ABSTRACT
Economically, the opposing models of modernization and dependency theory give way to pragmatic, but critical strategies for negotiating and reconfiguring capitalism in Latin America. Indeed, there is a rhetoric common to many Latin American contributions to the postmodernism debate: a rhetoric of impurity. The Latin American and Latin Americanist response to homogenizing theories of postmodernity might be conceived of as the inscription, within broader concepts, of the details of various local forms of cultural politics. Politically then, the pure projects of revolution and authoritarianism have all but dissolved into multiple and antagonistic versions of democracy and new social movements. "Social" practices "surprise" society by contaminating those sites it has overlooked in its focus on the conventional, official terrains of struggle. "Latin American postmodernity" demands that attention be given to the impurity that exists among the various artifacts produced under a variety of local social conditions and aesthetic traditions.
