The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America

The Places of History regrounds literary criticism in the particularities of history so as to probe those gaps created by reading Latin American literature through either the lenses of a totalizing view of globalized culture or through universal formulae for reading offered by meta-narratives. It is history which points to the tension between social reality and the theoretical categories used to talk about it - an idea that resides in the background of each of the essays. Several of the essays explore this concept in detail to flexibly probe the incommensurability of empirical history with any code or formula. Other essays go on to explore this problem with relation to the differences between Latin American reality and principally North Atlantic models of moderniy, these differences in turn becoming signs of particular regional identity in an increasingly globalized world; the response of elites to these differences through the establishment of monocultural patriotism and nationalism; and the possibilities of dialogue and alliance opposed to monocultural representations as expressed within the Romance in Latin American literature. At the centre of this collection is the idea of the shifting, unstable signpost which points to multiple and equivocal meanings. It is only by exploring the particularities of regional historical cultures that the sign’s span of meaning may be delimited and differentiated, probed for its revelation into the life at the heart of Latin American literature. The Places of History should be of interest to Latin Americanists and literary scholars alike for its eclectic and often experimental approach to the reading of texts and the reality they seek to capture.