Individual and collective concepts of identity are developed through negotiations of difference. These negotiations are reliant on the intensity and length of the encounter with 'the other', and are heightened by socio-political and cultural conjunctures such as colonialism and globalisation.

This edited collection invites us to explore the different instances of cultural encounters in Latin America from the Conquest to the present day. It resituates Hispanic culture within the wider debate on identity, and investigates the intricate mechanisms whereby the latter is being moulded and remoulded in the last five hundred years. Its focal point is difference not as a topological sign of alterity, nor simply as an essential component of the Self, but as the mechanism whereby the idea of the Self is negotiated, uttered and performed.

The volume brings together discussions on identity from a broad range of international specialists in the fields of literary and cultural studies, cultural history, art history, translation studies and cultural anthropology. They make important theoretical contributions to current debates, maintaining a fine balance between theoretical argument and empirical study.

Notes on Contributors.

Introduction (Eleni Kefala).

Part I: Found in Translation

1. Translating the Nahuas: Fray Bernardino de Sahagún's Parallel Texts in the Construction of Universal History of the Things of New Spain (Victoria Ríos Castaño).

2. Genealogies and Analogies of 'Culture' in the History of Cultural Translation - on Boturini's Translation of Tlaloc and Vico in Idea of a New General History of Northern America (John Ødemark).

3. The 'Acculturation' of the Translating Language: Gregory Rabassa and Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Anna Fochi).

Part II: Appropriations and the Rhetoric of Self-Definition

4. Claiming Ancestry and Lordship: Heraldic Language and Indigenous Identity in Post-Conquest Mexico (Mónica Domínguez Torres).

5. The Role of Degeneration Theory in Spanish American Public Discourse at the Fin de Siècle: Raza Latina and Immigration in Chile and Argentina (Michela Coletta).

6. (Mis)appropriating Europe: the Argentine Gaze in Ricardo Piglia's Artificial Respiration (Emilse Hidalgo).

Part III: Liminality and the Politics of Identity

7. Transatlantic Crossings: Don Álvaro as a Threshold (Christina Karageorgou-Bastea).

8. Transatlantic Deficits; or, Alberto Vilar at the Royal Opera House (Roberto Ignacio Díaz).

9. A European Enclave in an Alien Continent? Enduring Fictions of European Civilisation and Indigenous Barbarism in Argentina Today (Leslie Ray).

10. McOndo, Magical Neoliberalism and Latin American Identity (Rory O'Bryen).

Index.

Eleni Kefala is a lecturer in Latin American literature and culture at the University of St Andrews. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and subsequently held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Peripheral (Post) Modernity: The Syncretist Aesthetics of Borges, Piglia, Kalokyris and Kyriakidis (2007), and of numerous articles on Latin American and comparative literature and culture.