Hemispheric Looks at Literary AIDS Discourses in Latin America

Abstract

Ottmar Ette’s suggestion that we view the construction of the Americas as “hemispheric” will be taken up in this volume in many different ways. A comprehensive explication of the term will – a sensible procedure – have to come from the auctor of the concept himself. My promise of “hemispheric looks” rests on the following understanding: a statement only turns into discourse when the epistemic co-ordinates of its origin are under consideration. A hemispheric look frees an individual phenomenon from the isolation of its local conditions – in Latin America, for example – and embeds it in dynamic relations that always take into account slumbering, global discursive contexts that are only partially developed. The parallels and differences between cultural processes are thus necessarily perceived as complements.