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Postmodernity in Latin America. The Argentine Paradigm. By Santiago Colas. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. xiv+224 pages.
"I found my methodological guideposts in [C. L. R. James'] philosophical reflexions on Hegel and Marxism," Colas writes engagingly in the Preface to this book (xi). What it led him to, again in his own words, is to a work which "will, on the one hand, criticize the limitations of postmodernism theory, and, on the other, suggest an alternative account of recent Latin American culture" (xii). This is, in other words, a revisionist approach. It condemns those theorists of Postmodernism, especially Hutcheon, who exclude "the concrete historical and political dimension of postmodern culture" (3). Colas argues, rather predictably, that Latin American culture (by which he really means Spanish American fiction) is "impure" and "hybrid" and thus cannot be reconciled conveniently with current definitions or descriptions of Postmodernism. More especially he sees a process of "social and political resisting" (18) which cuts across any attempt to fit Postmodernism over Spanish American narratives like a paper pattern and cut around the edges.
Logically, at this point, what Colas might have considered doing was abandoning the whole concept of...