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Of Creole Symptoms, Cuban Fantasies, and Other Latin American Postcolonial Ideologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Santiago Colás
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Abstract

Postcolonial theory and criticism have tended to ignore the specificity of Latin American experiences of decolonization, which are largely early-nineteenth-century phenomena. Using Slavoj Žižek's Marxist and psychoanalytic theory of ideology, I highlight the particularities of the poetry of independence in the 1820s and the political and cultural discourses of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. From these instances, I elaborate a concept of Latin American postcoloniality as the recurring product of an intellectual and political elite driven by an unconscious desire for the persistence of external and internal colonial relations, and I argue that the practice of Latin American studies in the United States should be related to this concept.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 110 , Issue 3: Special Millennium issue , May 1995 , pp. 382 - 396
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1995

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