SOURCE: "Politics, Literature and the Intellectual in Latin America," in Salmagundi, Vol. 82-83, Spring/Summer, 1989, pp. 92-110.

In the following essay, Santi explores the "paradox" engendered when Latin American writers are expected to represent their geographical region's entire intellectual community while literature is generally excluded from intellectual discussion.

Our subject is vast and to attempt to cover it in an essay this size is perhaps mad. The reader may also wonder how a professor of literature can presume to address the complex and tumultuous world of politics and the intellectual in Latin America. I would wonder myself, were it not for the fact that literature and the writer—the poet, the novelist, the playwright, the essayist—continue to play a crucial role in the shaping of that world. In fact, so closely has the institution of literature been identified with the political debates among Latin American intellectuals, that...