Lettered City

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Cultural Studies Latin American & Caribbean Studies

by Angel Rama,

Translated by John Charles Chasteen

Duke University Press

Due/Published October 1996, 176 pages, paper

ISBN 0822317664

Posthumously published to wide acclaim, The Lettered City is an important work by one of Latin America's most respected theorists. Rama's study--presented here in its first English translation--provides an overview of the power of written discourse in the historical formation of Latin American societies, and highlights the central role of cities in deploying and reproducing that power. To impose order on a vast New World empire, the Iberian monarchs created carefully planned cities where institutional and legal powers were administered through a specialized cadre of elite men called letrados; it is the urban nexus of lettered culture and state power that Rama calls "the lettered city."