Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #5: latin america 179
most theoretically sophisticated and “developed.” I also know colleagues in
the Third World who will no doubt emphatically assert that there is no inside
and outside. It may be that they are the less theoretically sophisticated
and the most intellectually colonized, repeating and rehearsing dominant
propositions coming from an academic avant-garde intelligentsia, and responding
to local histories “interior” to the modern/colonial world.
Inside and outside, center and periphery are double metaphors that are
more telling about the loci of enunciation than to the ontology of the world.
There are and there aren’t inside and outside, center and periphery. What really
is is the saying of agents affirming or denying these oppositions within
the coloniality of power, the subalternization of knowledge, and the colonial
difference. The last horizon of border thinking is not only working
toward a critique of colonial categories; it is also working toward redressing
the subalternization of knowledges and the coloniality of power. It also
points toward a new way of thinking in which dichotomies can be replaced
by the complementarity of apparently contradictory terms. Border thinking
could open up the doors to an other tongue, an other thinking, an other logic
superseding the long history of the modern/colonial world, the coloniality
of power, the subalternization of knowledges and the colonial difference.
Discussion Questions
• What does Martin mean by singular and dual identities? And why is
the United States singular and Latin America dual?
• We have argued that Martin adopts an essentialist approach by
accepting Latin America as having a dual identity. After reading Martin’s
ideas in his own words, is it possible that his position is ambiguous, and
that he is simply revealing what Latin American authors have argued
rather than advocating a specifi c position?
• What role does Martin see literature playing in the issue of identity?
Does it simply reveal or does it actively construct identity?
• Does Bary ever try to defi ne Latin America?
• Bary and Martin mention many of the same authors. How do their
interpretations differ?
• Bary mentions some authors that Martin does not, such as Rigoberta
Menchú and the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. How do Bary’s references to
these authors challenge Martin’s essentialism?
• Neither Bary nor any of the authors to whom Bary appeals mention
the concept of discourse. So, how is Bary’s interpretive approach semiotic
rather than essentialist? How does it encourage us to reread texts by looking
for discursive infl uence?