Where's Jessica?: Myth, Nation, and War in America's Heartland

Discourse-based analysis continues to be thought of, in some quarters, in overgeneralizing terms. In this article, I emphasize that all instances of it do not share the same suppositions, and I demonstrate its purchase for a critical but nuanced revisiting of processes of national liberation and development. I present support for some of the conclusions that I advanced in an earlier study (Langley 2001), which examines post-1979 Sandinismo as a dispositif within modernity. Ultimately, I focus upon contrasting discourses of the literacy campaign that place Sandinismo in time and space as well as within a historical particularity. I consider how these discourses relate to the ways in which the most marginalized sectors of campesinos (peasants) fared in the context of the Sandinista project. The manner in which they had been ‘spoken’ about shaped and delimited how they ‘spoke’ and might have ‘spoken.’