The term “subalternity” refers to a condition of subordination brought about by colonization or other forms of economic, social, racial, linguistic, and/or cultural dominance. Subaltern studies is, therefore, a study of power. Who has it and who does not. Who is gaining it and who is losing it. Power is intimately related to questions of representation—to which representations have cognitive authority and can secure hegemony and which do not and cannot. In this book John Beverley examines ...

Revolving around the Celtic calendar, The Tao of Jesus is a lively book of 365 daily meditations (plus texts for moveable feast days and seasons) that integrate the spirit of Jesus into a creation-centered spirituality. Drawn from Christian, Taoist, Jewish, and aboriginal sources, it celebrates our connection to the Earth, the eternal Tao, and to one another. Culminating with chants, songs, rituals, and liturgies, The Tao of Jesus offers a delightful alternative to conventional church year...

What might the story of Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene look like if Jesus and Mary are given the places in the gospel story that they occupy in such recently discovered texts as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip? Butcher's answer to this question is provided in the present book, Sacred Partnership, a narrative volume that most resembles a modern-day gospel. Written in the present tense, the volume narrates a powerful story of ancient wisdom, holy myst...

“This book began in what seemed like a counterfactual intuition . . . that what had been happening in Nicaraguan poetry was essential to the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution,” write John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman. “In our own postmodern North American culture, we are long past thinking of literature as mattering much at all in the ‘real’ world, so how could this be?” This study sets out to answer that question by showing how literature has been an agent of the revolutionary process i...

The Failure of Latin America is a collection of John Beverley’s previously published essays and pairs them with new material that reflects on questions of post-colonialism and equality within the context of receding continental socialism. Beverley sees an impasse within both the academic postcolonial project and the Bolivarian idea of Latin America. The Pink Tide may have failed to permanently reshape Latin America, but in its failure there remains the possibility of an alternativ...

In Latinamericanism after 9/11, John Beverley explores Latinamericanist cultural theory in relation to new modes of political mobilization in Latin America. He contends that after 9/11, the hegemony of the United States and the neoliberal assumptions of the so-called Washington Consensus began to fade in Latin America. At the same time, the emergence in Latin America of new leftist governments—the marea rosada or “pink tide”—gathered momentum. Whatever its outcome, the

Postmodernism may seem a particularly inappropriate term when used in conjunction with a region that is usually thought of as having only recently, and then unevenly, acceded to modernity. Yet in the last several years the concept has risen to the top of the agenda of cultural and political debate in Latin America.This collection explores the Latin American engagement with postmodernism, less to present a regional variant of the concept than to situate it in a transnational framewo...