Subject: Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American

Subject: Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American

Comments

Defiant Geographies

|9780822946007|Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro|Defiant Geographies examines the destruction of a poor community in the center of Rio de Janeiro to make way for Brazil’s first international mega-event. As the country celebrated the centenary of its independence, its postabolition whitening ideology took on material form in the urban development project that staged Latin America’s first World’s Fair. The book explores official efforts to reorganize space that equated modernization with racial progress. It also considers the ways in which black and blackened subjects mobilized their own spatial logics to introduce alternative ways of occupying the city. Leu…

Read more

Comments

Poets, Philosophers, Lovers

|9780822946182|On the Writings of Giannina Braschi| With a foreword by Ilan Stavans This collection of essays, by fifteen scholars across diverse fields, explores forty years of writing by Giannina Braschi, one of the most revolutionary Latinx authors of her generation. Since the 1980s, Braschi’s linguistic and structural ingenuities, radical thinking, and poetic hilarity have spanned the genres of theatre, poetry, fiction, essay, musical, manifesto, political philosophy, and spoken word. Her best-known titles are El imperio de los sueños, Yo-Yo Boing!, and United States of Banana. She writes in Spanish, Spanglish, and English and embraces timely and enduring subjects: love, liberty,…

Read more

Comments

Queer Exposures

|9780822946694|Sexuality and Photography in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry|Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) stands out among recent Latin American writers because of his unique combination of critical acclaim, popularity, and literary significance. Queer Exposures analyzes two central but understudied topics in Bolaño’s fiction and poetry: sexuality and photography. Moving beyond a consideration of how his texts represent these topics, Ryan F. Long demonstrates that, when considered in tandem, they form the basis for a new innovative and critical approach. Emphasizing the processes of exposure associated with photography and sexuality, especially queer sexuality, provides readers and scholars with a versatile method for comprehending…

Read more

Comments

Impossible Domesticity

|9780822946915|Travels in Mexico| Translated by Robert Weis Travelers from Europe, North, and South America often perceive Mexico as a mythical place onto which they project their own cultures’ desires, fears, and anxieties. Gómez argues that Mexico’s role in these narratives was not passive and that the environment, peoples, ruins, political revolutions, and economy of Mexico were fundamental to the configuration of modern Western art and science. This project studies the images of Mexico and the ways they were contested by travelers of different national origins and trained in varied disciplines from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It starts with…

Read more

Comments

Buenos Aires Across the Arts

|9780822946922|Five and One Theses on Modernity, 1921-1939| By 1920 Buenos Aires was the largest and most cosmopolitan city of Latin America due to mass immigration from Europe in the previous decades. Unbridled urban expansion had drastic effects on the social and cultural topography of the Argentine capital, raising ideological and aesthetic issues that shaped the modernist landscape of the country. Artists across disciplines responded to these changes with conflicting depictions of urban space. Centering these conflicts as a cognitive map of modernity’s new realities in the city, Buenos Aires across the Arts looks at the interaction between modernity and modernism…

Read more