This book addresses the connection between political themes and literary form in the most recent Argentine poetry. Ben Bollig uses the concepts of “lyric” and “state” as twin coordinates for both an assessment of how Argentinian poets have conceived a political role for their work and how poems come to speak to us about politics. Drawing on concepts from contemporary literary theory, this striking study combines textual analysis with historical research to shed light on the ways in which new modes of circulation help to shape poetry today.
Sergio Raimondi’s work engages in the most complex issues of his time, including globalisation, colonialism, industrialisation and environmental degradation. Yet all his concerns are rigorously analysed through the medium of the poet’s art, steeped in literary tradition and craft. He is widely considered Argentina’s most important and influential contemporary poet, with an international reputation. Many of Raimondi’s poems address what might seem unlikely subjects for poetry: industrial practices, global trade, or labour legislation. Yet among the allusions, the immense research, the unsparing gaze, and the expert skill of the language there’s also room for desert-dry humour, touches of self-deprecation and immense empathy for individuals caught up in seemingly implacable historical processes. This volume includes a generous selection of his poems from Poesía civil (Civil Poetry) and Lexikón (Lexikon) in bilingual Spanish-English facing-pages format. A substantial introduction by the translators places Raimondi’s work in its literary and wider cultural context, and reflects on the challenges faced when bringing his unique poetry into English.
From Wild Tales to Zama, Argentine cinema has produced some of the most visually striking and critically lauded films of the 2000s. Argentina also boasts some of the most exciting contemporary poetry in the Spanish language. What happens when its film and poetry meet on screen? Moving Verses studies the relationship between poetry and cinema in Argentina. Although both the poetics of cinema and literary adaptation have become established areas of film scholarship in recent years, the diverse modes of exchange between poetry and cinema have received little critical attention. The book analyses how film and poetry transform each another, and how these two expressive media behave when placed into dialogue. Going beyond theories of adaptation, and engaging critically with concepts around intermediality and interdisciplinarity, Moving Verses offers tools and methods for studying both experimental and mainstream film from Latin America and beyond. The corpus includes some of Argentina's most exciting and radical contemporary directors (Raúl Perrone, Gustavo Fontán) as well as established modern masters (María Luisa Bemberg, Eliseo Subiela), and seldom studied experimental projects (Narcisa Hirsch, Claudio Caldini). The critical approach draws on recent works on intermediality and impure cinema to sketch and assess the many and varied ways in which directors read poetry on screen.
This book is the first to focus specifically on the exile-poetry link in the case of Argentina since the 1950s. Throughout Argentina's history, authors and important political figures have lived and written in exile. Thus exile is both a vital theme and a practical condition for Argentine letters, yet conversely, contemporary Argentina is a nation of immigrants from Europe and the rest of Latin America. Poetry is often perceived as the least directly political of genres, yet political and other forms of exile have impinged equally on the lives of poets as on any group. This study concentrates on writers who both regarded themselves as in some way exiled and who wrote about exile. This selection includes poets who are influential and recognised, but in general have not enjoyed the detailed study that they deserve: Alejandra Pizarnik, Juan Gelman, Osvaldo Lamborghini, Nestor Perlongher, Sergio Raimondi, Cristian Aliaga, and Washington Cucurto.
The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration offers a systematic account of population movements to and from the region over the last 150 years, spanning from the massive transoceanic migration of the 1870s to contemporary intraregional and transnational movements. The volume introduces the migratory trajectories of Latin American populations as a complex web of transnational movements linking origin, transit, and receiving countries. It showcases the historical mobility dynamics of different national groups including Arab, Asian, African, European, and indigenous migration and their divergent international trajectories within existing migration systems in the Western Hemisphere, including South America, the Caribbean, and Mesoamerica. The contributors explore some of the main causes for migration, including wars, economic dislocation, social immobility, environmental degradation, repression, and violence. Multiple case studies address critical contemporary topics such as the Venezuelan exodus, Central American migrant caravans, environmental migration, indigenous and gender migration, migrant religiosity, transit and return migration, urban labor markets, internal displacement, the nexus between organized crime and forced migration, the role of social media and new communication technologies, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on movement. These essays provide a comprehensive map of the historical evolution of migration in Latin America and contribute to define future challenges in migration studies in the region. This book will be of interest to scholars of Latin American and Migration Studies in the disciplines of history, sociology, political science, anthropology, and geography.
This book is a historical and discursive study of rock poetry produced in Argentina, during the “transition to democracy,” in the 1980s. Lucas R. Berone analyzes the lyrics and albums of a heterogeneous group of Argentine rock artists and bands, who began their careers at that time, to demonstrate the emergence and functioning of a new grammar of discursive production, he terms the “grammar of the incognitus (or hidden) subject.” This grammar is a very specific and distinct way of elaborating the enunciative relationship between the artist and his audience when compared to the traditional countercultural rock discourse. The author asserts that the new discursive grammar, focused on the singularity of the present and the “self,” will produce the last important revolution in the tradition of the so-called “rock nacional,” motivating critical responses in the leaders of the movement.
Excessively European, refreshingly European, not as European as it looks, struggling to overcome a delusion that it is European. Argentina—in all its complexity—has often been obscured by variations of the "like Europe and not like the rest of Latin America" cliché. The Argentina Reader deliberately breaks from that viewpoint. This essential introduction to Argentina’s history, culture, and society provides a richer, more comprehensive look at one of the most paradoxical of Latin American nations: a nation that used to be among the richest in the world, with the largest middle class in Latin America, yet one that entered the twenty-first century with its economy in shambles and its citizenry seething with frustration. This diverse collection brings together songs, articles, comic strips, scholarly essays, poems, and short stories. Most pieces are by Argentines. More than forty of the texts have never before appeared in English. The Argentina Reader contains photographs from Argentina’s National Archives and images of artwork by some of the country’s most talented painters and sculptors. Many selections deal with the history of indigenous Argentines, workers, women, blacks, and other groups often ignored in descriptions of the country. At the same time, the book includes excerpts by or about such major political figures as José de San Martín and Juan Perón. Pieces from literary and social figures virtually unknown in the United States appear alongside those by more well-known writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Ricardo Piglia, and Julio Cortázar. The Argentina Reader covers the Spanish colonial regime; the years of nation building following Argentina’s independence from Spain in 1810; and the sweeping progress of economic growth and cultural change that made Argentina, by the turn of the twentieth century, the most modern country in Latin America. The bulk of the collection focuses on the twentieth century: on the popular movements that enabled Peronism and the revolutionary dreams of the 1960s and 1970s; on the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 and the accompanying culture of terror and resistance; and, finally, on the contradictory and disconcerting tendencies unleashed by the principles of neoliberalism and the new global economy. The book also includes a list of suggestions for further reading. The Argentina Reader is an invaluable resource for those interested in learning about Argentine history and culture, whether in the classroom or in preparation for travel in Argentina.
Anti-Literature articulates a rethinking of what is meant today by "literature." Examining key Latin American forms of experimental writing from the 1920s to the present, Adam Joseph Shellhorse reveals literature's power as a site for radical reflection and reaction to contemporary political and cultural conditions. His analysis engages the work of writers such as Clarice Lispector, Oswald de Andrade, the Brazilian concrete poets, Osman Lins, and David Vi–as, to develop a theory of anti-literature that posits the feminine, multimedial, and subaltern as central to the undoing of what is meant by "literature." By placing Brazilian and Argentine anti-literature at the crux of a new way of thinking about the field, Shellhorse challenges prevailing discussions about the historical projection and critical force of Latin American literature. Examining a diverse array of texts and media that include the visual arts, concrete poetry, film scripts, pop culture, neo-baroque narrative, and others that defy genre, Shellhorse delineates the subversive potential of anti-literary modes of writing while also engaging current debates in Latin American studies on subalternity, feminine writing, posthegemony, concretism, affect, marranismo, and the politics of aesthetics.
