Can scholarly pursuit of soap operas and folk art actually reveal a national imagination? This innovative collection features studies of iconography in Mexico, telenovelas in Venezuela, drama in Chile, cinema in Brazil, comic strips and tango in Argentina, and ceramics in Peru. In examining these popular arts, the scholars gathered here ask the same broad questions: what precisely is a national culture at the level of the popular? The national idea in Latin America emerges from these pages as a problematic, divided one, worth sustained attention in the field of culture studies. Many different arts come forth in all their richness and vitality, compelling us to look, listen, and understand.

Writing in Disguise is a series of increasingly personal essays that both discuss and dramatize through firsthand experience the significance of subordination in academic life, in terms of issues and structures but above all in terms of texts. Some are written: memos, rejection letters, even resignation letters. Some are not: anecdotes, protests, jokes, parodies.

All of these texts have in common the imperative of disguise, represented as the most crucial consequence of dominant discourse, within which subordination might speak only by knowing its place, and write only by producing hidden transcripts.

Caustic, pointed, satiric, Writing in Disguise is an engaging critique of aspects of academia involving the misuse, misappropriation, and misappreciation of verbal communication in its many guises.