Books

Rosenberg explores Latin American artistic production concerned with the possibility of justice after the establishment, rise, and ebb of the human rights narrative around the turn of the last century. He grounds his study in discussions of literature, film, and visual art (novels of political refoundations, fictions of truth and reconciliation, visual arts based on cases of disappearance, films about police violence, artistic collaborations with police forces, and judicial documentaries). In doing so, he provides a highly original examination of the paradoxical demands on current artistic works to produce both capital value and foster human dignity.

This edited volume offers new perspectives on the important work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), one of the first Latin American writers to present an intellectual analysis of pre-Columbian history and culture and the ensuing colonial period. To the contributors, Inca Garcilaso presented an early counter-hegemonic discourse and a reframing of the history of native cultures that undermined the colonial rhetoric of his time and the geopolitical divisions it purported.

Dabove shows how the bandit trope was used in fictional and non-fictional narratives by writers and political leaders, from the Mexican Revolution to the present. By examining cases from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, from Pancho Villa’s autobiography to Hugo Chavez’s appropriation of his “outlaw” grandfather, Dabove reveals how bandits function as a symbol to expose the dilemmas or aspirations of cultural and political practices, including literature as a social practice and as an ethical experience.

This book examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Orlando Bentancor ties the colonizers’ attempts to justify the abuses wrought on the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire’s rightful place in the global sphere. To Bentancor, their presuppositions were a major turning point for colonial expansion and paved the way to global mercantilism.

This volume presents new perspectives on how comics on and from Latin America both view and express memory formation on major historical events and processes. The contributors, from a variety of disciplines including literary theory, cultural studies, and history, explore topics including national identity construction, narratives of resistance to colonialism and imperialism, the construction of revolutionary traditions, and the legacies of authoritarianism and political violence.

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.

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.

An analysis of how a decade of military rule in Venezuela produced a dominant ideology of progress so meticulously crafted that to this day audacious Modernist art and architecture and dictatorship are conflated under the term “modernity.”

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.

Coronado examines photography to further the argument that intellectuals grafted their own notions of indigeneity onto their subjects. He looks specifically at the Cuzco School of Photography (active in the southern Andes) through whose work Coronado argues for photography, in its capacity as a visual and technological practice, as a powerful tool for understanding and shaping what modernity meant in the region.

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.

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.

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

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