Introduction

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that a critical perspective anchored in conflict and multiplicity at the edge of what is termed “human” can generate fresh assessments of the ways in which Latin American cultural production has confronted historical, ethical, political, and economic processes. Such cultural production at the edge of the human promotes awareness of the ways in which the decentering of the human subject, now so often invoked as a means of encouraging radical equality across species lines, has also been used as an instrument of oppression and exclusion across history. Our principal argument is that a conceptual focus on “limits” as figures of human-nonhuman relations allows for the opening up of new dimensions to longstanding debates around identity and difference, the local and the global, and coloniality and power in Latin American culture.