Being in Common

Being in Common analyzes key works of twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture as precursors of contemporary theories of globalization. In a richly researched and wide-ranging account, Silvia Rosman studies how texts from the 1940s and '50s by major Latin American authors, such as Alejo Carpentier, Ezequiel Mart nez Estrada, Octavio Paz, and Jorge Luis Borges, provide alternatives to traditional forms of national, linguistic, or geographical belonging and thus allow us to think the commonality of experience differently. These texts offer articulations of community that challenge the totalizing and often violent homogeneity of identity or difference, the priority of the Subject and the location of culture. Rosman persuasively demonstrates how they explore ways of being in common--the communal relation--when the notion of a common being--a totalized conception of community--is shown to be untenable. In doing so she incorporates and looks beyond her predecessors' theoretical resources to urgent contemporary preoccupations with how to imagine identity in a "post-national" moment.