In this first comprehensive study of Latin America's literary vanguards of the 1920s and 1930s, Vicky Unruh explores the movement's provocative and polemic nature. Latin American vanguardism—a precursor to the widely acclaimed work of contemporary Latin American writers—was stimulated by the European avant-garde movements of the World War I era. But as Unruh's wide-ranging study attests, the vanguards of Latin America—emerging from the continent's own historical circumstances—developed a very distinct character and voice. Through manifestos, experimental texts, and ribald public performance, the vanguardists' work intertwined art, culture, and the politics of the day to produce a powerful brand of aesthetic activism, one that sparked an entire rethinking of the meaning of art and culture throughout Latin America.
"[This book] will become the standard reference on the Latin American vanguard. The time was ripe for an ambitious undertaking like this one, and Unruh does not disappoint."—Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Duke University
For a thousand days in the early 1970s, Chileans experienced revolution not as a dream but as daily life. Alongside Salvador Allende’s attempt to democratically bring about a socialist regime, new understandings of the meaning of revolutionary change emerged. In her groundbreaking book Beyond the Vanguard, Marian E. Schlotterbeck explores popular politics in Chile in the decade before Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and provides an in-depth account of how working-class people transformed the existing social order by embracing radical politics. Schlotterbeck eloquently examines the lost opportunities for creating a democratic revolution and the ways that the legacy of this period continues to resonate in Chile and beyond. Learn more about the author and this book in an interview published online with Jacobin.
Mostly sidestepping the issues of why people rebel, Rochlin (political science, Okanagan U. College, Canada) here focuses on how people rebel, examining how strategy and power condition successes, failures, and longevity of Latin American guerilla groups. Four case studies examine Peru's Sendero Luminoso, Colombia's FARC and ELN, and Mexico's Zapatista movement. Two chapters are provided for each group, with the first examining origins, ideologies, and support bases, while the second looks at the rebels in relation to power, strategy, and national security (presumably from the viewpoint of government elites). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde: Ultraísmo & Estridentismo, 1918-1927 is a thorough exploration of the meanings and values Hispanic poets and artists assigned to four iconic locations of modernity: the city, the cafés, means of transportation, and the sea, during the first decades of the 20th century. Joining important studies on Spatiality, Palomares-Salas convincingly argues that an unsolvable tension between place and space is at the core of the Hispanic avant-garde cultural production. A refreshing, transatlantic perspective on Ultraism and Stridentism, the book moves the Hispanic vanguards forward into broader, international discussions on space and modernism, and offers innovative readings of well-known, as well as rarely studied works.
In-depth scholarship on the central artists, movements, and themes of Latin American art, from the Mexican revolution to the present A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Art consists of over 30 never-before-published essays on the crucial historical and theoretical issues that have framed our understanding of art in Latin America. This book has a uniquely inclusive focus that includes both Spanish-speaking Caribbean and contemporary Latinx art in the United States. Influential critics of the 20th century are also covered, with an emphasis on their effect on the development of artistic movements. By providing in-depth explorations of central artists and issues, alongside cross-references to illustrations in major textbooks, this volume provides an excellent complement to wider surveys of Latin American and Latinx art. Readers will engage with the latest scholarship on each of five distinct historical periods, plus broader theoretical and historical trends that continue to influence how we understand Latinx, Indigenous, and Latin American art today. The book’s areas of focus include: The development of avant-garde art in the urban centers of Latin America from 1910-1945 The rise of abstraction during the Cold War and the internationalization of Latin American art from 1945-1959 The influence of the political upheavals of the 1960s on art and art theory in Latin America The rise of conceptual art as a response to dictatorship and social violence in the 1970s and 1980s The contemporary era of neoliberalism and globalization in Latin American and Latino Art, 1990-2010 With its comprehensive approach and informative structure, A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Art is an excellent resource for advanced students in Latin American culture and art. It is also a valuable reference for aspiring scholars in the field.
In the nineteenth century, Latin America was home to the majority of the world's democratic republics. Many historians have dismissed these political experiments as corrupt pantomimes of governments of Western Europe and the United States. Challenging that perspective, James E. Sanders contends that Latin America in this period was a site of genuine political innovation and popular debate reflecting Latin Americans' visions of modernity. Drawing on archival sources in Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay, Sanders traces the circulation of political discourse and democratic practice among urban elites, rural peasants, European immigrants, slaves, and freed blacks to show how and why ideas of liberty, democracy, and universalism gained widespread purchase across the region, mobilizing political consciousness and solidarity among diverse constituencies. In doing so, Sanders reframes the locus and meaning of political and cultural modernity.
A certain idea of the avant-garde posits the possibility of a total rupture with the past. The Unfinished Art of Theater pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the semiperiphery of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—precisely because of its historic weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where the bourgeois stage had not (yet) coalesced—was at the forefront of struggles to redefine the relationship between art and social change. Drawing on extensive archival research, Sarah J. Townsend reveals the importance of projects and texts that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy associated with the avant-garde: ethnographic operas with ties to the recording industry, populist puppet plays, children’s radio programs about the wonders of technology, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for (but never performed at) a theater shut down by the police. Ultimately, the book makes the case that the very category of avant-garde art is bound up in the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism.
The diverse countries of Latin America have produced a lively and ever evolving tradition of novels, many of which are read in translation all over the world. This Companion offers a broad overview of the novel's history and analyses in depth several representative works by, for example, Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez, Machado de Assis, Isabel Allende and Mario Vargas Llosa. The essays collected here offer several entryways into the understanding and appreciation of the Latin American novel in Spanish-speaking America and Brazil. The volume conveys a real sense of the heterogeneity of Latin American literature, highlighting regions whose cultural and geopolitical particularities are often overlooked. Indispensable to students of Latin American or Hispanic studies and those interested in comparative literature and the development of the novel as genre, the Companion features a comprehensive bibliography and chronology and concludes with an essay about the success of Latin American novels in translation.
In Transition Cinema, Jessica Stites Mor documents the critical role filmmakers, the film industry, and state regulators played in Argentina's volatile and unfinished transition from dictatorship to democracy. She shows how, during periods of both military repression and civilian rule, the state moved to control political film production and its content, distribution, and exhibition. She also reveals the strategies that the industry, independent filmmakers, and film activists employed to comply with or circumvent these regulations. Stites Mor traces three distinct generations of transition cinema, each defined by a seminal event that shifted the political economy of national filmmaking. The first generation of filmmakers witnessed and participated in civil uprisings, such as the Cordobazo in 1969, and faced waves of repression, violence, and censorship. This generation gave rise to vibrant underground exhibitions and film clubs and eventually became symbolically linked to the Peronist Left and radical militancy. Following the 1983 return to civilian rule, a second generation of political filmmakers emerged at the center of public debates, when Buenos Aires became the locus for state-level cultural programs to address human rights and collective memory. Building on that legacy, a third generation of filmmakers explored new modes of activist and political filmmaking aided by digital technology. They pioneered new genres such as the street phenomenon of cine piquetero and introduced resistance politics and social movements into highly visible public spaces. In this captivating work, Stites Mor examines how social movements, political actors, filmmakers, and government and industry institutions, all became deeply enmeshed in the project of Argentina's transition cinema. She demonstrates how film emerged as the chronicler of political struggles in a dialogue with the past, present, and future, whose message transcended both cultural and national borders.
