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Thresholds of Illiteracy reevaluates Latin American theories and narratives of cultural resistance by advancing the concept of \"illiteracy\" as a new critical approach to understanding scenes or moments of social antagonism. \"Illiteracy,\" Acosta claims, can offer us a way of talking about what cannot be subsumed within prevailing modes of reading, such as the opposition between writing and orality, that have frequently been deployed to distinguish between modern and archaic peoples and societies. This book is organized as a series of literary and cultural analyses of internationally recognized postcolonial narratives. It tackles a series of the most important political/aesthetic issues in Latin America that have arisen over the past thirty years or so, including indigenism, testimonio, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and migration to the United States via the U.S.-Mexican border. Through a critical examination of the \"illiterate\" effects and contradictions at work in these resistant narratives, the book goes beyond current theories of culture and politics to reveal radically unpredictable forms of antagonism that advance the possibility for an ever more democratic model of cultural analysis.

Of the many longstanding debates taking place in contemporary Latin American thought, the question of cultural difference (from the West), as well as the semiological nature of that difference, remains one of the most pivotal and politically entrenched. As it stands in these debates, however, orality/literacy has more often been assumed than critically interrogated.

The emergence of postcolonial theory in Latin American studies during the 1990s sparked a serious and hotly contested debate over the terms and conditions of intellectual exchange between Europe and the United States and those in Latin America. Many speculate that this debate was initially sparked in 1991 by Patricia Seed’s review essay “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse,” wherein she outlines, with absolute prescience and clarity, the significance that this “emergent interdisciplinary critique of colonial discourse” would have for Latin American studies (182). It wouldn’t be until two years later, through the publication of a special issue ofLatin American Research