We are long past thinking of literature as a universal human institution; rather, we tend to speak today of ‘literatures’ with historically and socially specific conditions of production and reception: ‘reading formations’, to use a concept Tony Bennett has developed. In relation to Latin America, the obvious starting point in this respect is the fact that one of the things —along with smallpox and the encomienda system— Columbus and his successors brought with them to the New World and imposed on it was the printed book and the modern institution of literature, newly animated in Europe itself by the doctrine and teaching of the Humanists and the inventions in vernacular literature of Petrarch and the Italian Renaissance.

As is well known, this endowed Latin American literature with an ambiguous cultural role and legacy: literature (or, less anachronistically, letras humanas) is a colonial institution, in fact one of the basic institutions of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas; yet it is also one of institutions crucial to the development of an autonomous creole and then national (although perhaps not popular-democratic) culture. Whatever their other differences, when (for example) Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, or Elena Poniatowska write today there is a sense in which their work and the impact it has on its public still bears the traces of this paradox. As Ángel Rama argued, a ‘republic of letters’ (ciudad letrada) and the consequent role of the writer as a political-moral leader are among the basic forms of institutional continuity between colonial and contemporary Latin America.

The question is how to evaluate this phenomenon. In the context of the understandable enthusiasm over the Boom and its coincidence with the political effervescence generated by the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s there was on the part of both authors and critics an idealization of the role of literature as an instrument of national formation and liberation in Latin American development, and perhaps not enough attention to the way it might function as an apparatus of alienation and domination: not enough attention to the unconscious, so to speak, of the literary. What is shared by both sides in the ongoing debate about the status of the colonial Baroque in Latin America is an agreement about the centrality of literature as a social practice, at least among the Spanish and creole elites.