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

50 reframing latin america
graph 2.7
semiotic inquiry leads us to ask different questions. How and when did
female sex organs become associated with volatility? What vested interests
are served by asserting that laziness is an intrinsic trait of the poor? Who
decides the criteria for most powerful nation? In the case of Latin America,
we do not ask whether Latin Americans are truly violent, poor, good dancers,
great musicians, exotic, passionate, or closer to nature, but how those
labels came to be applied to them.
Notes
1. Saussure’s main work was published posthumously in 1916 as Course
in General Linguistics (Paris: Payot). It actually consists of a compilation
of notes taken by his students of his lectures at the University of Geneva
between 1906 and 1911. It was fi rst published in Spanish in 1945 by the
Buenos Aires publisher Losada and then in English in 1959 by various publishers
such as Oxford’s Pergamon Press and New York’s McGraw-Hill and
has since been translated and reprinted many times.
2. See Alexander Lyon Macfi e, Orientalism: A Reader (New York: NYUP,
2002).