Latin America and Postmodernity: A Contemporary Reader Book

This compelling collection offers a wide-ranging, heterogeneous, interdisciplinary, and cross-generational spectrum of arguments focused on the impact and relevance of postmodernity to contemporary Latin America. Editors Lange-Churion and Mendieta have gathered a distinguished group of scholars in literary studies, sociology, political theory, philosophy, feminism, and postcolonial studies who offer their unique perspectives on topics as diverse as the relationship between modernity and the rise of the world-system and colonialism; the varied responses by Latin America to the challenges of postmodernism's purported second-level historicism, antiutopianism, and neo-liberal anarchism; postmodern fiction; the revival of a neobaroque aesthetic and postmodern pastiche; the need for feminism to counter the hegemony of the West, which projects a homogenizing concept of the feminine; and many other related issues. This challenging work dispels the belief that postmodernity has received few and mostly univocal responses in Latin America. It will disabuse students, educators, critics, and the informed public of the notion that the Latin American response to postmodernism has been mostly one of passive acceptance. Latin American intellectuals have been dealing with these conflicting points of view not reactively but creatively; indeed, several of the major questions regarding postmodernity were first discussed and debated in Latin America. This collection is an ideal primary text for courses in contemporary Latin American thought and those devoted to postmodernity. It will also serve as a major reference work on contemporary intellectual trends in the region. Social thinkers, philosophers, literary and cultural critics, and historians will find these essays invaluable. Contributors include Jorge Luis Borges, Santiago Castro-Gomez, Enrique Dussel, Guilermo Gomez-Pena, Pedro Lange-Churion, Walter Mignolo, Marcelo Paz, Nelly Richard, Ofelia Schutte, Iris M. Zavala, and Leopoldo Zea.Read More