At the turn of the millennium, narrative works by Latin American women writers have represented madness within contexts of sociopolitical strife and gender inequality. This book explores contemporary Latin American realities through madness narratives by prominent women authors, including Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Lya Luft (Brazil), Diamela Eltit (Chile), Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico), Laura Restrepo (Colombia) and Irene Vilar (Puerto Rico). Close reading of these works reveals a pattern of literary techniques--a "poetics of madness"--employed by the writers to represent conditions that defy language, make sociopolitical crises tangible and register cultural perceptions of mental illness through literature.
Unlike a conventional war waged against a standing army, a "dirty war" is waged against individuals, groups, or ideas considered subversive. Originally associated with Argentina's military regime from 1976-1983, the term has since been applied to neighboring dictatorships during the period. Indeed, it has become a byword for state-sponsored repression anywhere in the world. The first edition of this reference illustrated the concept by describing the regimes of Argentina, Chile (1973-1990), and Uruguay (1973-1985), which tortured, murdered, and disappeared thousands of people in the name of anticommunism while thousands more were driven into exile. The second edition expands the scope to include Bolivia (1971-1982), Brazil (1964-1985), and Paraguay (1954-1989). Includes a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on the countries; guerrilla and political movements; prominent guerrilla, human-rights, military, and political figures; local, regional, and international human-rights organizations; and artistic figures (filmmakers, novelists, and playwrights) whose works attempt to represent or resist the period of repression.--Publisher.
“This collection, because of its exceptional theoretical coherence and sophistication, is qualitatively superior to the most frequently consulted anthologies on Latin American women’s history and literature . . . [and] represents a new, more theoretically rigorous stage in the feminist debate on Latin American women.”—Elizabeth Garrels, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin. If life is no more than a prolonged flirtation with death, then Hilda Hilst's OF DEATH. MINIMAL ODES is the true account of a lifelong seduction. It is at once both a reverie and reliquary, as the poet imagines and reimagines that most paradoxical moment of disintegration--the corporeal flesh fusing with death's own dark corpus. With a visceral-mystical poetic voice that is as teasingly unrestrained as it is intellectually sublime, Hilst's odes enact a baroque danse macabre, where the poet revels in the incongruities of simultaneously seeking the sacred and profane. Translating the first collection of Hilda Hilst's significant body of poetry to appear in English, Laura Cescarco Eglin renders the imagery and philosophical complexity of these minimal odes with brio, while preserving the playful tone and lush melodies that mark OF DEATH. MINIMAL ODES as uniquely Hilstian. "The spare but ornate poems in this collection are startling the way a menagerie of creatures can be startling when the creatures themselves are composed of animal bits: claw, fur, 'brain and hooves / in the pitch dark.' Each minimal ode addresses death who becomes at times a lover, a sister, a slow-moving and wild mammal ever arriving. Hilst builds 'passageways' for death with each line--corridors which are 'Intricate. In knots.' The reader cannot help but join the poet in calling out the various names for death: 'Amber / Bundle of flutes / Gutter / Light.' And these are rendered stunningly in English by Laura Cesarco Eglin, who carries over every verse with clarity and care as though she were holding up pieces of glass to sunlight."--Carolina Ebeid "Before gaining notoriety for her highly original, experimental, and provocative works of fiction, Hilda Hilst engraved her name in Brazilian literary circles as a poet. OF DEATH. MINIMAL ODES, newly and assuredly translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin, shows Hilst the poet at her distilled best. As much a multimedia conversation with poetry as with life, death, and herself, Hilst poses essential questions whose answers lie at the core of these poems."--John Keene "In OF DEATH. MINIMAL ODES by Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst, death and poetry are lifelong bedfellows. In fact, they engage in a natural partnership, or, to borrow from the poet herself, a sisterhood-in-dialogue that is at once serious and seductive, playful, perilous, and habitual. Hilst's creative wordplays and tonal spectrum, by contrast, are extraordinary, and Laura Cesarco Eglin's translation matches her inventiveness with equal illumination. Hilst's verses affirm the common ground that exists between life and death, and carry with them a vibrant, volatile charge that accompanies this complicit union."--Marguerite Itamar Harrison, Associate Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Smith College "The poetry of Hilda Hilst is fundamental--in every sense. Thanks to Laura Cesarco Eglin, who has accepted the challenge of translating these verses brimming with sensuality and music, a little more of Hilst's work is made known to the world. I welcome this partnership."--Adriana Lisboa
Besides providing a thorough overview of advances in the concept of identity in Translation Studies, the book brings together a variety of approaches to identity as seen through the prism of translation. Individual chapters are united by the topic and their predominantly cultural approach, but they also supply dynamic impulses for the reader, since their methodologies, level of abstraction, and subject matter differ. The theoretical impulses brought together here include a call for the ecology of translational attention, a proposal of transcultural and farcical translation and a rethinking of Bourdieu’s habitus in terms of František Miko’s experiential complex. The book also offers first-hand insights into such topics as post-communist translation practices, provides sociological insights into the role politics played during state socialism in the creation of fields of translated fiction and the way imported fiction was able to subvert the intentions of the state, gives evidence of the struggles of small locales trying to be recognised though their literature, and draws links between local theory and more widely-known concepts.
Winner of the Montserrat Ordóñez Prize 2018 This book provides an original and exciting analysis of Colombian women’s writing and its relationship to feminist history from the 1970s to the present. In a period in which questions surrounding women and gender are often sidelined in the academic arena, it argues that feminism has been an important and intrinsic part of contemporary Colombian history. Focusing on understudied literary and non-literary texts written by Colombian women, it traces the particularities of Colombian feminism, showing how it has been closely entwined with left-wing politics and the country’s history of violence. This book therefore rethinks the place of feminism in Latin American history and its relationship to feminisms elsewhere, challenging many of the predominant critical paradigms used to understand Latin American literature and culture.
This book deals with slums as a specific question and a central focus in urban planning. It radically reverses the official version of the history of world cities as narrated during decades: slums are not at the margin of the contemporary process of urbanization; they are an integral part of it. Taking slums as its central focus and regarding them as symptomatic of the ongoing transformations of the city, the book moves to the very heart of the problem in urban planning. The book presents 16 case studies that form the basis for a theory of the slum and a concrete development manual for the slum. The interdisciplinary approach to analysing slums presented in this volume enables researchers to look at social and economic dimensions as well as at the constructive and spatial aspects of slums. Both at the scientific and the pedagogical level, it allows one to recognize the efforts of the slum’s residents, key players in the past, and present development of their neighborhoods, and to challenge public and private stakeholders on priorities decided in urban planning, and their mismatches when compared to the findings of experts and the demands of users. Whether one is a planner, an architect, a developer or simply an inhabitant of an emerging city, the presence of slums in one’s environment – at the same time central and nonetheless incongruous – makes a person ask questions. Today, it is out of the question to be satisfied with the assumption of the marginality of slums, or of the incongruous nature of their existence. Slums are now fully part of the urban landscape, contributing to the identity and the urbanism of cities and their stakeholders.
From internationally-acclaimed novelist Mayra Santos-Febres comes a carnal, epic novel about the life of Isabel “La Negra” Luberza--a legendary Puerto Rican madam who, by the end of World War II, became the most powerful woman on the island. Born into poverty and then abandoned by her mother, Isabel "La Negra" Luberza blossoms into a supremely sensual young woman. Obsessed with attaining aristocratic status—armed with incredible physical presence, indomitable ambition, and keen intelligence—she meets Fernando Fornarís, the man who will forever change her life. With a parcel of land given to her by her rich, white married lover, Isabel transforms herself into a hard-edged and merciless businesswoman—abandoning her own newborn son to become Puerto Rico's most feared and respected madam, a collector of society's secrets, a queen of the notorious brothel that emerges as the island's true political and economic heart. Set against the rich backdrop of the Caribbean and the United States during the tumultuous years of World War II, Mayra Santos-Febres's Our Lady of the Night is a breathtaking novel of passion, power, and the devastating price of achieving everything one wishes for.
This collection serves as an introduction to the new and emerging field of health and human rights. It covers such timely subjects as cleansing, world population control, women's reproductive choices, AIDS and HIV.
