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 Menchu 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-Klaren, Michael Clark, Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan, Ranajit Guha, Maria Milagros Lopez , Walter Mignolo, Alberto Moreiras, Abdul-Karim Mustapha, Jose Rabasa, Ileana Rodriguez, Josefina Saldana-Portillo, Javier Sanjines, C. Patricia Seed, Doris Sommer, Marcia Stephenson, Monica Szurmuk, Gareth Williams, Marc Zimmerman

Argues for the saliency of the category of the subaltern over that of class.

About the Author

Ileana Rodriguez 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.

Reviews
"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



Book Information
ISBN 9780822327127
Author Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez
Format Paperback
Page Count 472
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 680g