Saskia Sassen

Marc Zimmerman

Patricio Navia

Las ciudades latinoamericanas en el nuevo (des)orden mundial

Textual Modes and Cultural Politics from El Señor Presidente to Rigoberta Menchú

Literature and Resistance in Guatemala

What circumstances lead writers in a poor, multi-ethnic and largely illiterate country to produce a literature that both expresses and affects opposition to the regime? Who are these writers? This study examines these and other questions about the literature of resistance in Guatemala, from the days of Estrada Cabrera up to the events of May and June of 1993. Zimmerman provides the cultural context for the various modes of literary production and analysis, and identifies the currents of opposition in the nation's fiction, poetry, and testimonial writing. He details the cultural politics involving Guatemalan writers and their organizations during their years of Cerezo and Serrano-Elías, paying particular attention to the role of women and indigenous groups, Rigoberta Menchú among them. These two volumes are companion texts to Guatemala: Voices from the Silence, an "epic-collage" of writings compiled by Zimmerman and Raúl Rojas.

Literature and Resistance in Guatemala: Theory, history, fiction, and poetry

John Beverley

“This book began in what seemed like a counterfactual intuition . . . that what had been happening in Nicaraguan poetry was essential to the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution,” write John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman. “In our own postmodern North American culture, we are long past thinking of literature as mattering much at all in the ‘real’ world, so how could this be?” This study sets out to answer that question by showing how literature has been an agent of the revolutionary process in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The book begins by discussing theory about the relationship between literature, ideology, and politics, and charts the development of a regional system of political poetry beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in late twentieth-century writers. In this context, Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, Roque Dalton of El Salvador, and Otto René Castillo of Guatemala are among the poets who receive detailed attention.

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Gioconda Belli

The People Speak : a Collage of Chronology, Analysis, Poetry, Etc. Portraying Insurrection, Reconstruction, Cultural Revolution & U.S. Intervention

Nicaragua in Reconstruction & at War

Raúl Rojas

In this rich anthology of Guatemalan political writing, editors Zimmerman and Rojas have taken excerpts from poems, novels, stories, and essays and woven them into a powerful narrative of Guatemala's past. Forged in the midst of anti-dictatorial struggles, of rebellions and revolutionary crises, these discourses, both realistic and magical, show a nation attempting to move from social domination and fragmentation to a mythical community that has inspired its people to become soldiers and its soldiers to become poets.

Guatemalan Literature of Resistance

Voices from the Silence

Marc Zimmerman

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