculty member in the Hispanic Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of Indianizing Film. Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology (Rutgers University Press, 2009) and The Open Invitation. Activist Video, Mexico, and the Politics of Affect (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Together with Byrt Wammack Weber, she coedited Adjusting the Lens. Community and Collaborative Video in Mexico (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and she is one of the editors of the Journal for Latin American Cultural Studies

Nicolas Shumway is the Tomás Rivera Regents Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. His book The Invention of Argentina (1991) was selected by The New York Times as a “Notable Book of the Year” and appeared in a revised version in Spanish in 2005. He has also published numerous articles on the literature and cultural history of Spanish America, Brazil, and Spain, and been a visiting professor at the Universidade de São Paulo as well as at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and the Universidad San Andrés in Buenos Aires.

Amanda M. Smith is Assistant Professor of Latin American literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding co-chair of the Amazonia section of the Latin American Studies Association. She publishes and teaches on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American cultural production in dialogue with the environmental humanities, spatial humanities, and Indigenous studies. Her book, Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom, examines how literary texts have both overlapped and clashed with institutional projects that divide Amazonia into cultural and economic spaces.

Abril Trigo is Distinguished Humanities Professor of Latin American Cultures at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Caudillo, estado, nación: Literatura, historia e ideología en el Uruguay (1990), ¿Cultura uruguaya o culturas linyeras? (Para una cartografía de la neomodernidad posuruguaya) (1997), Memorias migrantes: Testimonios y ensayos sobre la diáspora uruguaya (2003) and The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, coauthored with Ana Del Sarto and Alicia Ríos (2004). Currently, he is working on Muerte y transfi guración de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos, a book-length essay on the effects of globalization on Latin American cultures, and Crítica de la economía politicolibidinal, a theoretical inquiry on the political economy of contemporary culture.

Gustavo Verdesio is Associate Professor of Spanish and Native American Studies at the University of Michigan. A revised version of his book La invención del Uruguay. La entrada del territorio y sus habitantes a la cultura occidental (1996) has been published as Forgotten Conquests. Rereading New World History from the Margins (2001). He coedited (with Alvaro F. Bolaños) Colonialism Past and Present. Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America Today (2002), and edited issue 52 of the journal Dispositio/n (2005), dedicated to the Latin American Subaltern Studies group. His articles have appeared in journals such as Settler Colonial Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, and Arqueología Suramericana.

Lesley Wyllie is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. She works on Latin American literature and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on the intersections between literature and the environment. She has published books on the novela de la selva and the literary geography of the Putumayo. In 2017 she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete her most recent monograph,  The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). She is Associate Editor of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

Editor’s Acknowledgments

For the second edition, I want to acknowledge the dedication and generosity of all the colleagues who, despite the disruption, hardships, and turmoil brought about by the pandemic of 2020, not only agreed to write for this Companion but sent a set of brilliant, insightful, and intensely researched essays. The Companion has not only been updated but it has gained gravity as scholars writing in the awareness of this fateful year, the deep transformational forces at play that the pandemic has brought to the fore, implicitly reflect on the meaning of this broad, pervasive, and irreversible change.

I need to thank all graduate and undergraduate students who over the years—long after graduation—have worked with me in the most stimulating, singular, and long-lasting scholarly dialogue. The youngest among them is Mariangela Ugarelli who has also assisted with the preparation of the manuscript for this second edition. Knowing that she could handle the Excel page has been a great comfort in dealing with the logistics of the project.

And of course, I once again acknowledge deeply the companionship, patience, and curiosity of Peter Klaren, who although not a literary scholar has read every draft in order to offer his critical appraisal and act in the place of the ideal reader of this Companion

CODA. Companion 2022

As the World Turns . . .

Codas are by definition short interventions. Codas constitute an attempt to reach a satisfactory, though perhaps always temporary, closing to the musical piece unfolding. A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture did, in the first edition as it does in this second edition, represent a kind of musical composition where pleats fold and unfold into inner and forward creases, tucks, and crevices that seem never ending. Conceived as such, a coda at this moment in history acquires the hue of a paradox, in that it both closes and opens the discussion on Latin American culture writ large.

Great change has occurred in Latin America in the last quarter century. Besides a turn to the left that never took place, people in Brazil and Spanish America along with many Indigenous communities living within the borders of various nation-states have experienced and continue to undergo the transformation brought about by the digital forces in play today. The forces of globalization, of which the digital age is only a part, have been exacerbated during the 2020 pandemic as people have been forced to communicate and interact more intensely via the internet, making use of every platform available for multiple purposes of exchange. Together, the pandemic and the digital transformation have repositioned subjects, fractured borders, reconfigured modes of production and realigned personal, social, and political relations. In this context, the paradoxical valance of a coda, as both summary ending but also opening onto uncharted waters, seems justified as a brief introduction to the new and enlightening chapters that comprise the volume in this second edition.

The last time I wrote in this space, we had just entered the new millennium. I suggested then that one of the best ways to understand the history of the unfolding of Latin America was to keep in sight its colonial genealogy and so, the concept of colonial semiosis, imagined as a deep, permanent, and pervasive exchange of signs across all human practices and experiences, seemed to be a good

A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture, Second Edition. Edited by Sara Castro-Klaren.

© 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

place to start. The unfettered exchange of signs and systems of signs that colonial situations entail –despite restrictions and hegemonic rules imposed by the colonizers – opens the way for the appearance of new forms, unsuspected places of enunciation, agencies, the formation of new subjects, new modes of communication and, of course, the emergence of new forms of oppression and dominance as well. Colonial semiosis is never separate from struggle, from loss, from resistance, and from appropriation. However, it is precisely in the space of contention, fraught with epistemological violence, where new subjects, voices, and practices arise. In a way, the multiple and divergent processes and experiences of colonial semiosis reside at the gate of modernity for both the colonizer, who takes “back” the experience and goods from the colonies, and the colonized who struggle to muster the forces necessary to resist and maybe even survive as well as lay the foundations of the variegated modernities that we have come to know and grapple with.

The theorization of these deep processes of colonization has led to the development of one of the most influential concepts we have seen arise in the last 30 years. Colonial semiosis has been absorbed and/or subsumed under the “coloniality of power,” a concept first developed by Anibal Quijano in Peru – not in France or England – and later expanded and further theorized by Walter Mignolo. Quijano stresses the conflict of knowledge and structures of power implicit in his term the “coloniality of power” as he developed it from the perspective of a subject living not at center of modernity but rather experiencing and assessing the epistemological hold of colonialism over the people ruled by empires. Writing in his Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000), Mignolo explains that in the “classification and reclassification of the planet’s population” – the sine qua non of the coloniality of power – “the concept of culture becomes crucial” (17). As Quijano points out, institutional structures become necessary to manage the classifications, distinctions, and hierarchies that organize the modern/colonial system. A powerful deployment of the knowledges sustains both the established order as well as the institutions that hold up its unassailable legitimacy. Most important within this matrix is the development of an epistemological perspective from which to constantly articulate the meaning and shape of the grid of power from which the production of knowledge is to emerge in order to maintain the coloniality of power in the hands of its managers (Mignolo 2000, 17). It is significant to stress here that the coloniality of power constitutes an analysis carried out outside the boundaries of any given discipline. Its analytic perspective was first put forth by Jose Carlos Mariátegui, a Gramscian intellectual concerned with understanding the clutch of coloniality in postcolonial Peru and, by extension, Latin America. He lived his short life far from the academic centers in the United States or Europe. Mariátegui labored every day immersed in the granular reality of the local and widely open to the possible meaning of world history and the forces that sustained the grip of the colonial domination in the clothing of modernity. However, neither Mariátegui nor Quijano could be said to work outside and beyond the broad and multiple umbrella of Western thinking, precisely because of the pervasive reach of the deep coloniality experienced in Latin America.

Rather, Quijano, Mariátegui, and many other trail-blazing Latin American intellectuals and artists should be thought to work from what Borges, in his “El escritor argentina y la tradicion” (1932, Obras completas 1972), posits as the web of thinking within which or against which, or beyond which, a Latin American intellectual operates. That is to say, the whole of Western tradition with special emphasis on its traditions of critical thinking, or thinking irreverently. Borges begins to make his point by asking: “Cual es la tradicion argentina?” (272). He replies by making a claim not for local traditions alone and not for the classical canon but rather for the whole

world’s traditions taken, seen, and transformed from an irreverent perspective. The key is the irreverence as against any kind of orthodoxy. Taking the case of the Irish writers who write in English and in doing so transform the language and the traditions as an example of what he has in mind by “irreverence,” Borges states: “Creo que nuestra tradicion es toda la cultura occidental, y creo tambien que tenemos derecho a esta tradicion, mayor que el que pueden tener los habitants de una u otra nacion occidental . . . Creo que los argentinos, los sudamericanos en general, estamos en una situacion analoga [a la de los irlandeses en relacion a la tradicion inglesa]. Podemos manejar todos los temas europeos, manejarlos sin superticiones, con una irreverencia que puede tener, y ya tiene consecuencias afortunadas” (272–273). In closing the essay, Borges once again claims the whole universe as the patrimonio (heritage) for Latin American intellectuals who should thus not fear the future but rather march forth confidently and try out all topics and modalities irreverently. It is this irreverence practiced at the edge of empire that accounts for the originality and accuracy of the theses involved in the concept of the coloniality of power. To some extent, the first edition of the Companion bears witness to the impact and influence the “coloniality of power” had on many a discipline in the social sciences and humanities.

Given that nothing ever stays the same, or is subject for very long to the same set of influences and innovations, it goes without saying that the tenuously integrated and multifaceted field of “Latin American Studies,” as different from “Latin America” itself, would be, at the same time, open to theoretical developments stemming from various epistemological locations. In fact, “Latin American Studies” comprises many disciplines which more often than not do not dovetail as an inquiry developed under similar or compatible methodologies, perspectives, or set of assumptions. Fractures, contradictions, incoherencies, urgencies, and directions vary enormously from one discipline to the next. Even though one may be able to say that there was/is a linguistic turn or a cultural studies turn in history, or a visual studies turn in anthropology and gender studies appear everywhere, the scholarship in each of those fields of inquiry encompasses questions and answers set within the paradigm of its own. Nevertheless, the institutions that the coloniality of power necessitates to manage knowledge – fellowships, conferences, scholarly journals, university presses, course curricula at university-level instruction, and hiring of teachers and professors—have in the first quarter of this century produced a great deal of scholarship under the aegis of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, queer theory, various Marxist approaches, and postcritical studies.

The second edition of the Blackwell Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture will appear 15 years after it was first conceptualized and assembled. At the moment, the field of Latin American studies, with its attendant large number of disciplines focusing on the history and the present of the region, was not only vigorous and growing; it was thriving. From archaeology to zoology, the number of students enrolled in courses all over the United States seemed to grow every year. Almost any field, but especially those in the humanities and social sciences, had been affected by postmodern theory in the broadest sense of the term, albeit in different ways and with varied results. It goes without saying that the most profound embrace of postmodern theory, beyond departments of French, took place in English departments, where the study of literature began departing from a focus on individual authors and texts under the impact of Marxist cultural studies. The aperture onto culture and more specifically onto the topics of interest to cultural studies – gender identities, feminism, masculinity, binarism, surveillance, spectacle, intersectionality, plasticity, precarity – affected all the humanities, the social sciences, in ways that can only be considered transformative due to the fact that there occurred a radical shift in the set of assumptions, the perspective, and the methods of study that constructed, identified,

and analyzed the new objects of study. The revival of Antonio Gramsci along with the legacy of French theorists such as Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Michel de Certeau, and Althusser and their readings of Karl Marx cannot be overemphasized in this turn toward culture as text. Concomitant with the rise of postmodern theory and its growth in other influential academic centers such as British universities, the American academy at large, and Australian universities, the last 30 years also witnessed the rise of postcolonial theory.

Perhaps a list of key terms in postcolonial studies (see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin 1989) could serve here as a quick reminder of some of the topics and perspectives that postcolonial studies put to the fore of the study of societies which, like Latin America, have undergone deep periods of colonization, together with the effects that colonization had on the colonizers’ own cultures. Postcolonial theory placed under an unforgiving critical lens the concept of the nation-state as a critical tool for understanding the transformations of political and cultural communities. We are reminded of how recent the birth of nations is in Europe and also of how the idea of “nation” has served to invent past rootedness and unified traditions in places where social, racial, and political heterogeneity has been the long-standing experience. Along with a fierce critique of “nation,” the nation-state and even subaltern agency, postcolonial studies questioned the neutrality and efficacy of concepts such as syncretism, authenticity, subaltern, transculturation, national language, agency, and modernity. It showed the unscientific and selfinterested development of concepts and reporting of event-concepts such as cannibalism, savagery, and backwardness. Examination of the terms of the construction of the “other” and “otherness” yielded illuminating understandings on the processes by which some subjects figured examples of the normal and others were deemed to occupied the space of barbarism. Postcolonial studies critically advanced the notions of ambiguity, decolonial thinking, diaspora, alterity, and agency as analytical tools to deconstruct the philosophies of sovereignty, unified thinking subjects at the helm of the production of modernity. Postcolonial theory produced critical perspectives onto concepts taken for granted such as “national liberation” or wars of national liberation. It questioned the neutrality of all disciplines. History, cartography, archaeology, and even biology were subject to new historiographical understandings that showed how the terms of their emplotment linked them to an unacknowledged relation with the coloniality of power. Biography and autobiography, narrative modes crucial to the study of literature, lost their secure connection to the “the truth” and texts became ever more distant from authentic points of origin that could validate their long-standing privileged situation as both art and testimony.

From the perspective of colonial intellectuals, there occurred a radical critique of the key concepts under whose aegis “colonialism” had been justified and even advanced as either a civilizing mission or modernity. Much of this critique came from Indian diasporic intellectuals now settled in the United States academy, but a good deal had already come and continued to come from Latin American intellectuals who, although not read in the United States, had nevertheless left a mark on Latin American thinking and the critical perspective of Latin Americanism in the United States. Who could fail to recognize the critical thinking of Jose Carlos Mariátegui in the development of the concept of the coloniality of power by Anibal Quijano, later refined and deployed by Walter Mignolo, for instance? While post postcolonial studies maintained specific historical reference – historical events by which one people or nation colonized another – the concept of coloniality of power reached much deeper into the matrix of thinking, showing that the epistemological situation it described and analyzed was not circumscribed in time and space but was rather a worldwide phenomenon that can and indeed did occur anytime, anywhere. The

phenomenon identified and understood by the analytics of the coloniality of power transpires both externally and internally and of course that includes developments in the field right now.

Although not necessarily linked to the work that the coloniality of power has performed in the reconceptualization of subjects and perspectives, I think it is important to mention here the appearance of a book like When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History (2018) by the historian Matthew Restall. The title repositions and signifies the events that are ordinarily understood to bear the force necessary for changing the course of history. Before Restall’s book, the narrative of world history had reserved that distinction for the moment when Columbus arrived in this hemisphere, but such narrative posited Columbus as subject, accidentally “discovering” America and excluded from the scene any Indigenous person. In Restall’s version, the focus is on the meeting between the two civilizations, on the duality implicit in the idea of encounter and the exchanges that followed. The book is a gripping and deeply informed rethinking of the meeting of these two civilizations as distilled in the “persons” of these two men at that moment in history.

The critical assessment of the telling of the story of the conquest of Mexico completely overturns what we have been told about the long duration of the events of 1521 in Tenochtitlan. Restall writes against the grain of almost all old and new accounts of the “conquest of Mexico.” He starts by completely dismantling the thus far unassailable testimonial and self-serving narratives of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, as well as the letters written by Cortes. One by one, the book takes apart the epistemological maneuvers necessary for intelligent people to believe in the Bernal Diaz account of both the prowess of the Spanish conquistadors and the pusillanimous nature of the Aztecs together with the rise of the spectacular “descriptions” of human sacrifice. Over and over, Restall puts to the question: why did subsequent historians believe the narrative put forth by Bernal Diaz and Cortes when it clearly violated elementary forms of understanding plausible human behavior? With reference to the riddle of Montezuma’s death, for instance, Restall asks why did the Spanish spend so much energy denying that they had murdered him in light of the fact that they had murdered and bragged about murdering other kings such as Atahuallpa and Cuauhtemoc? The historian asks:

Why then not admit to Montezuma’s murder? Why did Cortes and other survivors from the company deny it, and why did subsequent tellers of the traditional narrative elaborate upon that denial? Indeed, why go as far as Diaz did claiming that “Cortes and all the captains and soldiers wept as though they had lost a father”? That imaginatively implausible detail was repeated by Clavijero in the next century, and by Prescott in the next (believe it you can by McNutt’s sardonic aside). Those authors were not alone in indignantly defending the conquistadors and the denouncing the “monstrous imputation” that Cortes was guilty; why?

Because Montezuma’s murder by the Spaniards undermined the Surrender (story) . . . destroying the Spanish justification for their invasion. And while writers in later centuries were not as invested in the maintenance of Spanish conquest justification, they were still bound by the logic of the traditional narrative. Why would “Spaniards take the life of a king to whom they owed so many benefits” (as one put it)? (Restall, 2018: 227)

Many more inquiries concerning the binding of traditional or rather standing narratives embedded in colonial and modern studies need to be unraveled as they remain tied up by the force of the terms of emplotment and the ideology that undergirds them. We could ask, like Fernando Rosenberg does in his essay, if, for instance, the changes in subject formation we

witness in Latin America today are indeed similar to what has been called the phenomenon of the posthuman in the United States, or are these assessments driven by the force of empirical theory?

No history of Latin American culture could have anticipated the deep and irreversible transformation brought about in the last half a century by the arrival of digital modes of production and communication. The introduction of digital formats and possibilities of communication into people’s everyday lives is only comparable to the invention of writing and the domestication of the book when inexpensive printing made the circulation of ideas and modes of feeling widespread and speedy. However, in light of what the pandemic of 2020 has revealed, this comparison is not exactly apt, for the rapidity and expansive reach of digital forms of production, communication, and participation in unprecedented massive sets of interlocutors put the digital age into a category of its own. The salon culture of the nineteenth century that allowed women to play an influential role in the male-dominated world of letters, the democratizing culture of the newspaper and even the scenography of the family in front of the television set pale by comparison with the disruption in consumption patterns, dynamics of subject formation, dislocation of previous communication communities, multiplicity of opening onto realms previously unreachable brought on by the smartphone and all other devices that offer access to the internet. The dynamics of digital culture has affected established fields of knowledge, perception, circulation, sensitivity, and production of the very same culture that it is transforming.

While scholars had previously turned their attention to visual studies with an emphasis on photography, film, and television, new work has begun to appear on the impact that digital forms and formats are having on Latin American culture in general and literature in very specific ways. Several of the new essays in this second edition of the Companion capture both the growth in visual forms of communication as well as the transformative and pervasive presence of digitization of the world. To the surprise of many a reader, it seems that the very vaunted effect of the production of a posthuman culture due to digitization of everyday life cannot be so easily detected in Latin America, as the evidence shows that what appears to be emerging is rather a mediatized sensibility. In the Introduction to their Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era (2016), Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic write that: “It becomes clear that popular access to ever-growing, ever more intricate, networks in the Southern Hemisphere has not produced a new posthuman subjectivity. Rather we seek to demonstrate that the convergence of literary and technological media formats brings the body and the emotion of the spectator to the fore in new ways, even when using the same convergence of affect and ideology that occurs whenever an imaginary about technology circulates to produce subjects and communities” (1–2). It would seem that the power of digitization has been met with some irreverence and that the results of this encounter remain to be seen although it is ongoing, the impact is palpable in multiple ways, and scholars are paying close attention.

Concomitant with the production of new objects, new circuits of transmission, and consumption, there is of course the appearance of a new public. This public, among other things, is no longer wedded to or dependent on print culture as it once was. Take for example the graphic novel Zé Ninguém by the Brazilian artist Alberto Serrano. The book is made up of photographs of about 150 pieces of street art intervention that Serrano performed on walls, doorways, and underpasses in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The series of photographs are arranged into panels which together stand for a narrative that tells the story of the homeless Zé Ninguém in search of his lost love Ana. Edward King in his “Between Street and Book: Textual Assemblages and Urban Topologies in Graphic Fiction from Brazil” (2018) points out that “Zé Ninguém performs a

parallel between the assemblages that connect books to other media and an urban context that is composed of assemblages connecting local actions and events with global flows of images as well as human and non-human forms of agency” (223). King points out that street comics are “read” in nonlinear, partial, and fragmentary ways (224). In contrast with the book, since there is no prescribed order, every reading of the “novel” is not only different but also evanescent. Due to the precarity of graffiti, some works disappear altogether as soon as they are created (224). King observes that “Increasingly, graffiti and street artists produce work to be photographed and posted on line. The demands of online platforms . . . actively shape the work rather than merely providing a neutral vehicle for it. Artists increasingly produce images that are easily ‘shareable’ and ‘tagable’” (227). The Zé Ninguém quest reaches its apogee when his image goes viral and raises his hope that maybe Ana will “see” him. Zé Ninguém announces to his internet followers that “Nossa selfie bombou!” (Our selfie has gone wild!) (227), affirming the global, public connectivity now available.

This new public is capable of decoding and consuming texts in multiple media, in an infinite variety of forms, formats, and materialities. Although this new public itself is variegated, divided by generations, degrees of approximations marked by access to the computer or cell phone, and endowed with different degrees of education and sophistication, there is no question that the smartphone has leveled down all previous differences of class and education in access to information, arts, forms of communication, and the capacity to perform and communicate on line. This fact creates new publics and transforms the existing publics in a constant flow of new appearances. The interpretive capacity of this new public no longer depends on academic training or instruction. The appreciation of new and old aesthetic forms has entered a free fall atmosphere in which multiple interpretations and preferences can hold on the same day in the internet. The history of taste and canon building has entered an unparallel transformative stage in which Indigenous video competes with novels that dwell on the deepest exploration of the abject while mimicking the formats of email communication.

This huge demotic new dimension of mass culture has proven a challenge and stimulus to the well-established forms and institutions of print culture, of which literature was and remains the crown jewel. Literature retains its special capacity to invent credibly the existence of new subjectivities, while at the same time remaining aware of its own discursive status. Literature has been aware of the possibility of its own dissolution throughout the twentieth century as each avant garde wave challenged the terms of representation forged by the previous generation, only to emerge with the power of unthinkable forms and discourses. Digitization is not a challenge only to literature. All the art forms, from music to painting, are subject to the same forces of unlimited reproduction, fragmentation, decomposition, and recomposition brought about by the power of a world without originals. Will the digital age transform literature beyond recognition or will it open new spaces for the unique and indispensable critical capacity of literature?

Perhaps at this juncture we need to say, with Borges in 1930, that we ignore if “la musica sabe desesperar de la musica, y si el marmol del marmol, pero la literatura es un arte que sabe profetizar aquel tiempo en que habra enmudecido, y encarnizarse con la propia virtud, y enamorarse de la propia disolucion y coretjar su fin” (Borges 1972, 205). Reading the several essays here dedicated to moments when literature’s awareness of itself surges into unprecedented new perceptual coordinates, new narrative forms, unimagined dialogues with and fictionalization of other forms of representation such as cinema, photography, and digitization might provide some sense of the directions that literature, and culture at large, might take in Latin America as it faces not just another imperial thrust from the West but rather the self-claim made by the Chinese with regard to their having become

a world power on a par with the West. Will Latin America face yet another cycle of extractive capitalism, as the war for water seems to indicate? How will a new ecological awareness and strategy maneuver the economic, political, and cultural influence of China? What role will the West play in postcolonial spaces as it struggles with the East? This volume certainly opens onto uncharted waters even though it carries the weight of more than 500 years of cultural struggle and creation in “Latin America.”

References

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin.  The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas 1923–1972. Buenos Aires: Emece Editores, 1972.

Bush, Matthew and Tania Gentic, Eds. Technology, Literature, and the Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era. New York: Routledge, 2016.

King, Edward. “Between Street and Book: Textual Assemblages and Urban Topologies in Graphic Fiction

from Brazil,” in Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media. Eds. Heather J. Allen and Andrew R. Reynolds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018.

Mignolo, Walter. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking: Local Histories/Global Designs Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Restall, Matthew. When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History. New York: Harper Collins, 2018.

Second Thoughts on the Historical Foundations of Modernity/Coloniality and the Advent of Decolonial Thinking

Walter D. Mignolo

IAfter reviewing the Preamble to the Blackwell Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture as well as the chapters from the first edition, a “second thoughts” rather than editing the already printed version would be more appropriate for the occasion. The main factor is that we, on the planet today, are experiencing a change of era. The era that is closing is the era of Westernization of the planet which was formed since 1500. The planet, before 1500, did not “belong” to Europe. After 1500 and until 2000 approximately, Europe appropriated the planet. The Americas and Latin America were invented and appropriated in names, labor, and natural resources to the historical foundation of modernity. The incorporation of the Americas to an already exsisting European cosmo-geography, the constituton of an unipolar world order and the consolidaton of universal reason, theological and secular, are three pillars of Westernizaton.1

The signs of the upcoming era are the distancing of the Americas, North and South, from the centrality of Europe simultaneously with Europe losing a privileges that lasted for 450 years; the unipolar world order mutating into a multipolar interstate world order and, last but not least, the universality of reason being overcome by the pluriversality of independent thoughts. If global linear thinking traced the axes that legitimized continental and territorial partitions to the benefit of Europe, border thinking is today enacted to delegitimize its universality in both the multipolar world order of the interstate system and the public sphere where the political

A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture, Second Edition. Edited by Sara Castro-Klaren.

© 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

society is delinking from universality and reclaiming the rights of the people to think and act for their own benefit and not for the benefit of someone else. So both the invention of America and partition of continental Latin and Anglo America, the confluence of Atlantic colonial enterprise in the Caribbean, are events that belong to the era of Westernizaton that today is closing. The change of era that now is opening, and that Covid-19 accelerated, will be dominated for years to come by de-Westernizaton of the global interstate system and decolonizaton of universality enacted by the political society tangentially related to the nation-state. Both the present and the future of the Americas and Latin America are already experiencing the impact of de-Westernization and decoloniality. Consequently, Latin American Studies could not be excempt from the present and forthcoming turmoils.

The first edition of the Companion was published in 2008, and the Preamble was written in 2006. In 2021, the cultural configuration of “Latin” America has significantly changed politically and economically: politics and economy are cultural spheres both of the materiality of doing politics and economy as well as of the ideas and designs that guide and govern their doing. culture, with a capital letter, is everything that human beings do with their hands and mouths. With our mouths, we make coded signs called speech; with our hands, visible signs called writing while economy and politics are activities that cannot be separated from what people (us) think economy and politics are, how they shall be practiced, what are the benefits or drawbacks, what they do for us and why we need them. In this regard, thinking is not just a process of mental imagination, but processes that materialize in sounds (speech, discourses, music) and in writing (written words, graphics, images) guiding the interaction among people (all of us) involved in the economic and political spheres.

Thus, by 2008 the cultural configuration of “Latin” America was coming out of the turbulent era of neo-liberal culture that put a halt to the hopes brought about by the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the election of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970. Three years later, 1973 remains as the date of the dreadful beginning of a period in which politics and economics were legitimized, sustained, and promoted by neo-liberal culture until approximately 2000. Since then, the expression “turn to the left” captured the culture of hopes of the first decade of the twenty-first century that appeared to leave behind the nightmare of neo-liberal nightmares and dictatorships.2

However, by 2011 signs that the turn to the left was a premature and misleading intuition began to emerge: rather than a turn to the left, the signs were indicating a move towards deWesternization. De-Westernization since then is perhaps what prompted the major turmoil in the political and economic culture in Latin America. I began to sense that in 2011 and published another op-ed suggesting that if it was a turn (both in the sense of turning and in the sense of being next in line), it was neither to the left nor to decolonization but to de-Westernization.3 At that time, the word “de-Westernization” was slowly entering the geo-political vocabulary.

The praxes and self-understanding of de-Westernization began to materialize in East and South East Asia. One of the first uses, in 1978, was in the controversial and at the same time interesting book by Malaysian Muslim thinker Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas entitled Islam and Secularism. Chapter 8 is titled “The Dewesternization of Knowledge.”4 Rightly so because Islam was never colonized, for Islam is not a region but a belief system spread over regions and countries. Hence, decolonization was not a proper concept in this context. However, Islam couldn’t escape coloniality of knowledge or, if you wish, Westernization of knowledge. Al-Attas’s de-Westernization is a proposal in the Cultural sphere, which means that it is not specific to political and economic cultures, linguistic culture, historical culture, technological culture, or scientific culture but culture with a capital letter, which means what we human beings do and what we think,

explain, discuss, and debates of what we do. Al-Attas was not proposing to de-Westernize the political and economic cultures of the state, but of knowledge, as it was felt by Muslim thinkers like him that Western (theological and secular) knowledge encroached upon Islamic knowledge. I noticed the second appearance in 2008, the same year that this Companion was published, this time from Singapore and in the secular vein. The proponent was a former ambassador of Singapore to the United Nations in the 1990s, Kishore Mahbubani, and by the time he published the book, he was Director of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in the National University of Singapore. His argument focused on the spheres of political and economic cultures. His book is titled The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East and Chapter 4 is titled “De-Westernization and the Return of History.”5 The wording was an obvious reference to the celebrated “end of history” underscoring the road to the future now that the Soviet Union was out of the way. But the chapter argues a more substantial point: the nonEuropean histories that the Westernization of the planet destituted are now returning. While Al-Attas formulated it in the sphere of culture, Mahbubani targeted the spheres of political and economic activity. Although the leading case supporting the argument was China, in the background was the legacy of the “four Asian tigers” (Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan) that in previous years reached surprising levels of political economic growth. During the same period, across the Pacific Ocean, “Latin” America was struggling to overcome the legacies of neo-liberal political and economic cultures. Why was this the case?

II

The previous short narrative of the meaning of de-Westernization is helpful to understand the “de-Westernizing turn” of the economic and political cultures in “Latin” America as well as understanding the difficulties in “Latin” America to argue the return of history, as is the case of de-Westernization in Asia. But first I would like to say more about the cultures of political and economic de-Westernization. The Chinese so-called massive “Road and Belt Initiative” (BRI) is not an economic and political initiative based on liberal and neo-liberal political and economic cultures. On the contrary, the project delinks from a Western liberal and neo-liberal frame and is grounded on the philosophical “return of history,” meaning ancient Chinese history and thoughts (Confucius, Mencius, Laozi), integrating Mao Zedong’s legacies. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” refer to the blending of both incorporated into a larger cosmological and philosophical frame: the return of a civilization that rests upon 3000 years of memories and praxes of living or Chinese civilization. Peimin Ni has outlined in detail the philosophical perspective of the Belt and Road Initiative.6

A caveat before going forward. Often, addressing these issues, I have been questioned by the audience calling to my attention that Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, and the history of Chinese civilization is used by the state to legitimize its politics. My answer is always, yes, you are right, in the same way that Western states use Plato and Aristotle to legitimize democracy and state politics. I am not saying that the rise of China’s culture of politics and economics and its culture in general is good. I am just saying that it is, whether we like it or not. What it means is that China is capitalist but not neo-liberal. It is precisely their lack of obedience to neo-liberal principles that makes possible the reconstitution of their political and economic cultures appropriating the nation-state model and capitalist economy and basing them on different grounds and principles: their own language, memories, and praxes of living.

This kind of return to history is not as clear cut in “Latin” America as in mainland China and, in more complex ways, in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hong Kong and Taiwan were no doubt effective in their economic growth, although the return to history was tied up to British legacies in Hong Kong and to the history of China since the late 1940s in the case of Taiwan. The current configuration of Taiwan was set up by the conflict between Mao Zedong’s socialism and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalism. The latter exiled himself to Taiwan, forming his own nationalist government. Although today both Taiwan and Hong Kong are under the rule of mainland China, they are both ruled by actors of non-European descent. The difficulties in “Latin” America to argue and to act on the return to historical philosophy is that all nation-states are ruled by actors of European descent. I am not talking about blood but about upbringing and education, of the cosmo-vivencia rather than cosmo-vision embedded in the modern European languages that are the national languages (and literatures and cultures) of all existing nation-states.

The return of the history of Peninsular colonialism is not a desirable project for the present moving towards the future. Furthermore, the return of the history of ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Andes would imply subsuming them into the legacies of liberalism, neoliberalism, and Marxism (all manifestations of Western cosmology). The limits and problems of cultural “Indigenismo,” which impinged upon the spheres of economic and political cultures, are not desirable either (see Chapter 23). Equally problematic would be to make the same move vis-à-vis the current resurgence of Afro-diasporic cultures in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and the Insular Caribbean. The difficulties here are that there are three cosmologies (Western, African, and First Nations) entangled in a historical power differential (see Chapters 13 and 32). “Latin” America so far mutates between the struggles to end dependency to Westernization and the complacencies of submitting to it. In the first case, there is no need for the return of history. History has been there from the moment of independence from Spain and Portugal to turn toward France and England first and to the US later. In the second case, the problem is the lack of grounds on which to claim the return of history. Perhaps one way out would be to engage seriously with the teaching of Rodolfo Kusch in his relentless search for América Profunda (1962), accepting that deep America is the compound of three diverse demographic languages and cultures, including political and economic cultures: Pueblos Originarios, African Diaspora, and European Diaspora. The task is not an easy one because the return of history cannot be claimed only by actors from the European Diaspora.

After these clarifications, let’s return to the argument that the so-called turn to the left was indeed a turn towards de-Westernization minus the difficulty of the return of history. Why? It was first de-Westernization and not decoloniality, because none of the nation-states involved questioned the political and economic foundations of the nation-state. The confrontation with the West was propelled by a rhetoric of antiimperialism that was foremost a confrontation with the United States, for obvious and justifiable reasons. However, Westernization is a systemic rather than a conjunctural phenomenon in which the nation-state is an institution deeply ingrained in the structure and functioning of the colonial matrix of power, which I addressed in the previous Preamble. “Socialismo comunitario” which was announced during the former Evo Morales-Álvaro García Linera presidency could not have been sustained in the same way that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was and is. In the case of Bolivia, the return of history was blocked by the prevalence of the European model of the nation-state patterned on Marxism rather than on neo-liberalism as it was the previous state under Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada that preceded Evo Morales. The opening in the Constitution to the plurinational state, instead of one nation/one state, was a good opportunity to engage in a serious return of history in which all

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