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 self-interested 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
