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The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader

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Latin America Otherwise

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Book

Pages: 472

Illustrations: 4 figures

Published: September 2001

Editor: Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez

Contributors: Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez, Ranajit Guha, John Beverley, Alberto Moreiras, Marc Zimmerman, Patricia Seed, Sara Castro-Klaren, Doris Sommer, José Rabasa, Abdulkarim Mustapha, Robert Carr, Michael Clark, Gareth Williams, Javier Sanjines C., Beatriz Gonzalez, Stephenson, Marcia, Marcelo Bergman, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Walter D. Mignolo, Monica Szurmuk

Sharing a postrevolutionary sympathy with the struggles of the poor, the contributors to this first comprehensive collection of writing on subalternity in Latin America work to actively link politics, culture, and literature. Emerging from a decade of work and debates generated by a collective known as the Latin American Studies Group, the volume privileges the category of the subaltern over that of class, as contributors focus on the possibilities of investigating history from below.
In addition to an overview by Ranajit Guha, essay topics include nineteenth-century hygiene in Latin American countries, Rigoberta Menchú after the Nobel, commentaries on Haitian and Argentinian issues, the relationship between gender and race in Bolivia, and ungovernability and tragedy in Peru. Providing a radical critique of elite culture and of liberal, bourgeois, and modern epistemologies and projects, the essays included here prove that Latin American Subaltern Studies is much more than the mere translation of subaltern studies from South Asia to Latin America.

Contributors. Marcelo Bergman, John Beverley, Robert Carr, Sara Castro-Klarén, Michael Clark, Beatriz González Stephan, Ranajit Guha, María Milagros López , Walter Mignolo, Alberto Moreiras, Abdul-Karim Mustapha, José Rabasa, Ileana Rodríguez, Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Javier Sanjinés, C. Patricia Seed, Doris Sommer, Marcia Stephenson, Mónica Szurmuk, Gareth Williams, Marc Zimmerman

Praise

"The very relevant and important project presented in this book—to critically produce knowledge about and from Latin America—is not only addressed to scholars with a leftist past, but also to all those interested in theorizing Latin American cultural history beyond academic requirements and into the intellectual, ethical and political imperatives of a complex, globalized world that continues to "Other" and victimize subalterns." - Alvaro Félix Bolaños , MLN

"This Reader inventories the exciting variety of work produced by the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. . . . Ileana Rodríguez provides a useful introduction to the project as a whole. The cast of contributors is impressive—something like the subalternist edition of Who’s Who in Latin American cultural studies. . . . LASSR succeeds as a virtuoso exemplar of the genre: rich for its diversity of settings and subjects, novel in its identification of a wide-range of problematics, unified in its critique of reigning conventions, and challenging for its dizzying array of ‘otherwise’ thinking and writing. Although this review cannot possibly do justice to the many brilliant contributions of the individual authors, it is clear from this collection that the group was well on its way to developing a style of analysis, debate, and writing that could very well find an echo in future trends."

 - Mark Thurner , Hispanic American Historical Review

“A very impressive collection of essays. It is unusually successful in being able to retain throughout a coherent theoretical focus, depth and variety of empirical scholarship, a cosmopolitan resistance to scholarly insularity, and an insurgent spirit of questioning received ideas about subaltern groups and their politics. This book deserves a wide readership. The self-conscious, honest, and comparative dialogue that it conducts between the Latin American and the South Asian Subaltern Studies groups will enrich the field of subaltern studies as a whole.” - Dipesh Chakrabarty

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Ileana Rodríguez is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Ohio State University. She is the author of Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America and House/Garden/Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Latin American Literatures by Women, also published by Duke University Press.

Table Of Contents

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Introduction / Ileana Rodríguez 1

I. Convergences of Times: Subaltern Studies C South Asia/Latin America, Modern/Postmodern

Subaltern Studies: Projects for Our Time and Their Convergence / Ranajit Guha 35

The Im/possibility of Politics? Subalternity, Modernity, Hegemony / John Beverley 47

Solidarity as Event: Communism as Personal Practice, and Disencounters in the Politics of Desire / María Milagros López 64

A Storm Blowing from Paradise: Negative Globality and Critical Regionalism / Alberto Moreiras 81

II. Indigenous Peoples and the Coloniality of Power

Rigoberta Menchu After the Nobel: From Militant Narrative to Postmodern Politics / Marc Zimmerman 111

No Perfect World: Aboriginal Communities' Contemporary Resource Rights / Patricia Seed 129

Historiography on the Ground: The Toledo Circle and Guaman Poma / Sara Castro-Klaren 143

III. Subject Positions: Dominant and Subaltern Intellectuals?

Slaps and Embraces: A Rhetoric of Particularism / Doris Sommer 175

Beyond Representation? The Impossibility of the Local (Notes on Subaltern Studies in Light of a Rebellion in Tepoztlan, Morelos) / Jose Rabasa 191

Questions of Strategy as an Abstract Minimum: Subalternity and Us / Abdul Karim Mustapha 211

IV. Ungovernability: Authoritarian and Democratic Hegemonies

From Glory to Menace II Society: African-American Subalternity and the Ungovernability of the Democratic Impulse Under Super Capitalist Orders / Robert Carr 227

Twenty Preliminary Propositions for a Critical History of International Statecraft in Haiti / Michael Clark 241

Death in the Andes: Ungovernability and the Birth of Tragedy in Peru / Gareth Williams 260

Outside In and Inside Out: Visualizing Society in Bolivia / Javier Sanjines C. 288

V. Citizenship: Resistance, Transgression, Disobedience

The Teaching Machine for the Wild Citizen / Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan 313

Apprenticeship as Citizenship and Governability / Ileana Rodriguez 341

The Architectural Relationship between Gender, Race, and the Bolivian State / Marcia Stephenson 367

Gender, Citizenship, and Social Protest: The New Social Movements in Argentina / Marcelo Bergman and Monica Szurmuk 383

Who's the Indian in Aztlan? Re-Writing Mestizaje, Indianism, and Chicanismo from the Lacandon / Josefina Saldana-Portillo 402

Coloniality of Power and Subalternity / Walter D. Mignolo 424

Contributors 445

Index 449

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Paper ISBN: 978-0-8223-2712-7 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8223-2701-1 / eISBN: 978-0-8223-8077-1 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822380771

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