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John Randolph Beverley II is a literary and cultural critic at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies as well as an adjunct professor in the English and communication departments. He was influential in co-founding the Latin American subaltern studies [1] group as well as a founding member of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
He is a U.S.-based Latin Americanist cultural and literary theorist. In his work he is committed to revolutionary changes that would end the differences between rich and poor in Latin America and make a new and revolutionary democratic culture corresponding to the people's economic and political democratic revolutions. He has a dual emphasis on democracy and the people—-the workers, the masses, los de abajo, the multitude, and what he designates the subalter.
Born into a prosperous Anglo American family residing in South America, he became sensitive to the poverty and misery in which so many lived even as he had all the benefits of his class and caste. In this sense, his life goal has been to negate such differences. As a non-Hispanic student of Spanish literature, he gradually turned to Latin American themes, within larger contexts. At Princeton and then at the University of California, San Diego, he focused on Spanish Peninsular literature of Américo Castro, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, and Claudio Guillén; and studied Fredric Jameson who was developing methods for a Marxist approach to cultural and literary phenomena. He published a Marxist interpretation of Gongora's Soledades as his dissertation and first book.
The center of his interests shifted from Spain to Latin America, impelled by the political hopes of the 1960s and 1970s. He sought the application of his understanding of the Baroque to the development and structural situation of literature as a colonial and postcolonial institutions in the Americas. As a self-proclaimed Marxist and activist,[ citation needed ] he developed his literary work in relation to the Institute of Ideologies and Literatures in Minnesota, seeking to find progressive dimensions of literature and criticism that transcended state-centered powers of structure. That effort culminated in his Del Lazarillo a Sandinismo and his book with Marc Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions.
Beverley has written a number of texts on the testimonio, which can concern popular representation in literature and politics. He has taken the position that Latin America's own ideological structures have prevented the area's most progressive intellectuals from grasping their own reality. With the end of the cold war, the defeat of the Sandinistas and the full emergence of postmodern perspectives in Latin Americanist discourse, he produced a collection entitled The Post-Modern Debate in Latin America. While working on that text, he along with Ileana Rodríguez and others, co-founded the Latin American Subaltern Studies group, seeking a new post-cold war/post-sandinista post/postmodedrn theorization of the relations between culture, literature and political possibility, which he and other members (following Ernesto Laclau and others involved in cultural studies theory, but above all the South Asian Subaltern studies Group—at first through Gayatri Spivack and then more directly through R. Guha and others) saw as centered not directly on social classes but on the social groups and movements that struggled for empowerment and expression in the Americas.
In Against Literature, he writes from a subalternist perspective, and considers literature and existing literary studies (even leftwing versions) as implicated in hegemonic modernization projects at odds with subaltern positions. This view, now developed in relation to developing Latin American cultural studies discourse and in relation to the full emergence of globalization as the new macro-narrative of the post-postmodern period, became the subject of Subalternity and Representation (1999). The Latin American subaltern group dissolved early in the 21st century, but Beverley has continued working, co-developing a Pittsburgh University Press book series called “Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas,” publishing a new collection on Cuban literature, re-publishing his book with Hugo Achugar on testimonio, and completing Testimonio: The Politics of Truth (2004). In Latin Americanism after 9/11 (2014), he argues for a new situation for Latin America in the emerging global order, especially in view of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and other new left figures who have challenged older paradigms of left and right of previous decades. He critiques what he considers the failed politics of Zapatismo, and the “neo-conservative turn.”
The Sandinista National Liberation Front is a socialist political party in Nicaragua. Its members are called Sandinistas[sandiˈnistas] in both English and Spanish. The party is named after Augusto César Sandino, who led the Nicaraguan resistance against the United States occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930s.
Liberation theology is a synthesis of Christian theology and socio-economic analyses, that emphasizes "social concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed peoples." Beginning in the 1960s after the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology became the political praxis of Latin American theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and Jesuits Juan Luis Segundo, and Jon Sobrino, who popularized the phrase "preferential option for the poor." This expression was used first by Jesuit Fr. General Pedro Arrupe in 1968 and soon after this the World Synod of Catholic Bishops in 1971 chose as its theme "Justice in the World".
Luis de Góngora y Argote was a Spanish Baroque lyric poet. Góngora and his lifelong rival, Francisco de Quevedo, are widely considered the most prominent Spanish poets of all time. His style is characterized by what was called culteranismo, also known as Gongorismo. This style existed in stark contrast to Quevedo's conceptismo.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Spanish literature generally refers to literature written in the Spanish language within the territory that presently constitutes the Kingdom of Spain. Its development coincides and frequently intersects with that of other literary traditions from regions within the same territory, particularly Catalan literature, Galician intersects as well with Latin, Jewish, and Arabic literary traditions of the Iberian peninsula. The literature of Spanish America is an important branch of Spanish literature, with its own particular characteristics dating back to the earliest years of Spain’s conquest of the Americas.
José Lezama Lima was a Cuban writer and poet who is considered one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature.
The Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) or Subaltern Studies Collective is a group of South Asian scholars interested in the postcolonial and post-imperial societies. The term Subaltern Studies is sometimes also applied more broadly to others who share many of their views and they are often considered to be "exemplary of postcolonial studies" and as one of the most influential movements in the field. Their anti-essentialist approach is one of history from below, focused more on what happens among the masses at the base levels of society than among the elite.
In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates and identifies the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the men and women who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.
Sandinista ideology or Sandinismo is a series of political and economic philosophies championed and instituted by the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front throughout the late twentieth century. The ideology and movement acquired its name, image and, most crucially, military style from Augusto César Sandino, a Nicaraguan revolutionary leader who waged a guerrilla war against the United States Marines and the conservative Somoza National Guards in the early twentieth century. Despite using the Sandino name, the principals of modern Sandinista ideology were mainly developed by Carlos Fonseca, who, in likeness to the leaders of the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s, sought to inspire socialist populism among Nicaragua's peasant population. One of these main philosophies involved the institution of an educational system that would "free" the population from the perceived historical fallacies spouted by the ruling Somoza family. By awakening political thought among the people, proponents of Sandinista ideology believed that human resources would be available to not only execute a guerrilla war against the Somoza regime but also build a society resistant to economic and military intervention imposed by foreign entities.
Latin American studies (LAS) is an academic and research field associated with the study of Latin America. The interdisciplinary study is a subfield of area studies, and can be composed of numerous disciplines such as economics, sociology, history, international relations, political science, geography, gender studies, and literature.
Robert Stam is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a University Professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. He wrote with Ella Shohat Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.
Jean Franco is a British-born academic and literary critic known for her pioneering work on Latin American literature. Educated at Manchester and London, she has taught at London, Essex, and Stanford, and is currently professor emerita at Columbia University.
Latin American subaltern studies was a group founded in 1992 by John Beverley and Ileana Rodríguez. Inspired by the South Asian Subaltern Studies group, its aim was to apply a similar perspective to Latin American studies. It was one of the more important recent developments within Latin American cultural studies, though in the end the group folded owing to internal differences that were both scholarly and political.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical-theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.
Roger Lancaster is a professor of anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where from 1999 until 2014 he directed the Cultural Studies PhD Program. He is known for his writing in LGBT studies, gender/sexuality, culture and political economy, and critical science studies. His research tries to understand how sexual mores, racial hierarchies, and class predicaments interact in a changing world.
Belén Gache is a Spanish-Argentinian novelist and experimental writer.
Donald E. Pease is the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is an Americanist, literary and cultural critic, and academic. He has been a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1977 or 1978. He was the founding editor of the New Americanist Series at Duke University Press and editor of the Re-Encountering Colonialism Series and Re-Mapping the Transnational Turn: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies for the University Press of New England (UPNE). Pease directs the annual Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth.
Juan Poblete is Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Poblete began his career as a UCSC Assistant Professor in 1997. He is also the provost of Kresge College at UCSC and a Governing Board Member of the Latino Literary Cultures Project/Proyecto Culturas Literarias Latinas.
Ileana Rodríguez is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the Ohio State University, and she is also affiliated with the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica (IHNCA).