"Embers of the Past is a major statement on nation-building and nation deconstruction. Arguing that the construction of nations on the bases of modernity and linear history facilitated the rise of Europeans and the decline of Latin American communities, Javier SanjinÉs C. unravels not only those concepts but also others including Eurocentrism, capitalism, multitude, indio, criollo, leterado, and iletrado. He calls for the disarticulation of Western thinking and metaphors, the debunking of 'universalism' and 'progress.'"-Ileana RodrÍguez, author of Liberalism at Its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text
"In Embers of the Past, Javier C. SanjinÉs takes as his point of departure the problems of modernity and Western models of development in present-day Bolivia. Yet this fascinating book can be usefully applied in any society with a significant subalternized or racialized population. SanjinÉs reveals ethnicity as a complex process of reworking and reinventing culture, a process that relates the present with the ancestral past in more composite ways than one would have imagined."-Arturo Arias, author of Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America
“There is a careful logic to how the four pieces fit together…. Throughout Embers of the Past, SanjinÉs provides a study on the permanence of the past into the present, meditating on the need to shift the locus of enunciation from which we speak when we encounter, think about, and ultimately struggle against coloniality.”
- Eugenia Demuro (Postcolonial Studies) “[T]here is much depth of knowledge and insight in Sanjines’s sparkling literary history of Bolivia (and Latin America).... When read along with Sanjines’s first major English-language book… this striking set of essays opens new windows onto Bolivia’s variegated cultural and literary landscapes.”
- Brooke Larson (Canadian Journal of History)
