Negotiating Difference in the Hispanic World

Negotiating Difference in the Hispanic World invites readers to rethink the complex dialogical process of identity formation and self-definition in Latin America from the Conquest to the present day. Essays from an international scholarship provide an important theoretical contribution to debates on identity. Individual and collective concepts of identity are developed through negotiations of difference. These negotiations are reliant on the intensity and length of the encounter with ‘the other’, and are heightened by socio-political and cultural conjunctures such as colonialism and globalisation. This edited collection invites us to explore the different instances of cultural encounters in Latin America from the Conquest to the present day. It resituates Hispanic culture within the wider debate on identity, and investigates the intricate mechanisms whereby the latter is being moulded and remoulded in the last five hundred years. Its focal point is difference not as a topological sign of alterity, nor simply as an essential component of the Self, but as the mechanism whereby the idea of the Self is negotiated, uttered and performed. The volume brings together discussions on identity from a broad range of international specialists in the fields of literary and cultural studies, cultural history, art history, translation studies and cultural anthropology. They make important theoretical contributions to current debates, maintaining a fine balance between theoretical argument and empirical study. Negotiating Difference in the Hispanic World invites us to rethink the complex dialogical process of identity formation and self-definition in Latin America from the Conquest to the present day. Essays from an international scholarship provide an important theoretical contribution to debates on identity. Explores the various instances of cultural encounters in Latin America from the Conquest to the present day This volume is singularly wide in its breadth, covering sixteenth-century Aztec heraldry and Sahagún's Universal History of the Things of New Spain, to eighteenth-century notions of culture, nineteenth-century theatre, turn-of-the-century degeneration theory, and contemporary literature and culture. The book’s interdisciplinary approach combines literary and cultural studies, cultural history, art history, translation studies and cultural anthropology A broad geographical scope covers Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Cuba and the United States. The book makes an important theoretical contribution to the debates on identity through its innovative approaches, maintaining a fine balance between theoretical argument and empirical study The essays are written by specialists of different nationalities based in the United Kingdom, the United States, Norway and Argentina, providing an international cutting-edge scholarship