Beyond Renewal? Latin America, the “Classics,” and the Interesting Spaces between Martí and Chakrabarty

Drawing on my experience teaching in one of the last required Core Curricula in the United States, recent literature on indigenous people and indigeneity, and a remarkable text published in Brazil in 1937, this article considers the challenges and possibilities that arise when the European-U.S. canon is read and taught from a Latin American perspective. I place my findings in conversation with José Martí's anti-colonial perspective and Dipesh Chakrabarty's critique of postcolonial, both of whom, I argue, provide compelling but ultimately incomplete frameworks for a truly critical Latin Americanist reading of the canon and higher education in the U.S.