A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. Группа авторов

Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов страница 16

A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов

Скачать книгу

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.

       Sara Castro-Klaren

      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 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.

      Given that nothing

Скачать книгу