The Latin American Nation and Its Cultural Inscriptions: Archives of Promise or Lament?

It could be argued that Latin American topics gained impetus during the past two decades even while the institutional grounds of humanities and area studies came under question, perhaps an unsuspected cycle of academic production caught in seemingly uncharted territory.1 This is particularly evident in Latin American literary and cultural studies, a conceptual terrain invigorated through a wide spectrum of research programs as distinct as coloniality, deconstructive theories, ethnic, gender, and cultural studies, as well as transatlantic mapping. These efforts now conceive their object of study through editorial projects, theoretical strands, modes of writing and new sensibilities, each with its own market share, so to speak. As such, they form a challenging if not contradictory understanding of space (nation, society, community, body) as well as texts (writing, sounds, images) to which they correspond.2 This chapter will attempt to map this widening scope of emerging work on Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly since 1989, with a special focus on conceptual and economic shifts that question our understanding of nation-states and their cultural inscriptions.3