Cambridge Scholars Publishing A Marxist Critique of Latin American Colonial Studies

During the mid-1980s, Latin American colonial studies came to be dominated by the various ‘post’ movements―post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-Marxism―characterized by their promotion of discursivity as the ultimate horizon of sociality. This volume confronts discourse theory and examples of its colonial application with an alternative Althusserian problematic that foregrounds modes of production and class struggle, to which end it further promotes a view of colonial societies as split, not along a horizontal, geographic axis that offsets the New World against Europe, but vertically through the opposition between dominant tributary/feudal formations and their emergent capitalist equivalent. Its fundamental claim is that the radical-sounding rhetoric of the various ‘post’ movements, far from energizing the politics of resistance to the forces of imperialism, actually greases the mechanisms of finance capital. About the Author Malcolm K. Read was educated at Bristol University, UK, and gained his PhD at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he lectured in Spanish from 1968 to 1980. He served as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Auckland University, New Zealand, from 1980 to 1993, during which time he held a visiting professorship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. Following this, he became Chair of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where he taught until his retirement in 2012.