Colonialism now and then : Colonial Latin American studies in the light of the predicament of Latin Americanism / Gustavo Verdesio ; On the issues of academic colonialization and responsibility when reading and writing about colonial Latin America today / Alvaro Félix Bolaños ; Pre-Colombian pasts and Indian presents in Mexican history / José Rabasa ; Confronting imaginations : towards alternative reading of the Codex Mendoza / Cora Lagos ; Narrating colonial interventions : Don Diego de Torres, cacique of Turmequé in the New Kingdom of Granada / Luis Fernando Restrepo. (Post- )Colonial sublime : order and interdeterminacy in Eighteenth century Spanish American poetics and aesthetics / Anthony Higgins ; Gendered crime and punishment in New Spain : inquisitional cases against Ilusas / Stacey Schlau ; Representing gender, deviance and heterogeneity in the Eighteenth Century Peruvian newspaper Mercurio peruano / Mariselle Meléndez ; The dragon and the seashell : British corsairs, epic poetry and Creole nation in Viceregal Peru / José Antonio Mazzotti ; History and plunder in El carnero : writing, among Indians, a history of Spaniards and Euro-Americans in Colonial Spanish America / Alvaro Félix Bolaños ; The literary appropriation of the American landscape : the historical novels of Abel Posse and Juan José Saer and their critics / Gustavo Verdesio ; Writing with his thumb in the air : coloniality, past and present / Sara Castro-Klarén

Colonialism Past and Present : Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America Today - This collection of essays offers alternative readings of historical and literary texts produced during Latin America's colonial period. By considering the political and ideological implications of the texts' interpretation yesterday and today, it attempts to "decolonize" the field of Latin American studies and promote an ethical, interdisciplinary practice that does not falsify or appropriate knowledge produced by both the colonial subjects of the past and the oppressed subjects of the present. Using recent developments in postcolonial theory, the contributors challenge traditional approaches to Hispanism. The colonial situation under which these texts were composed, with all its injustices and prejudices, still lingers, and most studies have consistently avoided the connection between this colonial legacy and the situation of disenfranchised groups today. Colonialism Past and Present challenges discursive strategies that celebrate only European cultural traits, dismiss non-European cultural legacies, and solidify constructions of national projects considered natural extensions of European civilization since independence from Spain