Prof. Sandro Barros Publishes Competing Truths in Contemporary Latin American Literature

September 27, 2010

September 27, 2010, Greencastle, Ind. — Competing Truths in Contemporary Latin American Literature: Narrating Otherness, Marginality, and the Politics of Representation by Sandro R. Barros, assistant professor of modern languages (Spanish), has been published by Floricanto Press.

"The overwhelming success of the filmic adaptations of Before Night Falls by Cuban exile Reinaldo Arenas, The Virgin of the Assassins by Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo, and City of God by Brazilian author Paulo Lins attracted audiences worldwide to rediscover and rethink the content of these works as enigmatic messages of disillusionment and abjection regarding the Latin American realities they promote," notes a synopsis. The original texts' representation of sicarios, favelados, and homosexual dissidents undermines the conceptualization of the Latin American continental identity as 'Other' in relation to dominant Eurocentric and North American perspectives. Competing Truths delves into the question of to what extent the fictional and autobiographical truths purported by the aforementioned bestsellers engage in the process of fixating conventional paradigms of 'Third World' identity, such as poverty, violence and exclusion, as images of consumption for world audiences. Furthermore, Competing Truths examines what constitutes truth and reality from a perspective that assesses Latin American history and culture in a contest for the very meaning of the postmodern truth."

Learn more, and order the book, at Amazon.com.

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