Illiteracy in Latin America

This entry discusses the concepts of orality and literacy in contemporary Latin American cultural, literary, and philosophical thought: orality serves as the name for indigenous, nonwritten language forms, and literacy as Western, alphabetic, language. The entry addresses the ways in which orality and literacy feature as terms that have come to define Latin American culture, both as a narrative of the originary clash between indigenous and Western civilizations as well as in its modern iteration as cultural politics used by indigenous communities to resist modernization and development. Additionally, it foregrounds key critical and theoretical problems that obtain with orality and literacy that not only complicate their current understanding, but also make possible the development of a more democratic and egalitarian vocabulary to analyze and describe indigenous speech and cultural production.