Is there no "Latin American" literature?

Scott at Conversational Reading poses a really interesting question, raised by Letras Libres, 'why has it become so difficult to draw a more or less accurate map of recent Latin American fiction? And how can we, or how should we, interpret this difficulty?' Or, as Scott rephrases it, is Latin American fiction 'too fragmented to be considered as a whole?'

This is retracing a particularly modern issue. There is a way in which Modernism, with its border-crossing influences and allusions, and its ex-pat communities, defied the notion of a 'national literature' that so consumed (and was mostly constructed under) the imperialist-nationalist movement of the previous two centuries. As Edward Said so cogently illuminated in the 1970s, the third world was and is still very much conceptualized in broad ethnic terms derived from the imperial period: the Orient, the Middle-East, Africa, and Latin America.

The questions raised here is very likely the beginning of a challenge to that orthodoxy. The benefits are obvious of such a reconsideration, even ignoring the socio-political, are obvious. We can begin to connect Spanish-language authors and texts more readily across the boundaries of their language, and begin to see the individual works less as part of a larger tapestry and more in their own light, their own schools. Every Spanish-language author is not a new Borges or Marquez; their are other schools, groups, trends within which authors can be contextualized. (A discrediting of the absurd marketing-moniker 'ethnic literature' would be of enormous benefit to American readers.)

Difficulties remain, of course, and that key paradox: that without imperialism, there would be no 'Latin American' literature. The tie that binds these authors together is linguistic as well as historical: all of them come from a land or people re-imagined by Spain's imperial mechanism. It's a similar problem, or challenge, to that which Joyce had, writing as he did in English.

I'm interested to hear some more thoughts on this, from those more informed than I.