Abstract

During the last third of the twentieth century, representation came to be perceived as in a state of crisis. This crisis was and continues to be felt with particular virulence in Latin American and postcolonial studies, fields that explicitly set out to decenter knowledge production by including voices from the periphery of global capitalism. Yet, legitimate concerns over representation and a necessary vigilance against asserting epistemic control over the "subaltern" have tended to ossify into a seemingly unbridgeable difference between the subaltern and "us," thus rendering it harder to recognize potential similarities that might link "our" lives at the economic center to those living in the underdeveloped periphery. This article proposes that in his 1986 novel Cuzcatlán donde bate la mar del sur the Salvadoran public intellectual Manlio Argueta manages to think through issues of representation and alterity in such a way that might help to begin thinking beyond this impasse. Despite its emphasis on opacity and difference, Argueta's text refuses to posit an absolute rupture between the "subaltern" and the "self." Read within the context of the debate on the representation of the subaltern, I argue that his novel functions as an implicit rebuttal of the thesis of incommensurability and, more importantly, that it offers alternatives to the construction of subaltern consciousness.

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