Local/Global Latin Americanisms

The discussion of certain themes central to contemporary Latin Americanism in the light of the postcolonial debate finds a pre-text in the work of the important organic intellectual of the Cuban Revolution, Roberto Fernández Retamar. As this essay recontextualizes his discussion within the local history of current post-dictatorships in the Southern Cone, it further engages in dialogue with postcolonialism, postmodernism, postoccidentalism and postorientalism – the four critical projects that aim at overcoming modernity (Mignolo 1998). Two questions open the debate. With reference to the international division of intellectual labour, how does the growing Anglo-Saxonization of reflection about Latin America correlate with the local epistemologies? How do local histories, as producers of knowledge and of a ‘rhetoric of the colony’, impact global epistemologies and the ‘rhetoric of empire’? The further heuristic introduction of Latin American ‘theoretical babbling’, understood as a non-hegemonic descriptive tool, adds other layers to the debate. Is it productive to advance such a descriptive tool for postcolonial discourses developed in Latin America as instances of a non-European, non-North American or non-Commonwealth theorization? If shorn of the negativities associated with difference, is ‘theoretical babbling’ an appropriate category of analysis? Can it be seen as a form of resistance? Or does it weave a less than strategic connection with the colonizing category of barbarism, thus paving the way for the disqualification of discourses that do not follow the rules of production established by the hegemonic sites of knowledge

Barbarism · Democracy · Dictatorship · Empire · Hegemony · Latin Americans · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Social science · Sociology · Cuban History and Society · Law · Philosophy