Colonialism Past and Present: Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America Today.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-APR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

Colonialism Past and Present: Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America Today. Ed. by ALVARO FELIX BOLANOS and GUSTAVO VERDESIO. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2002. viii+300 pp. 2002. $27.95. ISBN 0-7914-5146-1.

In 1969 Georges Perec published La Disparition, a novel written entirely without the use of the letter 'e'. The absent letter forms part of the novel's plot; the reader's realization that the letter is missing is part of the process of understanding the work. In this edited collection by Alvaro Felix Bolanos and Gustavo Verdesio, the missing item is not a letter but a discipline. History (as opposed to literary criticism, anthropology, etc.) hovers as a ghostly absence throughout the volume until the final chapter, in which Sara Castro-Klaren calls clearly for a return to history, to 'the fullness of experience' (p. 265). Only then does it...

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