Introducing hyperworld(s): Language, culture, and history in the Latin American world(s)

Many of the articles published in this special edition of PORTAL responded to what we hoped would be the provocative, yet conceptually open, theme of the 2006 biennial conference of the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia: "Hyperworld: language, culture, history." The conference, and subsequent call for papers, aimed to elicit critical engagement with the processes by which, in the early 21st century - an information age of hypertechnology, post-nationalism, post-Fordism, and dominating transnational media - culture and economy have become fused, and globalizations tend towards the mercantilization, commodification, and privatization of human experience. We recognized that access to the technologies of globalizations is uneven. Although cyberspace and other hypertechnologies have become an integral part of workspaces, and of the domestic space in most households, across Western industrialized societies, and for the middle and upper-classes everywhere, this is not a reality for most people in the world, including the Latin American underclasses, the majority of the continent's population. But we also agreed with pundits who recognize that that limited access has not prevented a "techno-virtual spillover" into the historical-material world.2 More and more people - including those not in possession of the technologies - are increasingly touched by the techno-virtual realm and its logics, with a resultant transformation of global imaginaries in response to, for instance, the global spread of privatised entertainment and news via TV, satellites and the internet, and virtualized military operations (wars on terror, drugs, and rogue regimes). Under these hyperworldizing conditions, we asked, how might we talk about language, culture and history in Latin America, especially since language has an obvious, enduring importance as a tool for communication, and as the means to define culture and give narrative shape to our histories and power struggles?