Cultural Antagonism and the Crisis of Reality in Latin America

Horacio Legrás is a Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at University of California, Irvine, USA. He is the author of Literature and Subjection: The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America (2008) and Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory and the Making of Modern Mexico (2017) and over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

• AcknowledgmentsPreface1. The Nativist Avant-Grade2. Miguel Angel Asturias: The Science of Literature3. Seeing Women Photographed in Revolutionary Mexico4. The Dialectic of Diasporic Consciousness: The Afro-Cuban Voice and the Hypostasis of Meaning5.José María Arguedas: Capitalist Accumulation and Novelistic Mode of Presentation in the Andes6. Psychotic Violence: Crime and Consumption in the Apocalyptic Phase of CapitalismWorks CitedIndex

Legras is one of the most insightful and brilliant scholars of Latin American arts and literature today. Combining cultural-political history, textual and visual analysis, critical theory and psychoanalysis, this book works through the place of antagonism in Latin American modernity. Legras understands antagonism as the event whose emergence rearranges the Latin American real, and art and literature as the discursive sites where the contours of out-of-joint marginalized collective subjects can be traced and interrogated in the very act of dislocating the totalizing fictions put forth by the institutions that sustain the pretense of society as an objective, shared reality. This is an extraordinarily illuminating andintelligent book; it proves that theory can still be deployed as an intempestive form of historical imagination to intervene in the most urgent debates of the present.