Dependency theory and literary history: the case of Latin America

Here is the text (from my library, it won’t work for you) as published in the Minnesota Review in 1975. I’ve downloaded it. I’ve been carrying around a paper copy of it as a NYU working paper for 48 years. It’s still fresh. There is a lot in it and I carried it around because I felt I had not absorbed it and would need it.

I won’t try to summarize it here, and I still have not absorbed it, but I can still study it. It is referenced in this 2022 text I want to read, from Cambridge. What I had marked early on was about Fanon, Black Skin White Masks. Lifting from Franco: the hankering for assimilation makes inhabitants of colonized territories wear the mask of the metropolis because they must negate themselves in order to exist for the colonizer. So from Independence forward, the assimilation of Latin America into a universal culture has been as powerful a motivation as the quest for originality. Dependency theory cuts across this double bind.

Axé.


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