Over the course of the last three decades, the field of postcolonial studies – with its ample lexicon of derivatives (postcoloniality, postcolonial, post-colonial) and keywords (alterity, the Black Atlantic, borderlands, bricolage, cannibal, Créole/creolization, diaspora, frontier, heteroglossia, hybridity, in-betweenness, liminality, mestizaje, magical realism, mimicry, orality, resistance, subaltern, syncretism, third space, transculturation, trauma, among others) – has left an indelible mark across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (Fabian; Mason; Shohat and Stam; Taussig), including Latin American Studies (Durix, Faith, Mahoney, Moraña, Thurner, and Guerrero, Castro Klarén). From Central America, throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to the Southern Cone, the decolonizing desire for the unadulterated presence – and the voice – of the marginalized and oppressed “other” has found its expression in the surge and subsequent canonization of testimonio, a discursive mode purporting to combine truth, justice, and redress with “(para)literary” craftsmanship. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam point out, the wide adoption of postcolonial theories, insofar as they attempt to address multilayered identities, has had as its corollary a proliferation of “terms having to do with cultural mixing: religious (syncretism); biological (hybridity); human-genetic (mestizaje); and linguistic (creolization). … And while the themes are old … the historical moment is new.” Once again, many of these concepts resonate with the Americas and, in particular, with the Caribbean. In fact, it has become commonplace within literary criticism to assume and assert that Caribbean cultures in particular lend themselves almost by default to postcolonial interpretations, and such approaches have resonated with great force among the scholars from/of the region (Hofman, Balutansky, and Sourieau; Martínez San-Miguel).

Beginning in the late 1990s, postcolonial studies – launched by theorists such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak – became the target of unsparing criticism coming from some Latin American and Latin Americanist quarters (Klor de Alva; Mignolo; Vidal; Torres-Saillant). In his introduction to Histories/Global Designs, Walter Mignolo attests to – and shares – the ongoing “suspicion” about “coloniality and postcoloniality,” identifying the Southern Cone and Colombia as the epicenters of such skepticism.