Ben. Sifuentes-Jauregui – författare

Through a collection of critical essays, this work explores twelve keywords central in Latin American and Caribbean Studies: indigenismo, Americanism, colonialism, criollismo, race, transculturation, modernity, nation, gender, sexuality, testimonio, and popular culture. The central question motivating this work is how to think—epistemologically and pedagogically—about Latin American and Caribbean Studies as fields that have had different historical and institutional trajectories across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.

Through a collection of critical essays, this work explores twelve keywords central in Latin American and Caribbean Studies: indigenismo, Americanism, colonialism, criollismo, race, transculturation, modernity, nation, gender, sexuality, testimonio, and popular culture. The central question motivating this work is how to think—epistemologically and pedagogically—about Latin American and Caribbean Studies as fields that have had different historical and institutional trajectories across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.

Discusses how theories of queer performativity, as articulated within the US Academy, are unable to capture the whole of Latino American queer subjectivity and experience.The Avowal of Difference explores the potentialities and limitations that queer theory offers in the context of Latino American texts and subjects. Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui contrasts Latino American sexual genealogies with the Anglo-European "coming out" narrative-and interrogates the centrality of the "coming out" story as the regulating metaphor for gay, lesbian, or queer identities. In its place, the book looks at other strategies-from silence to circumlocution, from disavowal to indifference-to theorize queer subject formation in a Latino American cultural context. The analysis of texts by José Lezama Lima, Luis Zapata, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Junot Díaz, and others offers a comparative approach to understanding how queer sexualities are shaped and written in other cultural contexts.