In recent years, decoloniality has emerged as a topic of critical inquiry across Latinx writing studies. This article examines the politics and stakes of this scholarship and argues that Latinx writing has reached an impasse in its project to theorize alternatives to Western epistemologies of writing. Drawing from deconstruction and subaltern studies, we propose to think Latinx writing at its “absolute limit.”

The turn to Latin American rhetoric has broadly been galvanized by the need for a politics of difference. Critics have drawn from Latinamericanist theories of decoloniality to mobilize epistemological alternatives to Western forms of knowledge production and to critique the representations of alterity in the Western rhetorical tradition, posing variations of a common question: how to proceed from merely tolerating difference in the Western paradigm of rhetoric to actually theorizing rhetoric from the locus of non-Western (that is, non-logocentric) space? In this essay, we analyze the aporia dredged up by Latinamericanist theories of decoloniality as a prism through which to renew and rethink the terms and conditions of comparativist inquiry. We conclude by setting to work on preparing the non-nostalgic grounds for an alterity yet to arrive under the heading of the X.

ABSTRACTThe question of non-Western difference has come to feature prominently across the field of comparative rhetoric, where it is often presupposed that an irreducible difference separates Western from non-Western rhetorical and cultural production. It is on the basis of this presupposition that critics have established a politics of comparative inquiry, whereby restituting the pure consciousness of a non-Western subaltern subject is understood to subvert the hegemony of Western thought. But what exactly is the nature of this difference? In this article I examine the recent turn toward Latin America in the field of comparative rhetoric to argue that this presupposition serves as a constitutive topos—that the object of Latin America is invented rhetorically in the very act of comparative inquiry—and that this presupposition yields a political impasse that the field has yet to think through. Drawing on recent work in Latin American studies, I argue for a rearticulated notion of subalternity as a methodological approach for dealing with this impasse.