Thresholds of Illiteracy

Thresholds of Illiteracy is a study on the notion of resistance in Latin America. It is a timely examination and critique of theories of postcoloniality, cultural difference, and subalternity and their impact on contemporary Latin American cultural discourse and history. This book contends that in recent years the idea of resistance has become saturated through hasty and imprecise usage, leaving a concept that retains little of its truly political meaning, function, and force, and which demands serious revision if it is to continue to be analytically useful, and continue to inspire people's struggle for freedom. The purpose of this book is to propose a critical and historical reevaluation of Latin American theories and narratives of resistance from the last 40 years, and to advance a new more critical approach to understanding acts or moments of antagonism which I am calling "illiteracy." I develop and employ illiteracy as an analytic principle and critical category which I use to read diverse forms of cultural production and whose unique advantage is to unconceal a far more radical problematization of politics, speech, and resistance in Latin America than previously held. This book is organized as a series of literary and cultural analyses of internationally-recognized postcolonial narratives in Latin America: such as the Indigenismo in Peru, Testimonio in Central America and Cuba, the neo-Zapatista [EZLN] uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and the immigration crisis at the US/Mexico border. Through a critical examination of the "illiterate" effects and contradictions at work in these resistant narratives, "Thresholds" goes beyond current theories of culture and politics to reveal radically unpredictable, and unwieldy, forms of antagonism which advance the possibility for an ever more democratic model of cultural analysis.