Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America

Abstract

Expanding upon existing studies of transculturation, Silvia Spitta shows how Latin American cultures radically transformed, displaced, and subverted Spanish and later European and U.S. cultural impositions. She theorizes transculturation as the complex process of adjustment and re-creation - cultural, literary, linguistic, and personal - that allows for new configurations to emerge from the clash of cultures and colonial and neocolonial appropriations. Spitta not only introduces the question of gender into the debate, but also brings together previously disconnected media: the chronicles of the New World, the writings of the extirpators of idolatries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the paintings of the Cuzco School, and contemporary U.S. Latino narratives. Between Two Waters brings English-language readers into the post-colonial debate at the heart of Latin American literary criticism.