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The position of Latin America within today's geopolitical configuration is a highly ambiguous one.1 Unlike other regions commonly dubbed “postcolonial,” Latin America finds itself in the margins of not only the West but also of postcoloniality itself, or at least of postcolonial studies. The relatively few panels addressing Latin America at this conference,2 combined with the fact that, of the ten invited speakers, not one is a Latin Americanist—these rather banal facts attest to the odd relationship of Latin America and postcolonialism. In the following pages I will nonetheless resist the temptation of mapping Latin America onto the postcolonial expanse. Instead, I will evaluate certain aspects of postcoloniality via Latin America's peculiar position within the postcolonial scene.
Since much of my analysis will hinge on a notion of hybridity, it is necessary to define what I mean by this term. Hybridity, of course, has already established itself as a key notion within postcolonial studies, especially in the work of Homi Bhabha.3 My own ideas, in fact, will appear as quite similar to those of Bhabha; yet I will actually take my distance from Bhabha's work. For Bhabha, the oppression of colonized people and, by extension, the self-construction of the colonizer, are grounded on the West's aversion to its own fundamental multiplicity. Colonized peoples, dwelling both within and without the West, Western doubles but not quite Western, embody this hybridity. It is through the objectification or abjectification of the colonized Other (who by doubling the West, in fact splits it), then, that the West endlessly and violently attempts to forge a united origin and authenticity: a self uncontaminated and uncut (by outsiders, “foreigners,” Others).
Bhabha's theory of hybridity is also, therefore, a theory of displacement. For Bhabha, a voyage toward and through the land of another determines subjects from the start; a fusion with, and infu