The Secular Duty: Latin Americanism as Criollo Humanism

Latin Americanism is best understood as a political-theological formation, which produces the “justification” for its literary-philosophic enterprise as a sacrifice unto the payment of debts, the fulfillment of obligations, and, generally, its servitude to the social order. This article advances the argument that Latin Americanist critique has been, despite its best intentions, a deeply criollo endeavor (often with the racialized valences that the signifier suggests). A Spanish colonial heritage and a certain racialized inscription that works to immunize the Latin Americanist endeavor against theoretical speculation has resulted in a Latin Americanism that has been highly inconsequential: belletrism or “political engagement” as the twin face of a field that can too often only understand itself in terms of its service to a power from which it is at pains to maintain its difference. Engaging decolonial thought, on the one hand, and liberal literary criticism, on the other, I argue that Latin Americanist critique's missed encounter with deconstruction remains a symptomatic scene of its failure to emerge from its criollo heritage.