This volume surveys the range of texts, authors and topics from the literary and non-literary cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa, adopting a set of perspectives that are grounded in the discipline of postcolonial studies. Using comparative and contrastive methods, Postcolonial Perspectives reinterprets cultural landmarks and traditions of Latin America and Lusophone Africa.

Aimed at a readership in postcolonial, Luso-Brazilian and Latin American Studies, this surveys the range of texts, authors and topics from the literary and non-literary cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa, adopting perspectives that are grounded in the discipline of postcolonial studies.

Aimed at a readership in postcolonial, Luso-Brazilian and Latin American Studies, this surveys the range of texts, authors and topics from the literary and non-literary cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa, adopting perspectives that are grounded in the discipline of postcolonial studies.

This volume surveys the range of texts, authors and topics from the literary and non-literary cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa, adopting a set of perspectives that are grounded in the discipline of postcolonial studies. Using comparative and contrastive methods, Postcolonial Perspectives reinterprets cultural landmarks and traditions of Latin America and Lusophone Africa.

The vision of the South American rainforest as a wilderness of rank decay, poisonous insects, and bloodthirsty ‘savages’ in the Spanish American novela de la selva has often been interpreted as a belated imitation of European travel literature. This book offers a new reading of the genre by arguing that, far from being derivative, the novela de la selva re-imagined the tropics from a Latin American perspective, redefining tropical landscape aesthetics and ethnography through parodic rewritings of European perceptions of Amazonia in fictional and factual travel writing. With particular reference to the four emblematic novels of the genre – W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions [1904], José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine [1924], Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima [1935], and Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos [1953] – the book explores how writers throughout post-independence Latin America turned to the jungle as a locus for the contestation of both national and literary identity, harnessing the superabundant tropical vegetation and native myths and customs to forge a descriptive vocabulary which emphatically departed from the reductive categories of European travel writing. Despite being one of the most significant examples of postcolonial literature to emerge from Latin America in the twentieth century, the novela de la selva has, to date, received little critical attention: this book returns a seminal genre of Latin American literature to the centre of contemporary debates about postcolonial identity, travel writing, and imperial landscape aesthetics.

Postcolonial Borges is the first systematic account of geo-political and postcolonial themes in a range of writings by Borges, from the poetry and essays of the 1920s, through the prose and poetry of the middle years (the 40s, 50s, and 60s), to the stories of El informe de Brodie and the poems of La cifra and other later collections. Robin Fiddian analyses the development of a postcolonial sensibility in works such as 'Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires', 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', 'Theme of the Traitor and the Hero', and 'Brodie's Report'. He examines Borges's treatment of national and regional identity, and of East-West relations, in several essays and poems, contained, for example, in Other Inquisitions and Seven Nights. The theoretical concepts of 'coloniality' and 'Occidentalism' shed new light on several works by Borges, who acquires a sharper political profile than previously acknowledged. Fiddian pays special attention to Oriental subjects in Borges's works of the 70s and 80s, where their treatment is bound up with a critique of Occidental values and assumptions. Classified by some commentators over the years as a precursor of post-colonialism, Borges in fact emerges as a prototype of the postcolonial intellectual exemplified by James Joyce, Aimé Césaire (for example), and Edward Said. From a regional perspective, his repertoire of geopolitical and historical concerns resonates with those of Leopoldo Zea, Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Galeano, and Joaquín Torres García , who illustrate different strands and kinds of Latin American post-colonialism(s) of the twentieth century. At the same time, manifest differences in respect of political and artistic temperament mark Borges out as a postcolonial intellectual and creative writer who is sui generis.

Traces changes in Andean artists' vision of indigenous peoples as well as shifts in the critical discourse surrounding their work between 1920 and 1960.