Born in Montevideo,
Uruguay in 1940, Eduardo Galeano is the author of the
monumental trilogy Memory of Fire, a revisionary
history of the Americas, and of the ground-breaking
Open Veins of Latin America, the first serious
analysis of Latin American history from
"below." Despite being perhaps the single
most important literary voice to come out of Latin
America in the last decades in relation to issues of
human rights, Eduardo Galeano has been largely
ignored as a figure worthy of critical notice--only a
small number of incidental essays in English exist on
him and no book in either English or Spanish has
dealt with him as a major literary or political
figure. At once a chronicler, a journalist, a social
critic and activist, the political effect of
Galeano's work has been compared to that of Noam
Chomsky.
Here is the first
full-length, critical study of Galeano's life and
work. Part political biography, part cultural theory,
especially in relation to central issues involving
the telling of history and the relations between
literature and human rights, this book examines
events that have shaped Galeano's life--from his
close personal friendship with Allende, through the
dictatorships in Uruguay and Argentina that forced
him into exile, to the ongoing relationship between
Galeano and Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the
Chiapas rebellion. It will be complemented by a
documentary film that Fischlin is also working on,
with Malcolm Guy (Productions MultiMonde), for which
he has been given unprecedented access to Galeano and his papers. Thus, this book contains
a great deal of new material garnered from exclusive
interviews and rare film footage.
Table of Contents
Daniel Fischlin,
Ph.D., teaches literature at the University of
Guelph, his published books include: Adaptations of
Shakespeare, In Small Proportions: A Poetics of the
English Ayre, 1596-1622, and The Work of Opera:
Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference.
Martha Nandorfy is a
distinguished Hispanist scholar. She teaches Spanish
Literature at Concordia University, Montreal.
228 pages,
illustrations, bibliography, index
Paperback ISBN: 1-55164-178-X $24.99
Hardcover ISBN: 1-55164-179-8 $53.99
Cultural Studies / Literary
Criticism
November 2001
