Beverley has written a number of texts on the testimonio, which can concern popular representation in literature and politics.
He has taken the position that Latin America's own ideological structures have prevented the area's most progressive intellectuals from grasping their own reality.
While working on that text, he along with Ileana Rodríguez and others, co-founded the Latin American Subaltern Studies group, seeking a new post-cold war/post-sandinista post/postmodedrn theorization of the relations between culture, literature and political possibility, which he and other members (following Ernesto Laclau and others involved in cultural studies theory, but above all the South Asian Subaltern studies Group—at first through Gayatri Spivack and then more directly through R. Guha and others) saw as centered not directly on social classes but on the social groups and movements that struggled for empowerment and expression in the Americas.
The Latin American subaltern group dissolved early in the 21st century, but Beverley has continued working, co-developing a Pittsburgh University Press book series called “Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas,” publishing a new collection on Cuban literature, re-publishing his book with Hugo Achugar on testimonio, and completing Testimonio: The Politics of Truth (2004).
In Latin Americanism after 9/11 (2014), he argues for a new situation for Latin America in the emerging global order, especially in view of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and other new left figures who have challenged older paradigms of left and right of previous decades.