Is there a way of thinking about literature that is 'outside' or 'against' literature? In Against Literature, John Beverley brilliantly responds to this question, arguing for a negation of the literary that would allow nonliterary forms of cultural practice to displace literature's hegemony.

These four germinal essays by John Beverley sparked the widespread discussion and debate surrounding testimonio--the socially and politically charged Latin American narrative of witnessing--that culminated, with David Stoll's highly publicized attack on Rigoberta Menchu's celebrated testimonial text. Challenging 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 testimonio from its emergence in the Cold War era to the rise of a globalized economy and of U.S....

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...

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...

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...

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 consequences for understanding Spanish and Latin American literary and cultural history. Conceived in response to Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria'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,...

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...