Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies. ANTONIO VIEGO: Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007.

Abstract

It would behard to dispute the claim that much of Latino Studies and its antecedentdisciplines of Chicano and Puerto Rican Studies have emerged as coordinatedresponses to the collective trauma resulting from the violence of loss anddispossession. Be it the territorial, material, social, and politicaldispossession and displacement that follows from colonial conquest or thelinguistic, spiritual, or cultural loss that was coerced by legal andextra-legal means in the centuries following contact with Europeans, a profoundsense of fragmentation and alienation permeates the Latino world of theAmericas. This shared experience has been influential in shaping much of thediscursive response that constitutes Latino Studies.