This book focuses on the New Chilean Narrative published in the historically significant decade of the 90s by a group of writers belonging to the Generation of the 80s. The analysis of selected texts by Ana Maria del Rio, Diamela Eltit, Guadalupe Santa Cruz, Jaime Collyer, Ramon Diaz Eterovic, Gonzalo Contreras, and Alberto Fuguet explores the literary strategies by which these writers present literary imageries of deception that question the post-dictatorial order in Chile. The concept of imageries of deception alludes to literary motifs that represent a critical view of a Chilean contemporary reality whose source can be traced to the Pinochet dictatorship and its ideological aftermath. The imageries of deception question the dominant myths that sustain Chilean post-dictatorial society, and remember the nation's ideological conflicts of the past three decades. As cultural spaces where memory resists the dominant will to deceptively erase the past, the narrative of the 90s reveals the enduring and debilitating impact of a dictatorship successfully disguised as the current neo-liberal democracy.
This book covers the heterogeneity of Chilean literary production from the times of the Spanish conquest to the present. It shifts critical focus from national identity and issues to a more multifaceted transnational, hemispheric, and global approach. Its emphasis is on the paradigm transition from the purportedly homogeneous to the heterogeneous.
This English translation of Alfonsina Storni gives scholars and students in the fields of Latin American literature, womenÆs studies and world theater the opportunity to study rare examples of theater written by a woman on very controversial and progressive issues at the beginning of the twentieth century. The translation is furnished with an introduction that reviews the whole theatrical production of Storni in relation to the historical and social developments of her time and places her work within the context of the literature and theater of Argentina and the Southern Cone.
Mexican poet Paz (1914-98) wrote Blanco in Delhi while he was ambassador to India. Callan (emeritus, Spanish and humanities, U. of New Hampshire) argues that the poet intentionally and in great detail translated into his own metaphoric language the ancient practice of Yoga, especially as found in Tantric literature and developed in the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet. Assuming that readers are not necessarily familiar with Tantric yoga, he sets out its precepts before showing how Paz incorporated them. He discusses Blanco's physical layout and yogic fundamentals, channels and centers in the two bodies of yoga and in the poem, preliminary details on the subtle body in the poem, Paz on the word and language, and other topics. Quotations from the poem are in English and Spanish. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Salt in the Sand is a compelling historical ethnography of the interplay between memory and state violence in the formation of the Chilean nation-state. The historian and anthropologist Lessie Jo Frazier focuses on northern Chile, which figures prominently in the nation’s history as a site of military glory during the period of national conquest, of labor strikes and massacres in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, and of state detention and violence during World War II and the Cold War. It was also the site of a mass-grave excavation that galvanized the national human rights movement in 1990, during Chile’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Frazier analyzes the creation of official and alternative memories of specific instances of state violence in northern Chile from 1890 to the present, tracing how the form and content of those memories changed over time. In so doing, she shows how memory works to create political subjectivities mobilized for specific political projects within what she argues is the always-ongoing process of nation-state formation. Frazier’s broad historical perspective on political culture challenges the conventional periodization of modern Chilean history, particularly the idea that the 1973 military coup marked a radical break with the past. Analyzing multiple memories of state violence, Frazier innovatively shapes social and cultural theory to interpret a range of sources, including local and national government archives, personal papers, popular literature and music, interviews, architectural and ceremonial commemorations, and her ethnographic observations of civic associations, women's and environmental groups, and human rights organizations. A masterful integration of extensive empirical research with sophisticated theoretical analysis, Salt in the Sand is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on human rights, democratization, state formation, and national trauma and reconciliation.
This study deals with the experience of exile in the works of three Spanish American writers: The Cuban authors Reinaldo Arenas and Manuel Diaz Martinez, as well as the Uruguayan author Fernando Ainsa. Along with the reshaping of territories, and socio-economic and cultural dimensions which took place on a worldwide scale, the last few decades have also witnessed a reshaping of the spectrum and voices of Latin-American writers that create, revisit and suffer the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of exile. The displaced subject, or rather, the voices of the displaced, the marginalized and the excluded rise up from a fringe that, for various reasons or motives, will always represent a place that lies beyond the borders -imaginary or real- of the spatial, political, cultural, linguistic and sexual communities to which they subscribe. And, these voices, regardless of the grouping to which they belong and the choices on which they base the necessity or purpose of their expressive survival, map out a work that, while being personal in its origins, speaks to a more general context. exile and about exile, provided that we draw a distinction between these two facets (to the extent that it is possible) by having regard to thematic nuances and gradations that give substance to the journeys that mould diatopic variations in the discourses of the uprooted. And, it is necessary to speak in plural because, beyond the characteristics or common motives of nationalities and the political fortunes that have left their mark on entire generations of exiles, exile as a phenomenon responds to the rootlessness in itself, the blank spaces and the lack of linguistic, affective and cultural continuity, with strategies, identity masks and tactics for representation and resistance that infuse each of these idiosyncratic discourses. Hence its originality and intrinsic solitude, hence its penitence, and hence also its familiar and irreplaceable expressive uniqueness. It does not take much reflection to conclude that Latin-American literature has and continues to emanate predominantly from internal or territorial exiles. historiography of Latin America, tower above the founding moments and extend far beyond the consolidation of the nation states. Think of a work such as El Facundo by the Argentine writer, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, written in the style of a political pamphlet in an attempt to justify the ostracism that the author suffered, thereby initiating, in more ways than one, the narrative of the American subcontinent and its peculiar combination of genres. Think also of the journeys of Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral and Julio Cortazar, amongst other intellectuals, not to mention the vast list of travellers in the 19th century who set out to explore large parts of the American and European continents, travelling as far as the Middle East; or, exile in reverse, experiencing its destabilising face, stirred up by the cultural agendas projected onto the literary establishment by the ruling elites, as occurred in the Rio de la Plata towards the end of the last century. the demands that stem from violence and the devastating side-effects of globalisation, has transformed the Latin America of our day into a continent of emigration. And, it is a fact that those aspects which shape the identity of the field of literature have had to undergo significant short-term and long-term reassessments in order to assimilate new cultural centres of gravity and heterogonous cultural elements. The work presented here by Jose Ismael Gutierrez shares a similar concern, namely the need for research, which for some time has been enriching the Latin-American literary bibliography in these parts, as never before. However, careful consideration reveals that this study is linked to one of the essential discursive categories of the literary phenomenon in the history of our literature, namely territorial displacement as a system, involuntary displacement and the stigma of exclusion. The author possesses an ample theoretical and historic background for his research of some of the many figures that serve as conduits for the writings of exiles on Latin-American soil. assessments are alternated with points of view drawn from sociology, politics, philosophy, psychology and culture in general. This studious Spaniard, with his keen observations, demonstrates his profound knowledge of the various periods in the literature of the New World, having previously sufficiently proven his command of the field with an exceptional list of academic essays and articles on the 19th and 20th century, which were published in these latitudes. Such experience and scholarship seem to me to be a necessary condition for understanding the evolution of the literature and culture of Latin America from its roots and also from a global perspective, in other words, without restricting one's point of view to regional or generational phenomena, which though interesting, are but of limited importance. which Professor Gutierrez devotes the following three sections -the Cuban authors, Reinaldo Arenas and Manuel Diaz Martinez, as well as the Uruguayan author, Fernando Ainsa- and the unusual manner in which their respective contributions are presented -each one from certain historic-cultural coordinates and from an own interpretative angle- extend a forceful and novel invitation to the reader, whose intelligence and aesthetic sensibilities will engaged while being guided, page after page, along the various experiences of certain concrete, real-life exiles, whose experiences are physical, external and geographical, while at the same time being internal and spiritual. These exiles open up brilliant areas of discussion, which the critical lucidity of the researcher once again transforms into an essential and penetrating lesson on the most complex dimensions of contemporary and earlier Latin-American literature.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, Film, History and Memory broadens the focus from 'history', the study of past events, to 'memory', the processes – individual, generational, collective or state-driven – by which meanings are attached to the past.
