|9780822948537|Remodeling Fictions in Parque Central, Caracas|Vicente Lecuna examines an array of fictions surrounding Parque Central, a high-rise development conceived and built by the Venezuelan government as a key component of a modernization and urban renewal project. He classifies these fictions into two types: modeling and remodeling. Modeling fictions reflect an inaugural, festive, utopian nature and herald a better future that would abolish the chaotic urban past and allow a new middle class to thrive under modern, clean, orderly, and republican conditions. By contrast, remodeling fictions recast the complex as dark, sinister, contaminated, dangerous, and dirty. Lecuna argues that the Venezuelan…

|9780822967316|The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, Lesley Wylie’s close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as “nacido de árboles.” The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions…

|9780822948391|The Latin American Novel in the End Times|In The Return of the Contemporary, Nicolás Campisi combines the fields of post-dictatorship studies and environmental humanities to analyze Latin American cultural production in the neoliberal age. Each chapter pairs two authors from different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean who create a common vocabulary in which to frame the various crises of the region’s present and recent past, such as climate change, forced migration, the collapse of state institutions, and the afterlives of slavery. By situating his argument at the intersection of ecocritical and environmental humanities, affect studies, and the politics…

|9780822948087|Conflict and Stasis in Latin American Culture|The Other Border Wars: Conflict and Stasis in Latin American Culture questions bordering as an organizing principle of culture, conflict, and politics. Shannon Dowd argues that Central and South American border conflicts such as the Chaco War, between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932–1935); the Soccer War, between El Salvador and Honduras (1969); and the Falklands/Malvinas War, between Argentina and the United Kingdom (1982); can be considered as stasis, meaning civil strife, rather than polemos, meaning international war. Through analyses of literature, film, and theater, Dowd shows that border conflict is entwined with domestic strife, reinforced…

|9780822948094|Culture and Dissidence in the Villas Miseria of Buenos Aires|The Argentine capital is largely perceived as a middle-class space. Yet in reality, urban poverty and precarious settlements are defining features of the city. Agnese Codebò investigates how slums have produced culture as well as their representation in literature and the visual arts from the 1950s to the present. Looking at government-led urban projects, as well as novels, artworks, films, militant magazines, poems, and music, she tells the story of how villas miseria have mattered culturally and socially as spaces that produce new aesthetics, cultural trends, and social alliances, while offering…