Introduction: Exposing Paraguay

Abstract

The introduction provides the reader with a general overview of the book’s main themes, drawing on Roa Bastos’s image of a “delirious reality” to account for the underlying connections between the specificity of Paraguayan modernity, Latin American modernity as a whole, and the relative invisibility of the country in contemporary cultural criticism of the Americas. Breaking with traditional views that cast Paraguayan cultural and political processes as rather exceptional in the regional context, the introduction interrogates the extent to which Paraguay’s experience with authoritarianism, war, liberalism, capitalist expansion, and post-dictatorship regimes resonates with major historical and cultural trends throughout the continent. As such, this chapter makes the case for a problematization of the notion of Paraguayan exceptionalism.