Search results for ""Author John Beverley""

The term “subalternity” refers to a condition of subordination brought about by colonization or other forms of economic, social, racial, linguistic, and/or cultural dominance. Subaltern studies is, therefore, a study of power. Who has it and who does not. Who is gaining it and who is losing it. Power is intimately related to questions of representation—to which representations have cognitive authority and can secure hegemony and which do not and cannot. In this book John Beverley examines the relationship between subalternity and representation by analyzing the ways in which that relationship has been played out in the domain of Latin American studies. Dismissed by some as simply another new fashion in the critique of culture and by others as a postmarxist heresy, subaltern studies began with the work of Ranajit Guha and the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective in the 1980s. Beverley’s focus on Latin America, however, is evidence of the growing province of this field. In assessing subaltern studies’ purposes and methods, the potential dangers it presents, and its interactions with deconstruction, poststructuralism, cultural studies, Marxism, and political theory, Beverley builds his discussion around a single, provocative question: How can academic knowledge seek to represent the subaltern when that knowledge is itself implicated in the practices that construct the subaltern as such? In his search for answers, he grapples with a number of issues, notably the 1998 debate between David Stoll and Rigoberta Menchú over her award-winning testimonial narrative, I, Rigoberta Menchú. Other topics explored include the concept of civil society, Florencia Mallon’s influential Peasant and Nation, the relationship between the Latin American “lettered city” and the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780–1783, the ideas of transculturation and hybridity in postcolonial studies and Latin American cultural studies, multiculturalism, and the relationship between populism, popular culture, and the “national-popular” in conditions of globalization.This critique and defense of subaltern studies offers a compendium of insights into a new form of knowledge and knowledge production. It will interest those studying postcolonialism, political science, cultural studies, and Latin American culture, history, and literature.

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The continuing importance of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American culture. The Hispanic Baroque is a Janus-faced phenomenon, one of its faces peering at the sunset of feudalism, the other at the dawn of European modernity. This collection of essays seeks to engage with this paradox and its consequencesfor understanding Spanish and Latin American literary and cultural history. Conceived in response to Roberto González Echevarría's influential Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spain and Latin America, and spanning many years of Beverley's own intellectual trajectory, it includes material already in the public domain, together with much that is new, previously unpublished or long unavailable. An Introduction outlines the ongoing scholarly discussion about the nature of the Baroque in both Spain and Spanish America. The essays deal respectively with Luis de Góngora's Soledades; the picaresque novel; the Baroque pastoral; Gracián's theory of "wit" andthe equation of wit and power; and the relation among Baroque writing, colonial hegemony, and the formation of a criollo culture in Spanish America. A section on Baroque historicism suggests some ways of using the Baroqueto reflect on our contemporary situation, and the volume concludes with a wide-ranging conversation about the Baroque and Hispanism between the author and Fernando Gómez Herrero, a young scholar strongly influenced by postcolonialstudies. JOHN BEVERLEY is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

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In Latinamericanism after 9/11, John Beverley explores Latinamericanist cultural theory in relation to new modes of political mobilization in Latin America. He contends that after 9/11, the hegemony of the United States and the neoliberal assumptions of the so-called Washington Consensus began to fade in Latin America. At the same time, the emergence in Latin America of new leftist governments—the marea rosada or “pink tide”—gathered momentum. Whatever its outcome, the marea rosada has shifted the grounds of Latinamericanist thinking in a significant way. Beverley proposes new paradigms better suited to Latin America’s reconfigured political landscape. In the process, he takes up matters such as Latin American postcolonial and cultural studies, the relation of deconstruction and Latinamericanism, the persistence of the national question and cultural nationalism in Latin America, the neoconservative turn in recent Latin American literary and cultural criticism, and the relation between subalternity and the state. Beverley’s perspective flows out of his involvement with the project of Latin American subaltern studies, but it also defines a position that is in some ways postsubalternist. He takes particular issue with recent calls for a “posthegemonic” politics.

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Certain post-Romantic conceptions have seen literature as a sanctioned space for the articulation of social dissidence and heterogeneity. Yet recent scholarship has shown that literature did not always have an oppositional character, that in its modern form it emerged precisely as a central ideological practice of European absolutism in the 16th and 17th centuries. Literature was one of the conditions responsible for emergence of the modern nation-state; and its institutionalization was founded on the incorporation and neutralization of contradictions. This study attempts to answer the following question: Is there not a way of thinking about literature that is "outside" or "against" literature? Beverley argues for a negation of the literary that would allow non-literary forms of cultural practice to displace literature's hegemony. Beverley reminds us that contemporary theorists speak of literatures with historically and socially-specific conditions of production and reading formations; that is, mediated relations between text and context. He then begins his explorations with Latin American literature, which he says, is endowed with the legacy of Columbus - discovery, conquest, and colonization - an ambiguous cultural function, making it both a colonial institution and a historical agent of nation formation. He moves from this consideration to an extensive discussion of the post-colonial "testimonio", poised between literature and the dynamics of subaltern culture. Beverley's demonstration - of how the internal logic that has always driven the dominant conception of literature must of necessity explode into cultural politics - is a significant intervention into current debates about cultural studies, the canon, and multiculturalism. John Beverley is the author of "Aspects of Gongora's `Soledades'" and, with Mark Zimmerman, co-author of "Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions".

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Una coleccion de ensayos escogidos del critico John Beverley en el campo del Latinoamericanismo literario, atento a los conexiones entre literatura, hegemonia, y conflicto social. Abarca el periodo que va desde los ochenta del siglo pasado hasta hoy. Los temas incluyen el barroco colonial y su fuerza hegemonica en la cultura latinoamericana, el testimonio como genero emergente, la literatura militante, el postmodernismo, la relacion entre critica literaria y cultural y el desarrollo de la llamada Marea Rosada, y en general el impacto de los estudios postcoloniales y subalternos. La coleccion proporciona una vision critica de la ciudad letrada latinoamericana y una defensa del campo de la critica literaria como un lugar de constituir y reconstituir la hegemonia. En este sentido, se situa a la vez contra la llamada "crisis de las humanidades" inducida por los efectos ideologicos del neoliberalismo, pero tambien contra posiciones criticas, como la desconstruccion, que aspiran a una trascendencia de la critica literaria como tal, y del proyecto del Latinoamericanismo en terminos generales.

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These four germinal essays by John Beverley sparked the widespread discussions and debate surrounding testimono- the socially and politically charged Latin American narrative of witnessing- that culminated with David Stoll's highly publicized attack on Rigoberta Menchú's celebrated testimonial text. Challanging Hardt and Negri's 'Empire', Beverley's extensive new introduction examines the broader historical, political, and ethical issues that this literature raises, tracing the development of testimono from its emergence in the Cold War era to the rise of a globalized economy and of U.S.political hegemony.

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“This book began in what seemed like a counterfactual intuition . . . that what had been happening in Nicaraguan poetry was essential to the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution,” write John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman. “In our own postmodern North American culture, we are long past thinking of literature as mattering much at all in the ‘real’ world, so how could this be?” This study sets out to answer that question by showing how literature has been an agent of the revolutionary process in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.The book begins by discussing theory about the relationship between literature, ideology, and politics, and charts the development of a regional system of political poetry beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in late twentieth-century writers. In this context, Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, Roque Dalton of El Salvador, and Otto René Castillo of Guatemala are among the poets who receive detailed attention.

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Postmodernism may seem a particularly inappropriate term when used in conjunction with a region that is usually thought of as having only recently, and then unevenly, acceded to modernity. Yet in the last several years the concept has risen to the top of the agenda of cultural and political debate in Latin America. This collection explores the Latin American engagement with postmodernism, less to present a regional variant of the concept than to situate it in a transnational framework. Recognizing that postmodernism in Latin America can only inaccurately be thought of as having traveled from an advanced capitalist "center" to arrive at a still dependent neocolonial "periphery," the contributors share the assumption that postmodernism is itself about the dynamics of interaction between local and metropolitan cultures in a global system in which the center-periphery model has begun to break down. These essays examine the ways in which postmodernism not only designates the effects of this transnationalism in Latin America, but also registers the cultural and political impact on an increasingly simultaneous global culture of a Latin America struggling with its own set of postcolonial contingencies, particularly the crisis of its political left, the dominance of neoliberal economic models, and the new challenges and possibilities opened by democratization.With new essays on the dynamics of Brazilian culture, the relationship between postmodernism and Latin American feminism, postmodernism and imperialism, and the implications of postmodernist theory for social policy, as well as the text of the Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle of the Zapatatista National Liberation Army, this expanded edition of boundary 2 will interest not only Latin Americanists, but scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern.Contributors. Xavier Albó, José Joaquín Brunner, Fernando Calderón, Enrique Dussel, Néstor García Canclini, Martín Hopenhayn, Neil Larsen, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, Norbert Lechner, María Milagros López, Raquel Olea, Aníbal Quijano, Nelly Richard, Carlos Rincón, Silviano Santiago, Beatriz Sarlo, Roberto Schwarz, and Hernán Vidal

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