Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American

Challenges to the Current Cultural Histories of the Neoliberal Period in Mexico and Brazil

New and Collected Essays on the Idea of Latin America by John Beverley

The Development of Latin American Literary Journalism and the Emergence of an Original Literature

An Ethnography of the Underground Print Book in Latin America

Performance Art as a Source of Historical Truth in Mexico

The interrelations between capitalism and political violence in late 20th century Argentina.

A study of the intermittences of the processes of transitional justice and memory in post-dictatorship Uruguay.

The emergence of Latin Americanism as a field of critical debate and inquiry.

Modernity at Gunpoint provides the first study of the political and cultural significance of weaponry in the context of major armed conflicts in Mexico and Central America.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Puerto Rico was swept by a wave of modernization, transforming the island from a predominantly rural society to an unquestionably urban one. A curious paradox ensued, however. The newly installed government, certain academic circles, and radio and television media, constructed, promoted, and sponsored a narrative of Puerto Rican culture based on rural subjects, practices, and spaces.Concrete and Countryside shows how the arts used a battery of images of the urban and the rural to understand, negotiate, and critique the innumerable changes taking place on the island.

Cuban Studies 46 includes a critical dossier on poet Lourdes Casal, with individual essays viewing the issues of race, feminism, and diaspora in her work. Additional essays address voices of economic change from the non-state sector; cinema and church during the Special Period; and race, identity, and Cuban women’s activism in historic and cultural contexts.

In Search of the Sacred Book follows the development of the Latin American novel from the early twentieth century until today by examining the attempts of major novelists to “sacralize” the novel by incorporating traits present in the sacred texts of many religions. It concludes with a view of the “desacralization” of the novel by more recent authors.

Angel Rama (1926-1983) is a major figure in Latin American literary and cultural studies, but little has been published on his critical work. Gonzalez focuses on Rama’s response to and appropriation of European critics like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukacs. He argues that Rama realized the inapplicability of many of their theories and descriptions of cultural modernization to Latin America, and reworked them to produce his own discourse that challenged prevailing notions of social and cultural modernization.

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, Shellhorse reveals literature’s power as a site for radical reflection and reaction to contemporary political and cultural conditions.