This edited collection brings together the latest research on discourse and society in Latin America and Caribbean in one volume. Employing cross-cutting approaches to current political, institutional and media discourses, it bridges existing theoretical and analytical gaps between the socio-political macro issues and the micro aspects of linguistic analysis to provide fresh insights that deconstruct the complex socio-political power dynamics in Latin America and the Caribbean. Across eight chapters this volume explores the regions’ thorny relationship with their complex histories of colonialism and slavery as well as the ongoing, multifaceted constructions of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic identities at the individual, regional and national levels. In doing so, it demonstrates the unique and rich particularities of these regions and why it is that they challenge many conventional dogmas and methods across the Social Sciences. This book will be of particular interest to scholars working in Discourse Studies, Sociology, Politics, Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

"This book offers a regional, intersectional, and transnational perspective of psychoanalysis in Latin America and the Caribbean that illuminates psychoanalysis's role as social and political discourse through a collection of original interventions in the fields of psychoanalysis, cultural studies, psychology, anthropology, health sciences, history, and philosophy. The authors contribute to discussions about the applicability of psychoanalytic concepts to reading Latin American and Caribbean sociopolitical phenomena as well as how these regionally specific dimensions challenge and transform traditional psychoanalytic notions. Firstly, the book offers a regional overview of psychoanalysis as a discourse that reflects on the imbrication between the psychic and the sociopolitical. Secondly, it showcases intersectional perspectives that illuminate psychoanalysis's potentials and limitations in addressing contemporary problematics around race, gender, sexuality, and class. Finally, the book attests to the area's role in advancing psychoanalysis as a transnational discipline. By providing both a balanced regional overview and an interdisciplinary perspective, the volume will be essential for all psychoanalysts and scholars wanting to understand the place of psychoanalysis in Latin American and Caribbean discourse"--

Latin America's long history of showing how racism can co-exist with racial mixture and conviviality offers useful ammunition for strengthening anti-racist stances. This volume asks whether cultural production has a particular role to play within discourses and practices of anti-racism in Latin America and the Caribbean. The contributors analyse music, performance, education, language, film and art in diverse national contexts across the region. The book also places Latin American and Caribbean racial formations within a broader global context and sets out the premise that the region provides valuable opportunities for thinking about anti-racism when recent political events have made ever more fragile the claims that, at least in Europe and the United States, we exist in a 'post-racial' world.

Building on the pioneering work of Edward Said in fresh and useful ways, contributors to this volume consider both historical contacts and literary influences in the formation of Latin American constructs of the “Orient” and the “Self” from colonial times to the present. In the process, they unveil wide-ranging manifestations of Orientalism. Contributors scrutinize the “other” great encounter, not with Europeans but with Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese cultures, as they marked Latin American societies from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean to Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. The perspectives, experiences, and theories presented in these examples offer a comprehensive framework for understanding wide-ranging manifestations of Orientalism in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world. Orientalism and Identity in Latin America expands current theoretical frameworks, juxtaposing historical, biographical, and literary depictions of Middle Eastern and Asian migrations, both of people and cultural elements, as they have been received, perceived, refashioned, and integrated into Latin American discourses of identity and difference. Underlying this intercultural dialogue is the hypothesis that the discourse of Orientalism and the process of Orientalization apply equally to Near Eastern and Far Eastern subjects as well as to immigrants, regardless of provenance—and indeed to any individual or group who might be construed as “Other” by a particular dominant culture.

"From Lack to Excess analyzes the narrative and rhetorical structures of Latin American colonial texts by establishing a dialogue with studies on minority discourse, minor literatures, and postcolonial theory. After reviewing the main contributions and limitations of Transatlantic, Early Modern, and Postcolonial studies for the interpretation of Latin American colonial textualities, Martinez-San Miguel takes as a point of departure the subtle yet pervasive semantic link between the terms "minority" and "colonialism" prevalent in current studies on ethnic and sexual identities. She then engages the disciplinary debate between Colonial Latin American studies and Early Modern, Transatlantic, and Postcolonial studies, paying attention to the epistemic and institutional junctures that explain the current reconfiguration of these fields." "As an alternative to an exhausted debate, Martinez-San Miguel uses Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of a "minor literature," along with current studies on minority discourse to propose new close readings of texts by Hernan Cortes, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. From Lack to Excess traces a discursive voyage that configures a linguistic matrix from the initial lack of language to the excessive Baroque representation of American reality."--BOOK JACKET.

Selected essays from the rich and complex collection of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the Caribbean, examine the psychological, sociological, and philosophical implications of cultural dependency.

From cross-dressing pirates to servants and slaves, women have played vital and often surprising roles in the navigation and cultural mapping of Caribbean territory. Yet these experiences rarely surface in the increasing body of critical literature on women s travel writing, which has focused on European or American women traveling to exotic locales as imperial subjects. This stellar collection of essays offers a contestatory discourse that embraces the forms of travelogue, autobiography, and ethnography as vehicles for women s rewriting of "flawed" or incomplete accounts of Caribbean cultures. This study considers writing by Caribbean women, such as the slave narrative of Mary Prince and the autobiography of Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, and works by women whose travels to the Caribbean had enormous impacts on their own lives, such as Aphra Behn and Zora Neale Hurston. Ranging across cultural, historical, literary, and class dimensions of travel writing, these essays give voice to women writers who have been silenced, ignored, or marginalized.