A Marxist Critique of Latin American Colonial Studies

During the mid-1980s, Latin American colonial studies came to be dominated by the various ‘post’ movements—post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-Marxism—characterized by their promotion of discursivity as the ultimate horizon of sociality. This volume confronts discourse theory and examples of its colonial application with an alternative Althusserian problematic that foregrounds modes of production and class struggle, to which end it further promotes a view of colonial societies as split, not along a horizontal, geographic axis that offsets the New World against Europe, but vertically through the opposition between dominant tributary/feudal formations and their emergent capitalist equivalent. Its fundamental claim is that the radical-sounding rhetoric of the various ‘post’ movements, far from energizing the politics of resistance to the forces of imperialism, actually greases the mechanisms of finance capital.