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Posmodernidad en la periferia: Enfoques latinoamericanos de la nueva teoria cultural. Ed. Hermann Herlinghaus and Monika Walter. Berlin: Langer Verlag, 1994. 264 pages.
Posmodernidad en la periferia: Enfoques latinoamericanos de la nueva teoria cultural is a collection of eleven essays edited by Hermann Herlinghaus and Monika Walter that treats the concept of postmodernity in Latin America. The collective expertise of the contributors is comprehensive and impressive. There are studies of cinema, communication, identity, mass media, politics, and popular culture that discuss the theme of modernity and postmodernity in Latin America. This carefully prepared text includes a thoughtful introduction, which is the first essay by Herlinghaus and Walter. The editors begin with an overview of the fundamental characteristics of modernity and postmodernity in Latin America. Focusing on the works of the other essayists in the volume, Herlinghaus and Walter proceed to describe an epistemological revolution that strives to contextualize the new concepts that define postmodernity "sin descartar las experiencias culturales de la literatura."
The exclusive focus of the second essay is tradition and modernity in Latin America. Jose Joaquin Brunner illustrates his idea of Latin American culture of our time as an evolving and budding collage that is still being created, and where each piece produces and reproduces others. After examining the idea of "la modernidad" from many different points of view, Brunner concludes that "la modernidad" did not arrive in Latin America from intellectuals or intellectual sources. Instead, he argues that it arrived through mass media and cultural apparatuses that have produced and are still producing culture, i.e., television, poverty, soap...