front cover of Taking Form, Making Worlds
Taking Form, Making Worlds
Cartonera Publishers in Latin America
Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Patrick O’Hare
University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 LASA Visual Culture Studies Section Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

The first comprehensive study of cartonera, a vibrant publishing phenomenon born in Latin America.


A publishing phenomenon and artistic project, cartonera was born in the wake of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis. Infused with a rebellious spirit, it has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of publishers across Latin America and Europe making colorful, low-cost books out of cardboard salvaged from the street. Taking Form, Making Worlds is the first comprehensive study of cartonera. Drawing on interdisciplinary research conducted across Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, the authors show how this hands-on practice has fostered a politically engaged network of writers, artists, and readers. More than a social movement, cartonera uses texts, workshops, encounters, and exhibitions to foster community and engagement through open-ended forms that are at once artistic and social. For various groups including waste-pickers, Indigenous communities, rural children, and imprisoned women, cartonera provides a platform for unique stories and sparks collaborations that bring the walls of the “lettered city” tumbling down. In contexts of stigma and exclusion, cartonera collectives give form to a decolonial aesthetics of resistance, making possible a space of creative experimentation through which plural worlds can be brought to life.

[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
The Tension Of Paradox
José Donoso’s the Obscene Bird of Night As Spiritual Exercises
Pamela May Finnegan
Ohio University Press, 1992

Pamela Finnegan provides a detailed criticism of a major novel written by one of Chile’s leading literary figures. She analyzes the symbolism and the use of language in The Obscene Bird of Night, showing that the novel’s world becomes an icon characterized by entropy, parody, and materiality. Her study concludes that all linguistic ordering fictionalizes, that the lack of spirituality within the novel’s world is symptomatic of language gone stale, and that blindness to this fact leads to dogma or solipsism, each counter-productive to communication and human endeavor. To revive the linguistic system, she argues, we must revive the creative power of language.

[more]

front cover of Tentative Transgressions
Tentative Transgressions
Homosexuality, AIDS, and the Theater in Brazil
Severino J. Albuquerque
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, Albuquerque examines the way the Modernist movement both fueled and inhibited the use of gay imagery in Brazilian drama. This elegant and fluid study ultimately becomes an examination of a whole Latin society, and the ways in which Latin theatre has absorbed and reflected the culture's own changing sensibilities, that will intrigue anyone interested in Latin American culture, literature, or theater.

Winner, 2008 Elizabeth A. Steinberg Prize

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Teotihuacan
The World Beyond the City
David M. Carballo
Harvard University Press

Teotihuacan was a city of major importance in the Americas between 1 and 550 CE. As one of only two cities in the New World with a population over one hundred thousand, it developed a network of influence that stretched across Mesoamerica. The size of its urban core, the scale of its monumental architecture, and its singular apartment compounds made Teotihuacan unique among Mesoamerica’s urban state societies.

Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City brings together specialists in art and archaeology to develop a synthetic overview of the urban, political, economic, and religious organization of a key power in Classic-period Mesoamerica. The book provides the first comparative discussion of Teotihuacan’s foreign policy with respect to the Central Mexican Highlands, Oaxaca, Veracruz, and the Maya Lowlands and Highlands. Contributors debate whether Teotihuacan’s interactions were hegemonic, diplomatic, stylistic, or a combination of these or other social processes. The authors draw on recent investigations and discoveries to update models of Teotihuacan’s history, in the process covering various questions about the nature of Teotihuacan’s commercial relations, its political structure, its military relationships with outlying areas, the prestige of the city, and the worldview it espoused through both monumental architecture and portable media.

[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Textual Confrontations
Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature
Alfred J. Mac Adam
University of Chicago Press, 1987
In this masterful experiment in truly comparative literary criticism, Alfred J. Mac Adam establishes Latin America's place in the Western literary tradition. By juxtaposing Latin American and Anglo-American texts, he shows how Latin American literature has gone beyond the context of Hispanic letters to borrow from, exploit, and finally extend the Western tradition.

Mac Adam describes the changes that have taken place in Latin American literature since the time of Modernismo (roughly 1880-1920), when Spanish American writers tried to update their literary language by imitating foreign, mostly French, literature. Since then, as he demonstrates, Latin American writing has achieved a pioneering status by means of a different kind of imitation—parody—whereby it gives back to the former centers of Western culture their own writing, now distorted and reshaped into something new.
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism
Thl Vol 53
Edmond CrosTranslated by Jerome SchwartzForeword by Jurgen Link and Ursula Link-Heer
University of Minnesota Press, 1988

Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Edmond Cros is a leading French Hispanicist whose work is unique in Continental theory because it brings Spanish and Mexican texts into current literary debates, which have so far centered mainly on the French and German traditions. Equally distinctive is the nature of his work, which Cros terms sociocriticism. Unlike most sociological approaches to literature, which leave the structure of texts untouched, sociocriticism aims to prove that the encounter with "ideological traces," and with antagonistic tensions between social classes, is central to any reading of texts. Cros's method distinguishes between the "semiotic and "ideological" elements within a text, and involves the patient, exacting reconstruction of the concrete text from these elements, a process that enables the sociocritic to interpret its fault lines, its internal contradictions - in the end , its irreducibly social nature.

As its title suggests, Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism is structured in two parts. Its opening chapters analyze sociological theories of discourse, including those of Foucault, Bakhtin, and Goldman; in the second part, Cros applies theory to practice in readings of specific works: the film Scarface, contemporary Mexican poetry and prose (Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes), and the picaresque novel of the Spanish Golden Age. In their foreword, Jurgen Link and Ursula Link-Heer differentiate sociocriticism from other social approaches to literature and show how Cros's method works in specific textual readings. They emphasize his resistance to the reductive modes and "misreadings" that dominate much of contemporary theory.

Edmond Cros is a professor of literary theory and Hispanic studies at the Universite Paul Valery in Montpellier, France, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Jurgen Link teaches at the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum and Ursula Link-Heer at the Universitat Siegen, both in West Germany.

[more]

front cover of They Forged the Signature of God
They Forged the Signature of God
A Novel
Viriato Sención
Northwestern University Press, 1995
This vivid exposé of corruption and political tyranny in the Dominican Republic rang so true to the reality that the President of that country went on television to denounce the book. They Forged the Signature of God went on to become the best-selling book in the history of the Dominican Republic. 

Sención's novel follows the lives of three seminary students who suffer from church-state oppression. The book also gives a chilling portrait of Dr. Ramos, a sinister autocrat, who manages to survive six terms as president of his country through manipulation and tyranny. This finely textured novel gives a vivid picture of the internal politics of the Dominican Republic.
[more]

front cover of Thiefing Sugar
Thiefing Sugar
Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature
Omise eke Natasha Tinsley
Duke University Press, 2010
In Thiefing Sugar, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley explores the poetry and prose of Caribbean women writers, revealing in their imagery a rich tradition of erotic relations between women. She takes the book’s title from Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here, where eroticism between women is likened to the sweet and subversive act of cane cutters stealing sugar. The natural world is repeatedly reclaimed and reinterpreted to express love between women in the poetry and prose that Tinsley analyzes. She not only recuperates stories of Caribbean women loving women, stories that have been ignored or passed over by postcolonial and queer scholarship until now, she also shows how those erotic relations and their literary evocations form a poetics and politics of decolonization. Tinsley’s interpretations of twentieth-century literature by Dutch-, English-, and French-speaking women from the Caribbean take into account colonialism, migration, labor history, violence, and revolutionary politics. Throughout Thiefing Sugar, Tinsley connects her readings to contemporary matters such as neoimperialism and international LGBT and human-rights discourses. She explains too how the texts that she examines intervene in black feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, particularly when she highlights the cultural limitations of the metaphors that dominate queer theory in North America and Europe, including those of the closet and “coming out.”
[more]

front cover of Thieving Three-Fingered Jack
Thieving Three-Fingered Jack
Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015
Botkin, Frances R.
Rutgers University Press, 2018

The fugitive slave known as “Three-Fingered Jack” terrorized colonial Jamaica from 1780 until vanquished by Maroons, self-emancipated Afro-Jamaicans bound by treaty to police the island for runaways and rebels.  A thief and a killer, Jack was also a freedom fighter who sabotaged the colonial machine until his grisly death at its behest. Narratives about his exploits shed light on the problems of black rebellion and solutions administered by the colonial state, creating an occasion to consider counter-narratives about its methods of divide and conquer. For more than two centuries, writers, performers, and storytellers in England, Jamaica, and the United States have “thieved" Three Fingered Jack's riveting tale, defining black agency through and against representations of his resistance.

Frances R. Botkin offers a literary and cultural history that explores the persistence of stories about this black rebel, his contributions to constructions of black masculinity in the Atlantic world, and his legacies in Jamaican and United States popular culture.

[more]

front cover of The Things That Fly in the Night
The Things That Fly in the Night
Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora
Giselle Liza Anatol
Rutgers University Press, 2015
The Things That Fly in the Night explores images of vampirism in Caribbean and African diasporic folk traditions and in contemporary fiction. Giselle Liza Anatol focuses on the figure of the soucouyant, or Old Hag—an aged woman by day who sheds her skin during night’s darkest hours in order to fly about her community and suck the blood of her unwitting victims. In contrast to the glitz, glamour, and seductiveness of conventional depictions of the European vampire, the soucouyant triggers unease about old age and female power. Tracing relevant folklore through the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, the U.S. Deep South, and parts of West Africa, Anatol shows how tales of the nocturnal female bloodsuckers not only entertain and encourage obedience in pre-adolescent listeners, but also work to instill particular values about women’s “proper” place and behaviors in society at large. 
 
[more]

logo for University of London Press
This America We Dream of
Rodo and "Ariel" One Hundred Years on
Edited by Gustavo San Roman
University of London Press, 2001

front cover of Three Authors of Alienation
Three Authors of Alienation
Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier
By M. Ian Adams
University of Texas Press, 1975

As a philosophical and social concept, alienation covers a broad range of mental states, both normal and abnormal. Correspondingly, a wide range of literary forms has been employed to deal with this important theme. In Three Authors of Alienation, an exploration of the literary expression of alienation, M. Ian Adams discusses the works of three contemporary Latin American authors.

The fiction of María Luisa Bombal, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Alejo Carpentier reflects alienation, disgust with life, and a feeling of nothingness arising from the conditions of modern society. However, each author treats the theme differently. In La última niebla, María Luisa Bombal uses poetic imagery to create the emotional life of the protagonist. Juan Carlos Onetti portrays the schizoid extreme of alienation with a complex of symbols based on changes of vision caused by the mental states of his characters. In Los pasos perdidos, Alejo Carpentier presents the problem of the modern alienated artist who attempts to rid himself of his social alienation by changing times and cultures.

In his close analysis of the works discussed, Adams considers each literary element in its context and also in terms of its relation to the larger artistic vision of the author. In addition, he places the works of the three authors in the greater perspective of modern social problems by discussing the concepts of social alienation proposed by Erich Fromm and Erich Kahler. His conclusion is that, although disgust with life and feelings of meaninglessness are at the heart of the experiences of the characters of all three authors, only in Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos are social conditions the major cause of alienation. In the works of Bombal and Onetti, alienation is a result not of social conditions, but of factors unique to the characters’ personalities and circumstances.

Three Authors of Alienation is a solid contribution to criticism of contemporary Latin American narrative. Adams’s projection of a social problem into the realm of aesthetic experience yields intriguing interpretations of both the problem and the literature.

[more]

front cover of Tierra del Fuego
Tierra del Fuego
Sylvia Iparraguirre
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Tierra del Fuego is more than a suspenseful seafaring tale in the tradition of Captain Hornblower; it is also a chilling psychological and cultural tale, reminiscent of Heart of Darkness or Lord of the Flies, that probes deeply into human nature. Based on the true story of the Yámana Indian, Jemmy Button (parts of which are recorded in Chapter 10 of Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle), the novel explores Captain Robert Fitzroy's abduction of Jemmy Button and his attempt to "civilize" him in England and return him to his country as a bearer of "enlightened society." His experiment leads to tragic consequences. The novel deals with European arrogance and exploitation, but avoids falling into the cliché of "the Noble Savage." Jemmy (the "Other") remains strange and the attempt to co-opt him fails.

Tierra del Fuego has already won two major awards for the Spanish edition: The Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award for the best work of fiction written by a woman and The Best Book of the Year Award at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.

[more]

front cover of To Defend This Sunrise
To Defend This Sunrise
Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua
Courtney Desiree Morris
Rutgers University Press, 2023
To Defend this Sunrise examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state’s co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of “multicultural dispossession.” This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.
 
[more]

front cover of Torture in Brazil
Torture in Brazil
A Shocking Report on the Pervasive Use of Torture by Brazilian Military Governments, 1964-1979, Secretly Prepared by the Archiodese of São Paulo
Archdiocese of São Paulo, Brazil
University of Texas Press, 1998

Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

From 1964 until 1985, Brazil was ruled by a military regime that sanctioned the systematic use of torture in dealing with its political opponents. The catalog of what went on during that grim period was originally published in Portuguese as Brasil: Nunca Mais (Brazil: Never Again) in 1985.

The volume was based on the official documentation kept by the very military that perpetrated the horrific acts. These extensive documents include military court proceedings of actual trials, secretly photocopied by lawyers associated with the Catholic Church and analyzed by a team of researchers. Their daring project—known as BNM for Brasil: Nunca Mais—compiled more than 2,700 pages of testimony by political prisoners documenting close to three hundred forms of torture.

The BNM project proves conclusively that torture was an essential part of the military justice system and that judicial authorities were clearly aware of the use of torture to extract confessions. Still, it took more than a decade after the publication of Brasil: Nunca Mais for the armed forces to admit publicly that such torture had ever taken place. Torture in Brazil, the English version of the book re-edited here, serves as a timely reminder of the role of Brazil's military in past repression.

[more]

front cover of Touched Bodies
Touched Bodies
The Performative Turn in Latin American Art
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Shortlisted for the 2020 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize​
Winner of the 2019 Art Journal Prize from the College Art Association

What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy. Based on original documents and innovative readings, her book brings politics and ethics to the discussion of artistic developments during the “long 1980s”. She describes the rise of performance art in the context of feminism, HIV-activism, and human right movements, taking a close look at the work of Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita from Chile, León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentágono from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performative turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, recast the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways in which we perceive art and understand its role in society.
[more]

front cover of The Tragedy of King Christophe
The Tragedy of King Christophe
Aimé Césaire
Northwestern University Press, 2015
The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963, revised 1970) is recognized as the Martiniquan writer and activist Aime Cesaire’s greatest play. Set in the period of upheaval in Haiti after the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, it follows the historical figure of Henri Christophe, a slave who rose to become a general in Toussaint Louverture’s army. Christophe declared himself king in 1811 and ruled the northern part of Haiti until 1820. Cesaire employs Shakespearean plotting and revels in the inexhaustible possibilities of language to convey the tragedy of Christophe’s transformation from a charismatic leader sensitive to the oppression of his people to an oppressor himself. Paul Breslin and Rachel Ney’s nimble, accurate translation includes an introduction and explanatory notes to guide students, scholars, and general readers alike.
[more]

front cover of Transforming Rural Water Governance
Transforming Rural Water Governance
The Road from Resource Management to Political Activism in Nicaragua
Sarah T. Romano
University of Arizona Press, 2019
The most acute water crises occur in everyday contexts in impoverished rural and urban areas across the Global South. While they rarely make headlines, these crises, characterized by inequitable access to sufficient and clean water, affect over one billion people globally. What is less known, though, is that millions of these same global citizens are at the forefront of responding to the challenges of water privatization, climate change, deforestation, mega-­hydraulic projects, and other threats to accessing water as a critical resource.

In Transforming Rural Water Governance Sarah T. Romano explains the bottom-up development and political impact of community-based water and sanitation committees (CAPS) in Nicaragua. Romano traces the evolution of CAPS from rural resource management associations into a national political force through grassroots organizing and strategic alliances.

Resource management and service provision is inherently political: charging residents fees for service, determining rules for household water shutoffs and reconnections, and negotiating access to water sources with local property owners constitute just a few of the highly political endeavors resource management associations like CAPS undertake as part of their day-to-day work in their communities. Yet, for decades in Nicaragua, this local work did not reflect political activism. In the mid-2000s CAPS’ collective push for social change propelled them onto a national stage and into new roles as they demanded recognition from the government.

Romano argues that the transformation of Nicaragua’s CAPS into political actors is a promising example of the pursuit of sustainable and equitable water governance, particularly in Latin America. Transforming Rural Water Governance demonstrates that when activism informs public policy processes, the outcome is more inclusive governance and the potential for greater social and environmental justice.
[more]

front cover of Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo
Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo
Bernadine Hernández and Karen Roybal
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
For more than forty years, Chicana author Ana Castillo has produced novels, poems, and critical essays that forge connections between generations; challenge borders around race, gender, and sexuality; and critically engage transnational issues of space, identity, and belonging. Her contributions to Latinx cultural production and to Chicana feminist thought have transcended and contributed to feminist praxis, ethnic literature, and border studies throughout the Americas. Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo is the first edited collection that focuses on Castillo’s oeuvre, which directly confronts what happens in response to cultural displacement, mixing, and border crossing. Divided into five sections, this collection thinks about Castillo’s poetics, language, and form, as well as thematic issues such as borders, immigration, gender, sexuality, and transnational feminism. From her first political poetry, Otro Canto, published in 1977, to her mainstream novels such as The Mixquiahuala Letters, So Far From God, and The Guardians, this collection aims to unravel how Castillo’s writing impacts people of color around the globe and works in solidarity with other third world feminisms.
[more]

front cover of Transversal
Transversal
Poems
Urayoán Noel
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Transversal takes a  disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.

Featuring Noel’s bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination, Transversal contains personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel’s experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico. This collection explores walking poems improvised on a smartphone, as well as remixed classical and experimental forms. Poems are presented in interlocking bilingual versions that complicate the relationship between translation and original, and between English and Spanish as languages of empire and popular struggle. The book creatively examines translation and its simultaneous urgency and impossibility in a time of global crisis.

Transversal seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language
.
[more]

logo for University of London Press
Traslados/Translations
Essays on Latin America in Honour of Jason Wilson
Edited by Claire Lindsay
University of London Press, 2012

front cover of Trauma, Taboo, and Truth-Telling
Trauma, Taboo, and Truth-Telling
Listening to Silences in Postdictatorship Argentina
Nancy J. Gates-Madsen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Argentina’s repressive 1976–83 dictatorship, during which an estimated thirty thousand people were “disappeared,” prompted the postauthoritarian administrations and human rights groups to encourage public exposure of past crimes and traumas. Truth commissions, trials, and other efforts have aimed to break the silence and give voice to the voiceless. Yet despite these many reckonings, there are still silences, taboos, and unanswerable questions.
            Nancy J. Gates-Madsen reads between the lines of Argentine cultural texts (fiction, drama, testimonial narrative, telenovela, documentary film) to explore the fundamental role of silence—the unsaid—in the expression of trauma. Her careful examination of the interplay between textual and contextual silences illuminates public debate about the meaning of memory in Argentina—which stories are being told and, more important, which are being silenced. The imposition of silence is not limited to the military domain or its apologists, she shows; the human rights community also perpetuates and creates taboos.
[more]

front cover of Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism
Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism
Samantha A. Noël
Duke University Press, 2021
In Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, Samantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other white-dominant regimes through tropicalist representation. With depictions of tropical scenery and landscapes situated throughout the African diaspora, performances staged in tropical settings, and bodily expressions of tropicality during Carnival, artists such as Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Josephine Baker, and Maya Angelou developed what Noël calls “tropical aesthetics”—using art to name and reclaim spaces of Black sovereignty. As a unifying element in the Caribbean modern art movement and the Harlem Renaissance, tropical aesthetics became a way for visual artists and performers to express their sense of belonging to and rootedness in a place. Tropical aesthetics, Noël contends, became central to these artists’ identities and creative processes while enabling them to craft alternative Black diasporic histories. In outlining the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the artistic and cultural practices of Black modernist art, Noël recasts understandings of African diasporic art.
[more]

front cover of Tropical Lung
Tropical Lung
exi(s)t(s)
Roberto Harrison
Omnidawn, 2021
Tropical Lung is a collection of writings and drawings from and to a new homeland, a vision of Panamá and the Tecumseh Republic where technology is necessary for understanding the ancient, then is erased and transcended by an ever-present electronic circle. Roberto Harrison combines poetry and visual art in this surrealist vision of a world both historical and reborn, where the futuristic links to the ancient. Harrison looks to symbolic beginnings, spaces of light and mystery that counter disassociation with explorations of the foundational structures of personhood.

Tropical Lung shows how apocalypses can give us the keys to new futures and how aloneness and silence can lead us to live multidimensionally, beyond the boundaries of time and space. The screen makes itself known and offers a means of kinship, but it is also removed by song and born in the red of encounter and the dark of seven pupils. These wild visions coalesce into a fantastic vision of a future both technological and communal.
 
[more]

front cover of Twelve Prophets of Aleijadinho
Twelve Prophets of Aleijadinho
Hans Mann
University of Texas Press, 1967

They stand on a hilltop in the mountains of Minas Gerais in Brazil—twelve dramatic figures, twelve Old Testament prophets soundlessly crying their warnings to mankind. There they have stood for over two centuries, masterpieces by that strange, unhappy sculptor, Antonio Francisco Lisboa—or, as he is better known, Aleijadinho, "The Little Cripple."

These figures, some mirroring in their faces the calm certainty of their prophesies and some reflecting the desperation of their warnings, have an impact upon the mind and the emotions of the modern viewer fully as great as their effect must have been upon those for whom they were originally carved—the adventurers of the lusty goldmining region which was eighteenth-century Minas Gerais. Their impact draws added depth from the realization that they bear also the mark of the anguish of their creator.

Aleijadinho, the mulatto son of a local builder, grew up untutored amid the building fever of the mining centers, grew up to endure throughout the last half of his long life the physical torment and the mental suffering of a painful and mutilating disease. Yet, developing his self-schooled talent, he stamped the hallmark of his creativity upon the religious art of the whole region.

In this volume the late artist photographer Hans Mann provides a sensitive pictorial study of the Twelve Prophets, of the six scenes of the Crucifixion which stand just below the Prophets on that windy hillside at Congonhas do Campo, and of other representative examples of the sculpture of Aleijadinho. A brief text by the photographer's wife, Graciela Mann, provides the information and background needed for the fullest enjoyment of the pictures.

The prose poem "When the Statues Speak," by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, sets the dramatic mood for the photographs of the Prophets themselves.

[more]

front cover of Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction
Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction
By Naomi Lindstrom
University of Texas Press, 1994

Spanish American fiction became a world phenomenon in the twentieth century through multilanguage translations of such novels as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude, and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits. Yet these "blockbusters" are only a tiny fraction of the total, rich outpouring of Spanish-language literature from Latin America.

In this book, Naomi Lindstrom offers English-language readers a comprehensive survey of the century's literary production in Latin America (excluding Brazil). Discussing movements and trends, she places the famous masterworks in historical perspective and highlights authors and works that deserve a wider readership. Her study begins with Rodó's famous essay Ariel and ends with Rigoberta Menchú's 1992 achievement of the Nobel Prize. Her selection of works is designed to draw attention, whenever possible, to works that are available in good English translations.

A special feature of the book is its treatment of the "postboom" period. In this important concluding section, Lindstrom discusses documentary narratives, the new interrelations between popular culture and literary writing, and underrepresented groups such as youth cultures, slum dwellers, gays and lesbians, and ethnic enclaves. Written in accessible, nonspecialized language, Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction will be equally useful for general readers as a broad overview of this vibrant literature and for scholars as a reliable reference work.

[more]

front cover of The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel
The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel
By Raymond Leslie Williams
University of Texas Press, 2003

A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book

Spanish American novels of the Boom period (1962-1967) attracted a world readership to Latin American literature, but Latin American writers had already been engaging in the modernist experiments of their North American and European counterparts since the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the desire to be "modern" is a constant preoccupation in twentieth-century Spanish American literature and thus a very useful lens through which to view the century's novels.

In this pathfinding study, Raymond L. Williams offers the first complete analytical and critical overview of the Spanish American novel throughout the entire twentieth century. Using the desire to be modern as his organizing principle, he divides the century's novels into five periods and discusses the differing forms that "the modern" took in each era. For each period, Williams begins with a broad overview of many novels, literary contexts, and some cultural debates, followed by new readings of both canonical and significant non-canonical novels. A special feature of this book is its emphasis on women writers and other previously ignored and/or marginalized authors, including experimental and gay writers. Williams also clarifies the legacy of the Boom, the Postboom, and the Postmodern as he introduces new writers and new novelistic trends of the 1990s.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter