Drawing on a mix of political, economic, literary, and filmic texts, Crisis Cultures challenges current cultural histories of the neoliberal period by arguing that financialization, and not just neoliberalism, has been at the center of the dramatic transformations in Latin American societies in the last thirty years. Starting from political economic figures such as crisis, hyperinflation, credit, and circulation and exemplary cultural texts, Whitener traces the interactions between culture, finance, surplus populations, and racialized state violence after 1982 in Mexico and Brazil. Crisis Cultures makes sense of the emergence of new forms of exploitation and terrifying police and militarized violence by tracking the cultural and discursive forms, including real abstraction and the favela and immaterial cadavers and voided collectivities, that have emerged in the complicated aftermath of the long downturn and global turn to finance.
"Offers an array of disciplinary views on how theories of globalization and an emerging postnational critical imagination have impacted traditional ways of thinking about literature."--Samuel Amago, author of Spanish Cinema in the Global Context: Film on Film Moving beyond the traditional study of Hispanic literature on a nation-by-nation basis, this volume explores how globalization is currently affecting Spanish and Latin American fiction, poetry, and literary theory. Taking a postnational approach, contributors examine works by José Martí, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Junot Díaz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Cecilia Vicuña, Jorge Luis Borges, and other writers. They discuss how expanding worldviews have impacted the way these authors write and how they are read today. Whether analyzing the increasingly popular character of the voluntary exile, the theme of masculinity in This Is How You Lose Her, or the multilingual nature of the Spanish language itself, they show how contemporary Hispanic writers and critics are engaging in cross-cultural literary conversations. Drawing from a range of fields including postcolonial, Latino, gender, exile, and transatlantic studies, these essays help characterize a new "world" literature that reflects changing understandings of memory, belonging, and identity.
Liquid Borders provides a timely and critical analysis of the large-scale migration of people across borders, which has sent shockwaves through the global world order in recent years. In this book, internationally recognized scholars and activists from a variety of fields analyze key issues related to diasporic movements, displacements, exiles, "illegal" migrants, border crossings, deportations, maritime ventures, and the militarization of borders from political, economic, and cultural perspectives. Ambitious in scope, with cases stretching from the Mediterranean to Australia, the US/Mexico border, Venezuela, and deterritorialized sectors in Colombia and Central America, the various contributions are unified around the notion of freedom of movement, and the recognition of the need to think differently about ideas of citizenship and sovereignty around the world. Liquid Borders will be of interest to policy makers, and to researchers across the humanities, sociology, area studies, politics, international relations, geography, and of course migration and border studies.
Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s underwent a profound and often violent process of social change. From the Cuban Revolution to the massive guerrilla movements in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, and most of Central America, to the democratic socialist experiment of Allende in Chile, to the increased popularity of socialist-oriented parties in Uruguay, or para-socialist movements, such as the Juventud Peronista in Argentina, the idea of social change was in the air. Although this topic has been explored from a political and social point of view, there is an aspect that has remained fairly unexplored. The cultural—and especially musical—dimension of this movement, so vital in order to comprehend the extent of its emotional appeal, has not been fully documented. Without an account of how music was pervasively used in the construction of the emotional components that always accompany political action, any explanation of what occurred in Latin America during that period will be always partial. This bookis an initial attempt to overcome this deficit. In this collection of essays, we examine the history of the militant song movement in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina at the peak of its popularity (from the mid-1960s to the coup d’états in the mid-1970s), considering their different political stances and musical deportments. Throughout the book, the contribution of the most important musicians of the movement (Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, Patricio Manns, Quilapayún, Inti-Illimani, etc., in Chile; Daniel Viglietti, Alfredo Zitarrosa, Los Olimareños, etc., in Uruguay; Atahualpa Yupanqui, Horacio Guarany, Mercedes Sosa, Marian Farías Gómez, Armando Tejada Gómez, César Isella, Víctor Heredia, Los Trovadores, etc., in Argentina) are highlighted; and some of the most important conceptual extended oeuvres of the period (called “cantatas”) are analyzed (such as “La Cantata Popular Santa María de Iquique” in the Chilean case and “Montoneros” in the Argentine case). The contributors to the collection deal with the complex relationship that the aesthetic of the movement established between the political content of the lyrics and the musical and performative aspects of the most popular songs of the period.
Latin American literary/cultural studies in Spanish and Portuguese programs in the United States are conducted by faculty members from different generations, different national origins, and varying times of entering the university system. They come from multiple intellectual and theoretical traditions and are motivated by multiple aesthetic and social concerns. In the United States they are prompted simultaneously by local and Latin American issues. What balance do they strike in order to appeal to the interest of an increasingly transnational US student body, while maintaining the hope that works they produce will also contribute to Latin American cultures? Are they aware of the way previous generations dealt with these issues? And how does it relate to their current practices? This edition seeks not only to outline a historical memory but also to foster discussions that encourage future creation of work at a time when so many of the utopias that previously energised Latin American literary/cultural studies are collapsing.
This book presents a challenging view of the adoption and co-option of multiculturalism in Latin America from six scholars with extensive experience of grassroots movements and intellectual debates. It raises serious questions of theory, method, and interpretation for both social scientists and policymakers on the basis of cases in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Multicultural policies have enabled people to recover the land of their ancestors, administer justice in accordance with their traditions, provide recognition as full citizens of the nation, and promote affirmative action to enable them to take the place in society which is theirs by right. The message of this book is that while the multicultural response has done much to raise the symbolic recognition of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples nationally and internationally, its application calls for a profound reappraisal in spheres such as land, gender, institutional design, and equal opportunities. Written by scholars with long-term and in-depth engagement in Latin America, the chapters show that multicultural theories and policies, which assume racial and cultural boundaries to be clear-cut, overlook the pervasive reality of racial and cultural mixture and place excessive confidence in identity politics.
This collection interrogates sports in Latin America as a key terrain in which nation is defined and populations are interpellated through emotionally charged practices (state policy, media representations, and sports play itself by professionals, national teams and amateurs) of inclusion and exclusion.
In Vernacular Latin Americanisms, Fernando Degiovanni offers a long-view perspective on the intense debates that shaped Latin American studies and still inform their function in the globalized and neoliberal university of today. By doing so he provides a reevaluation of a field whose epistemological and political status has obsessed its participants up until the present. The book focuses on the emergence of Latin Americanism as a field of critical debate and scholarly inquiry between the 1890s and the 1960s. Drawing on contemporary theory, intellectual history, and extensive archival research, Degiovanni explores in particular how the discourse and realities of war and capitalism have left an indelible mark on the formation of disciplinary perspectives on Latin American cultures in both the United States and Latin America. Questioning the premise that Latin Americanism as a discipline comes out of the tradition of continental identity developed by prominent intellectuals such as José Martí, José E. Rodó or José Vasconcelos, Degiovanni proposes that the scholars who established the discipline did not set out to defend Latin America as a place of uncontaminated spiritual values opposed to a utilitarian and materialist United States. Their mission was entirely different, even the opposite: giving a place to culture in the consolidation of alternative models of regional economic cooperation at moments of international armed conflict. For scholars theorizing Latin Americanism in market terms, this meant questioning nativist and cosmopolitan narratives about identity; it also meant abandoning any Bolivarian project of continental unity or of socialist internationalism.
Essays by intellectuals and specialists in Latin American cultural studies that provide a comprehensive view of the specific problems, topics, and methodologies of the field vis-a-vis British and U.S. cultural studies.
