Being in Common: Nation, Subject, and Community in Latin American Literature and Culture (Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory)

'Being in Common' analyzes key works of twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture as precursors of contemporary theories of globalization. The book studies how texts from the 1940s and 1950s by major Latin American authors, such as Alejo Carpentier, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, Octavio Paz, and Jorge Luis Borges, provide alternatives to national belonging in order to articulate the community of experience. These texts offer articualtions of commnuity that interrupt the totalizing and often violent homogeneity of identity (or difference), the priority of the Subject and the location of culture. They explore ways of being in common (the communal relation) when the notion of a common being (a totalizing conception of community) is shown to be untenable.

Silvia Rosman is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at New York University.