Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas

Rabasa offers new interpretations of the meaning of history from indigenous perspectives and develops the concept of a communal temporality that is not limited by time, but rather exists within the individual, community, and culture as a living knowledge that links both past and present. Rabasa recalls the works of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci, and contemporary south Asian subalternists Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others. He incorporates their conceptions of communality, insurgency, resistance to hegemonic governments, and the creation of autonomous spaces as strategies employed by indigenous groups around the globe, but goes further in defining these strategies as millennial and deeply rooted in Mesoamerican antiquity.

Repositions Peruvian indigenismo as a discourse of and about modernity, in which the movement’s artists and intellectuals used the figure of the Indian to mobilize larger questions about becoming modern.

Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation through a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Historicizing the thought of Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination.

Legras views the factors that have both formed and stifled the integration of peripheral experiences into Latin American literature. He analyzes key works by novelists Juan Jose Saer (The Witness), Nellie Campobello (Cartucho), Roa Bastos (Son of Man), and Jose Maria Arguedas (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below), among others, to provide a theoretical basis for understanding the plight of the author, the peripheral voice, and the confines of the literary medium.

Intersecting Tango engages Buenos Aires during the sweeping changes of 1900-1930, to capture a culture in motion through which Buenos Aires transformed itself into a modern, cosmopolitan city. Taking the reader through a dazzling array of sites, sources, and events, Bergero conveys the city in all its complexity. Drawing on architecture and gendered spaces, photography, newspaper columns, schoolbooks, “high” and “low” literature, private letters, advertising, fashion, and popular music, she illuminates a range of urban social geographies inhabited by the city’s defining classes and groups. In mining this vast material, Bergero traces the profound change in social fabric by which these diverse identities evolved, through the processes of modernization and its many dislocations, into a new national identity capable of embodying modernity.

Traces the production of nationalist imaginaries through the public visual representation of modern state formation in Brazil and Argentina. The purpose of these imaginaries was to vindicate political upheavals and secure the viability of the newly independent states through a sense of historic destiny and inevitable evolution. The visions of national heritage, territory, and social and ethnic composition were conceived in a complex interplay between government, cultural and scientific institutions, as a means of propagating political agendas and power throughout the emerging states.

Other South raises new questions about the scope and attitude of Faulkner’s project, positioning his work as an inherent critique of colonialism and emphasizing a more specific conceptualization of coloniality. Engaging with theorists from the former colonies, Aboul-Ela draws on an understanding of economics, social structures, and the colonial/neocolonial status of the Third World, and steps outside the preconceptions of current postcolonial studies to offer a view of our shared literary heritage.

Winner of the 2010 Kayden Book Award for literary studies.

An original study of the popular theme of banditry in works of literature, essays, poetry, and drama, from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s, and banditry’s pivotal role during the conceptualization and formation of the Latin American nation-state. While focusing on four crucial countries (Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela), it is the first book to address the depiction of banditry in Latin America as a whole.

Part field diary, part art critique, and part cultural anthropology— the book offers a glimpse of an aesthetic “other” (the Ishir [Chamacoco] of Parguay), causing us to reexamine Western perspectives on the interpretation of art, religion, and Native American culture.

Examines the canonical Latin American avant-garde texts of the 1920s and 1930s, with particular focus on Roberto Arlt and Mario de Andrade. The movement developed on its own terms, in polemic dialogue with European movements, critiquing modernity itself, and developed a geopolitical awareness that bridged postcolonial and postmodern culture and continues its influence today.

An intellectual tour de force from one of today’s leading critics of Latin American literature and culture, The Corpus Delicti [The Body of Crime] is a manual of crime, a compendium of crime tales, and an extended meditation on the role of crime in life.

Rockin’ Las Americas is the first book to explore the production, dissemination, and consumption of rock music throughout Latin America. Contributors include experts in music, history, literature, sociology, and anthropology, as well as practicing rockeros.

Mestizaje refers to the process of cultural, ethnic, and racial mixture that is part of cultural identity in Latin America. Through a careful study of fiction, political essays, and visual art, this book defines the meaning of mestizaje in the context of the emergence of a modern national and artistic identity in late-19th- and early 20th-century Bolivia.