front cover of La Florida del Inca and the Struggle for Social Equality in Colonial Spanish America
La Florida del Inca and the Struggle for Social Equality in Colonial Spanish America
Jonathan D. Steigman
University of Alabama Press, 2005

A cross-disciplinary view of an important De Soto chronicle.


Among the early Spanish chroniclers who contributed to popular images of the New World was the Amerindian-Spanish (mestizo) historian and literary writer, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616).  He authored several works, of which La Florida del Inca (1605) stands out as the best because of its unique Amerindian and European perspectives on the De Soto expedition (1539-1543).  As the child of an Indian mother and a Spanish father, Garcilaso lived in both worlds--and saw value in each. Hailed throughout Europe for his excellent contemporary Renaissance writing style, his work was characterized as literary art. Garcilaso revealed the emotions, struggles, and conflicts experienced by those who participated in the historic and grandiose adventure in La Florida. Although criticized for some lapses in accuracy in his attempts to paint both the Spaniards and the Amerindians as noble participants in a world-changing event, his work remains the most accessible of all the chronicles.

In this volume, Jonathan Steigman explores El Inca’s rationale and motivations in writing his chronicle. He suggests that El Inca was trying to influence events by influencing discourse; that he sought to create a discourse of tolerance and agrarianism, rather than the dominant European discourse of intolerance, persecution, and lust for wealth. Although El Inca's purposes went well beyond detailing the facts of De Soto’s entrada, his skill as a writer and his dual understanding of the backgrounds of the participants enabled him to paint a more complete picture than most--putting a sympathetic human face on explorers and natives alike.


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La Malinche in Mexican Literature
From History to Myth
By Sandra Messinger Cypess
University of Texas Press, 1991

Of all the historical characters known from the time of the Spanish conquest of the New World, none has proved more pervasive or controversial than that of the Indian interpreter, guide, mistress, and confidante of Hernán Cortés, Doña Marina—La Malinche—Malintzin. The mother of Cortés's son, she becomes not only the mother of the mestizo but also the Mexican Eve, the symbol of national betrayal.

Very little documented evidence is available about Doña Marina. This is the first serious study tracing La Malinche in texts from the conquest period to the present day. It is also the first study to delineate the transformation of this historical figure into a literary sign with multiple manifestations.

Cypess includes such seldom analyzed texts as Ireneo Paz's Amor y suplicio and Doña Marina, as well as new readings of well-known texts like Octavio Paz's El laberinto de la soledad. Using a feminist perspective, she convincingly demonstrates how the literary depiction and presentation of La Malinche is tied to the political agenda of the moment. She also shows how the symbol of La Malinche has changed over time through the impact of sociopolitical events on the literary expression.

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The Language of the In-Between
Travestis, Post-hegemony, and Writing in Contemporary Chile and Peru
Erika Almenara
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Often, the process of modern state formation is founded on the marginalization of certain groups, and Latin America is no exception. In The Language of the In-Between, Erika Almenara contends that literary production replicates this same process. Looking at marginalized communities in Chile and Peru, particularly writers who are travesti, trans, cuir/queer, and Indigenous, the author shows how these writers stake a claim for the liminal space that is neither one thing nor the other. This allows a freedom to expose oppression and to critique a national identity based on erasure. By employing a language of nonnormative gender and sexuality to dispute the state projects of modernity and modernization, the voice of the poor and racialized travesti evolves from powerlessness to become an agent of social transformation.

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Las aventuras de Chupacabra Charlie
Frederick Luis Aldama, illustrado por Chris Escobar
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Chupacabra Charlie es un chupacabras de diez años educado, guapo e inusualmente alto que anhela la aventura más allá de los límites de México, pero no muy al norte. Poco sabe Charlie cuando se hace amigo de una joven humana, Lupe, que juntos, con solo algunas quesadillas de tocino y algunas latas de Jumex, encontrarán más aventuras de las que podrían manejar. En el camino, se encuentrarán con personas extrañas y peligros inesperados en la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México que ponen a prueba su valentía. ¿Podrán Charlie y Lupe regresar sanos y salvos a casa?
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Latin American and Caribbean Library Resources in the British Isles
A Directory
Alan Biggins and Valerie Cooper
University of London Press, 2001

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Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century
Transgressing the Frame
James Scorer
University of Texas Press, 2024

How twenty-first-century Latin American comics transgress social, political, and cultural frontiers.

Given comics’ ability to cross borders, Latin American creators have used the form to transgress the political, social, spatial, and cultural borders that shape the region. A groundbreaking and comprehensive study of twenty-first-century Latin American comics, Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century documents how these works move beyond national boundaries and explores new aspects of the form, its subjects, and its creators.

Latin American comics production is arguably more interconnected and more networked across national borders than ever before. Analyzing works from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, James Scorer organizes his study around forms of “transgression,” such as transnationalism, border crossings, transfeminisms, punk bodies, and encounters in the neoliberal city. Scorer examines the feminist comics collective Chicks on Comics; the DIY comics zine world; nonfiction and journalistic comics; contagion and zombie narratives; and more. Drawing from archives across the United States, Europe, and Latin America, Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century posits that these comics produce micronarratives of everyday life that speak to sites of social struggle shared across nation states.

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Latin American Documentary Filmmaking
Major Works
David William Foster
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Latin American Documentary Filmmaking is the first volume written in English to explore Latin American documentary filmmaking with extensive and intelligent analysis. David William Foster, the leading authority on Latin American urban cultural production, provides rich, new interpretations on the production of gender, political persecution, historical conflicts, and exclusion from the mainstream in many of Latin America’s most important documentary films.

Foster provides a series of detailed examinations of major texts of Latin American filmmaking, discussing their textual production and processes of meaning. His analysis delves deeply into the world of Latin American film and brings forth a discourse of structure that has previously been absent from the fields of filmmaking and Latin American studies. This volume provides perspective on diverse and methodological approaches, pulling from a wide scope of cinematic traditions. Using his own critical readings and research, Foster presents his findings in terms that are accessible to non-Spanish speakers and Latin American film enthusiasts.

A much-needed contribution to the field of Latin American documentary film, Foster’s research and perspective will be a valuable source for those interested in film studies, gender studies, and culture.
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The Latin American Ecocultural Reader
Edited by Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes
Northwestern University Press, 2021

The Latin American Ecocultural Reader is a comprehensive anthology of literary and cultural texts about the natural world. The selections, drawn from throughout the Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil, span from the early colonial period to the present. Editors Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes present work by canonical figures, including José Martí, Bartolomé de las Casas, Rubén Darío, and Alfonsina Storni, in the context of our current state of environmental crisis, prompting new interpretations of their celebrated writings. They also present contemporary work that illuminates the marginalized environmental cultures of women, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American populations. Each selection is introduced with a short essay on the author and the salience of their work; the selections are arranged into eight parts, each of which begins with an introductory essay that speaks to the political, economic, and environmental history of the time and provides interpretative cues for the selections that follow.

The editors also include a general introduction with a concise overview of the field of ecocriticism as it has developed since the 1990s. They argue that various strands of environmental thought—recognizable today as extractivism, eco-feminism, Amerindian ontologies, and so forth—can be traced back through the centuries to the earliest colonial period, when Europeans first described the Americas as an edenic “New World” and appropriated the bodies of enslaved Indians and Africans to exploit its natural bounty.

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Latin American Elections
Choice and Change
Richard Nadeau, Éric Bélanger, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Mathieu Turgeon, and François Gélineau
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The Michigan model, named after the institution where it was first articulated, has been used to explain voting behavior in North American and Western European democracies. In Latin American Elections, experts on Latin America join with experts on electoral studies to evaluate the model’s applicability in this region. Analyzing data from the AmericasBarometer, a scientific public opinion survey carried out in 18 Latin American nations from 2008 to 2012, the authors find that, like democratic voters elsewhere, Latin Americans respond to long-term forces, such as social class, political party ties, and political ideology while also paying attention to short-term issues, such as the economy, crime, corruption. Of course, Latin Americans differ from other Americans, and among themselves. Voters who have experienced left-wing populism may favor government curbs on freedom of expression, for example, while voters enduring high levels of economic deprivation or instability tend to vote against the party in power.
The authors thus conclude that, to a surprising extent, the Michigan model offers a powerful explanatory model for voting behavior in Latin America.

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Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference
Amaryll Chanady
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

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Latin American Literature at the Millennium
Local Lives, Global Spaces
Cecily Raynor
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces analyzes literary constructions of locality from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s. In this astute study, Raynor reads work by Roberto Bolaño, Valeria Luiselli, Luiz Ruffato, Bernardo Carvalho, João Gilberto Noll, and Wilson Bueno to reveal representations of the human experience that unsettle conventionally understood links between locality and geographical place. The book raises vital considerations for understanding the region’s transition into the twenty-first century, and for evaluating Latin American authors’ representations of everyday place and modes of belonging.
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Latin American Melodrama
Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment
Edited and with an Introduction by Darlene J. Sadlier
University of Illinois Press, 2008

Like their Hollywood counterparts, Latin American film and TV melodramas have always been popular and highly profitable. The first of its kind, this anthology engages in a serious study of the aesthetics and cultural implications of Latin American melodramas. Written by some of the major figures in Latin American film scholarship, the studies range across seventy years of movies and television within a transnational context, focusing specifically on the period known as the "Golden Age" of melodrama, the impact of classic melodrama on later forms, and more contemporary forms of melodrama. An introductory essay examines current critical and theoretical debates on melodrama and places the essays within the context of Latin American film and media scholarship.

Contributors are Luisela Alvaray, Mariana Baltar, Catherine L. Benamou, Marvin D’Lugo, Paula Félix-Didier, Andrés Levinson, Gilberto Perez, Darlene J. Sadlier, Cid Vasconcelos, and Ismail Xavier.

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest
Reinventing the New World
Kimberle S. López
University of Missouri Press, 2002
As the quincentenary of Columbus’s first voyage was approaching, Latin American authors vied to finish novels rewriting the conquest in order to have them published in the years surrounding 1992. Surprisingly, few of these novels attempted to reconstruct the indigenous perspective on this historical moment, focusing instead on representing the European conquerors. In Latin American Novels of the Conquest, Kimberle López focuses on five of these works: Juan José Saer’s El entenado; Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán; Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante; and Homero Aridjis’s 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. She utilizes these books to explore how their authors represented the conquest from the fictionalized perspective of the conquistador, ultimately deconstructing the rhetoric of empire through the representation of a simultaneous fascination and aversion between the colonizer and colonized.
The fictionalized explorers and conquistadors represented in this corpus all identify with certain aspects of Amerindian culture—significantly, those elements that are most distinct from European culture, such as cannibalism and human sacrifice—but also feel the need to distance themselves from these “others” in order to protect their own European cultural identity. In most cases, the conquistadors themselves are represented as outsiders within the enterprise of imperialism, due to ethnic, religious, or sexual differences from the norm. This representation turns the gaze inward toward the “other” within European culture, underscoring the complex origins of Latin American cultures in the violent encounter between the Amerindians and the conquistadors.
            By examining these issues, Lopéz’s Latin American Novels of the Conquest illuminates the ways in which Latin American novelists used their literary imaginations to embody their ambivalence regarding their own transcultural heritage as children of both the colonized and the colonizer.
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Latin American Politics
A Theoretical Approach
By Torcuato S. Di Tella
University of Texas Press, 2001

First published in English in 1990 as Latin American Politics: A Theoretical Framework, a translation of Torcuato S. Di Tella's original Sociología de los procesos políticos, this new edition also focuses on the prerequisites for democracy in any society and on the role of the popular classes in social change. Di Tella draws on the work of Montesquieu, Burke, Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim in formulating his explanatory theories. These theories are then tested against crucial events in Latin American history—from the rebellions of the eighteenth century to the caudillos of the nineteenth century and the militarism of the twentieth century.

This edition is more attuned to an English-speaking audience, with a new chapter addressing the historical process in Argentina from the 1930s to 2000. Latin American Politics is written in a style easily accessible to the general reader or student, while its emphasis on the growth of democracy in Latin America makes it particularly timely.

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Latin American Textualities
History, Materiality, and Digital Media
Edited by Heather J. Allen and Andrew R. Reynolds
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Textuality is the condition in which a text is created, edited, archived, published, disseminated, and consumed. “Texts,” therefore, encompass a broad variety of artifacts: traditional printed matter such as grammar books and newspaper articles; phonographs; graphic novels; ephemera such as fashion illustrations, catalogs, and postcards; and even virtual databases and cataloging systems.\

Latin American Textualities is a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look at textual history, textual artifacts, and digital textualities across Latin America from the colonial era to the present. Editors Heather J. Allen and Andrew R. Reynolds gather a wide range of scholars to investigate the region’s textual scholarship. Contributors offer engaging examples of not just artifacts but also the contexts in which the texts are used. Topics include Guamán Poma’s library, the effect of sound recordings on writing in Argentina, Sudamericana Publishing House’s contribution to the Latin American literary boom, and Argentine science fiction. Latin American Textualities provides new paths to reading Latin American history, culture, and literatures.

Contributors:

Heather J. Allen
Catalina Andrango-Walker
Sam Carter
Sara Castro-Klarén
Edward King
Rebecca Kosick
Silvia Kurlat Ares
Walther Maradiegue
Clayton McCarl
José Enrique Navarro
Andrew R. Reynolds
George Antony Thomas
Zac Zimmer
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The Latin American Voter
Pursuing Representation and Accountability in Challenging Contexts
Ryan E. Carlin, Matthew M. Singer, and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister
University of Michigan Press, 2015
In this volume, experts on Latin American public opinion and political behavior employ region-wide public opinion studies, elite surveys, experiments, and advanced statistical methods to reach several key conclusions about voting behavior in the region’s emerging democracies. In Latin America, to varying degrees the average voter grounds his or her decision in factors identified in classic models of voter choice. Individuals are motivated to go to the polls and select elected officials on the basis of class, religion, gender, ethnicity and other demographic factors; substantive political connections including partisanship, left-right stances, and policy preferences; and politician performance in areas like the economy, corruption, and crime.

Yet evidence from Latin America shows that the determinants of voter choice cannot be properly understood without reference to context—the substance (specific cleavages, campaigns, performance) and the structure (fragmentation and polarization) that characterize the political environment. Voting behavior reflects the relative youth and fluidity of the region’s party systems, as parties emerge and splinter to a far greater degree than in long-standing party systems.  Consequently, explanations of voter choice centered around country differences stand on equal footing to explanations focused on individual-level factors.
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Latin America's New Historical Novel
By Seymour Menton
University of Texas Press, 1993

Beginning with the 1979 publication of Alejo Carpentier's El arpa y la sombra, the New Historical Novel has become the dominant genre within Latin American fiction. In this at-times tongue-in-cheek postmodern study, Seymour Menton explores why the New Historical Novel has achieved such popularity and offers discerning readings of numerous works.

Menton argues persuasively that the proximity of the Columbus Quincentennial triggered the rise of the New Historical Novel. After defining the historical novel in general, he identifies the distinguishing features of the New Historical Novel.

Individual chapters delve deeply into such major works as Mario Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo, Abel Posse's Los perros del paraíso, Gabriel García Márquez's El general en su laberinto, and Carlos Fuentes' La campaña. A chapter on the Jewish Latin American novel focuses on several works that deserve greater recognition, such as Pedro Orgambide's Aventuras de Edmund Ziller en tierras del Nuevo Mundo, Moacyr Scliar's A estranha nação de Rafael Mendes, and Angelina Muñiz's Tierra adentro.

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Latino/a Biblical Hermeneutics
Problematics, Objectives, Strategies
Francisco Lozada Jr.
SBL Press, 2014

Engage essays that are profoundly theological and resolutely social

In this collection of essays, contributors seek to analyze the vision of the critical task espoused by Latino/a critics. The project explores how such critics approach their vocation as critics in the light of their identity as members of the Latino/a experience and reality. A variety of critics—representing a broad spectrum of the Latino/a American formation, along various axes of identity—address the question in whatever way they deem appropriate: What does it mean to be a Latino/a critic?

Features:

  • Essays from sixteen scholars
  • Articles bring together the fields of biblical studies and racial-ethnic studies
  • Conclusion addresses directions for future research
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Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word
Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala
Emil’ Keme
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Bringing to the fore the voices of Maya authors and what their poetry tells us about resistance, sovereignty, trauma, and regeneration 

In 1954, Guatemala suffered a coup d’etat, resulting in a decades-long civil war. During this period, Indigenous Mayans were subject to displacement, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing. Within the context of the armed conflict and the postwar period in Guatemala, K’iche’ Maya scholar Emil’ Keme identifies three historical phases of Indigenous Maya literary insurgency in which Maya authors use poetry to dignify their distinct cultural, political, gender, sexual, and linguistic identities.

Le Maya Q’atzij / Our Maya Word employs Indigenous and decolonial theoretical frameworks to critically analyze poetic works written by ten contemporary Maya writers from five different Maya nations in Iximulew/Guatemala. Similar to other Maya authors throughout colonial history, these authors and their poetry criticize, in their own creative ways, the continuing colonial assaults to their existence by the nation-state. Throughout, Keme displays the decolonial potentialities and shortcomings proposed by each Maya writer, establishing a new and productive way of understanding Maya living realities and their emancipatory challenges in Iximulew/Guatemala.

This innovative work shows how Indigenous Maya poetics carries out various processes of decolonization and, especially, how Maya literature offers diverse and heterogeneous perspectives about what it means to be Maya in the contemporary world.

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The Learned Ones
Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico
Kelly S. McDonough
University of Arizona Press, 2014
They were the healers, teachers, and writers, the “wise ones” of Nahuatl-speaking cultures in Mexico, remembered in painted codices and early colonial manuscripts of Mesoamerica as the guardians of knowledge. Yet they very often seem bound to an unrecoverable past, as stereotypes prevent some from linking the words “indigenous” and “intellectual” together.

Not so, according to author Kelly S. McDonough, at least not for native speakers of Nahuatl, one of the most widely spoken and best-documented indigenous languages of the Americas. This book focuses on how Nahuas have been deeply engaged with the written word ever since the introduction of the Roman alphabet in the early sixteenth century. Dipping into distinct time periods of the past five hundred years, this broad perspective allows McDonough to show the heterogeneity of Nahua knowledge and writing as Nahuas took up the pen as agents of their own discourses and agendas.

McDonough worked collaboratively with contemporary Nahua researchers and students, reconnecting the theorization of a population with the population itself. The Learned Ones describes the experience of reading historic text with native speakers today, some encountering Nahua intellectuals and their writing for the very first time. It intertwines the written word with oral traditions and embodied knowledge, aiming to retie the strand of alphabetic writing to the dynamic trajectory of Nahua intellectual work.
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Learning from Madness
Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art
Kaira M. Cabañas
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Throughout the history of European modernism, philosophers and artists have been fascinated by madness. Something different happened in Brazil, however, with the “art of the insane” that flourished within the modernist movements there. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the direction and creation of art by the mentally ill was actively encouraged by prominent figures in both medicine and art criticism, which led to a much wider appreciation among the curators of major institutions of modern art in Brazil, where pieces are included in important exhibitions and collections.
   
Kaira M. Cabañas shows that at the center of this advocacy stood such significant proponents as psychiatrists Osório César and Nise da Silveira, who championed treatments that included painting and drawing studios; and the art critic Mário Pedrosa, who penned Gestaltist theses on aesthetic response. Cabañas examines the lasting influence of this unique era of Brazilian modernism, and how the afterlife of this “outsider art” continues to raise important questions. How do we respect the experiences of the mad as their work is viewed through the lens of global art? Why is this art reappearing now that definitions of global contemporary art are being contested?

Learning from Madness offers an invigorating series of case studies that track the parallels between psychiatric patients’ work in Western Europe and its reception by influential artists there, to an analogous but altogether distinct situation in Brazil.
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Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque
Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation
Edited by Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills
University of Texas Press, 2014

Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the period designated as the Baroque—new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities—a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another.

Featuring the most creative thinking by the foremost scholars across a number of disciplines, the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque is a uniquely wide-ranging and sustained exploration of the profound cultural transfers and transformations that define the transatlantic Spanish world in the Baroque era. Pairs of authors—one treating the peninsular Spanish kingdoms, the other those of the Americas—provocatively investigate over forty key concepts, ranging from material objects to metaphysical notions. Illuminating difference as much as complementarity, departure as much as continuity, the book captures a dynamic universe of meanings in the various midst of its own re-creations. The Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque joins leading work in a number of intersecting fields and will fire new research—it is the indispensible starting point for all serious scholars of the early modern Spanish world.

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LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua
Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements
Karen Kampwirth
University of Arizona Press, 2022
The modern political tumult of Nicaragua includes revolution, dictatorship, and social movements. LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua explores the untold stories of the LGBTQ community of Nicaragua and its role in the recent political history of the country.

Karen Kampwirth is a renowned scholar of the Nicaraguan Revolution, who has been writing at the intersection of gender and politics for decades. In this chronological telling of the last fifty years of political history in Nicaragua, Kampwirth deploys a critical new lens: understanding politics from the perspective of the country’s LGBTQ community. Kampwirth details the gay and lesbian guerrillas in the 1960s and 1970s, Nicaragua’s first openly gay television wizard in the 1980s, and the attempts by LGBTQ revolutionaries to create a civil rights movement and the subsequent squashing of that movement by the ruling Sandinista party. She analyzes the shifting political alliances, the rise of strong feminist and LGBTQ movements in Nicaragua, and the attempts by the administration of Daniel Ortega to co-opt and control these movements.

Ultimately, this is a story of struggle and defeat, progress and joy. This timely book provides a well-documented review of LGBTQ politics in modern Nicaragua, helping us to see the Sandinista Revolution and its ongoing aftermath in a new light.
 
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The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
The Stoke Newington Edition
Daniel Defoe
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Robinson Crusoe, an adventure tale that fascinated such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, and J. M. Coetzee, has been an international best-seller for three hundred years. An adventure tale involving cannibals, pirates, and shipwrecks, it embodies economic, social, political, and philosophical themes that continue to be relevant today. Moreover, the notion of isolation on a deserted island and a fascination with survival continue to be central to countless popular cinema and television programs. This edition of the novel with its introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes provides a uniquely scholarly presentation of the novel. There has been no other edition like it.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Life Assignment
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
Four Way Books, 2020
The speaker of the poems in The Life Assignment is reviewing his history. As if sorting through a box of photographs, the speaker sorts through relationships, trying to discern what was healthy from what was exploitative. Concepts of love are turned over and over in these poems: romantic love, love of family, love of country, self-love (or lack thereof). Often the speaker finds that what at first appeared to be caring, was insincere all along. When tenderness is in short supply, how can one protect himself? How can one find home? In his debut collection, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado bends poems through bilingual lyrics that present spartan observation as evidence for its exacting verdict: “We never leave when life is elsewhere. The clemency of men disappears / as does the light, tarring the roofs.” An electric debut collection.
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The Light of Desire
La Luz del Deseo
Marjorie Agosín
Swan Isle Press, 2009

Marjorie Agosín’s intensely personal long poem The Light of Desire is both a secular and sacred meditation on love and its meanings in the land of Israel. Following the tradition of the Song of Songs and the secular poetry of Sepharad, the beloved in The Light of Desire is both physical and metaphorical. The lovers’ bodies are the paths, the geography, leading not only from desire to sensual pleasure, but to memory and illumination. The light on the pink stones of Jerusalem, the sunlight of Galilee, from hills to the sea, the fragrant air and “mantle of stars,” all become one in this tender, rhapsodic expression of longing and desire. This is not unrequited love, but rather a reciprocal passion that brings exquisite pleasure, pain, a sense of fragility, and the hope and belief in that which is eternal.

The poem was written over a four-year span in Jerusalem’s Mishkenot Sha’ananim neighborhood, overlooking the wall of the Second Temple, and these hallowed surroundings imbued Agosín’s poetic voice. Lori Marie Carlson’s sensitive translation maintains the spirit of the original Spanish in this bilingual edition.

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Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Other Poems
Aime Cesaire
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Annette Smith and Dominic Thomas’s new translations of Aimé Césaire’s Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Solar Throat Slashed (poems deleted) expose to a new audience a pivotal figure in twentieth-century French literature. This collection presents the early and last stages of a po­et’s course, encapsulating in one volume Césaire’s entire literary career and creative evolution as perhaps the only French poet writing simultaneously at the crossroads of the avant-garde and classical movements. 

This volume’s inclusion of previously deleted poems from Solar Throat Slashed is politically important; despite their initial exclusion from a French republication of Soleil Cou Coupé in 1961, these thirty-one poems are crucial to understanding Césaire’s legacy and remain of tremendous pertinence today as they provide helpful ways of thinking about and contextualizing discussions on race, identity, global identities, and the links between “black conscious­ness” and “social consciousness.”

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The Limits of Identity
Politics and Poetics in Latin America
By Charles Hatfield
University of Texas Press, 2015

The Limits of Identity is a polemical critique of the repudiation of universalism and the theoretical commitment to identity and difference embedded in Latin American literary and cultural studies. Through original readings of foundational Latin American thinkers (such as José Martí and José Enrique Rodó) and contemporary theorists (such as John Beverley and Doris Sommer), Charles Hatfield reveals and challenges the anti-universalism that informs seemingly disparate theoretical projects.

The Limits of Identity offers a critical reexamination of widely held conceptions of culture, ideology, interpretation, and history. The repudiation of universalism, Hatfield argues, creates a set of problems that are both theoretical and political. Even though the recognition of identity and difference is normally thought to be a form of resistance, The Limits of Identity claims that, in fact, the opposite is true.

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Literary Bondage
Slavery in Cuban Narrative
By William Luis
University of Texas Press, 1990

In the nineteenth century, the Cuban economy rested on the twin pillars of sugar and slaves. Slavery was abolished in 1886, but, one hundred years later, Cuban authors were still writing antislavery narratives. William Luis explores this seeming paradox in his groundbreaking study Literary Bondage, asking why this literary genre has remained a viable means of expression.

Applying Foucault's theory of counter-discourse to a vast body of antislavery literature, Luis shows how these narratives have always served to undermine the foundations of slavery, to protest the marginalized status of blacks in Cuban society, and to rewrite the canon of "acceptable" history and literature. He finds that emancipation did not end the need for such counter-discourse and reveals how the antislavery narrative continues to provide a forum for voices that have been silenced by the dominant culture.

In addition to such well-known works as Cecilia Valdés, The Kingdom of This World, and The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, Luis draws on many literary works outside the familiar canon, including Romualdo, uno de tantos, Aponte, SofíaLa familia Unzúazu, El negrero, and Los guerrilleros negros. This comprehensive coverage raises important questions about the process of canon-formation and brings to light Cuba's rich heritage of Afro-Latin literature and culture.

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Literature and Liminality
Festive Readings in the Hispanic Tradition
Gustavo Pérez Firmat
Duke University Press, 1986
Recent literary studies and related disciplines have given much attention to phenomena that seem to occupy more or less permanently eccentric positions in our experience.
Gustavo Perez Firmat examines three of these marginal or liminal phenomena—paying particular attention to the distinction between "center" and "periphery"—as they appear in Hispanic literature. Carnival (the traditional festival in which normal behavior is overturned), choteo (an insulting form of humor), and disease are three liminal entities discussed. Less an attempt to frame a general theory of such "liminalities" than an effort to demonstrate the interpretive power of the liminality concept, this work challenges conventional boundaries of critical sense and offers new insights into a variety of questions, among them the notion of convertability in psychoanalysis and the relation of New World culture to its European forebears.
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Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions
By John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman
University of Texas Press, 1990

“This book began in what seemed like a counterfactual intuition . . . that what had been happening in Nicaraguan poetry was essential to the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution,” write John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman. “In our own postmodern North American culture, we are long past thinking of literature as mattering much at all in the ‘real’ world, so how could this be?” This study sets out to answer that question by showing how literature has been an agent of the revolutionary process in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

The book begins by discussing theory about the relationship between literature, ideology, and politics, and charts the development of a regional system of political poetry beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in late twentieth-century writers. In this context, Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, Roque Dalton of El Salvador, and Otto René Castillo of Guatemala are among the poets who receive detailed attention.

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Literature and Resistance in Guatemala
Textual Modes and Cultural Politics from El Señor Presidente to Rigoberta Menchú
Marc Zimmerman
Ohio University Press, 1994
What circumstances lead writers in a poor, multi-ethnic and largely illiterate country to produce a literature that both expresses and affects opposition to the regime? Who are these writers? This study examines these and other questions about the literature of resistance in Guatemala, from the days of Estrada Cabrera up to the events of May and June of 1993. Zimmerman provides the cultural context for the various modes of literary production and analysis, and identifies the currents of opposition in the nation’s fiction, poetry, and testimonial writing. He details the cultural politics involving Guatemalan writers and their organizations during their years of Cerezo and Serrano-Elías, paying particular attention to the role of women and indigenous groups, Rigoberta Menchú among them. These two volumes are companion texts to Guatemala: Voices from the Silence, an “epic-collage” of writings compiled by Zimmerman and Raúl Rojas.
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Literature and Subjection
The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America
Horacio Legras
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008
Through theoretical, philosophical, cultural, political, and historical analysis, Horacio Legras views the myriad factors that have both formed and stifled the integration of peripheral experiences into Latin American literature. Despite these barriers, Legras reveals a handful of contemporary authors who have attempted in earnest to present marginalized voices to the Western world. His deep and insightful analysis of key works by novelists Juan José Saer (The Witness), Nellie Campobello (Cartucho), Roa Bastos (Son of Man), and Jose María Arguedas (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below), among others, provides a theoretical basis for understanding the plight of the author, the peripheral voice and the confines of the literary medium. What emerges is an intricate discussion of the clash and subjugation of cultures and the tragedy of a lost worldview.
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Literature, Law, and Rhetorical Performance in the Anticolonial Atlantic
Anne W Gulick
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
The era of national liberation and decolonization may have come and gone, but postcolonialism remains a largely elusive ideal in the early twenty-first century. In Literature, Law, and Rhetorical Performance in the Anticolonial Atlantic, Anne W. Gulick uncovers a dynamic literary history of African and Caribbean critical engagements with First World law. This transatlantic archive attests to the continuing vitality of anticolonialism as a model for intellectual inquiry and political performance. Gulick argues that experimentation with declarative forms is a vital rhetorical strategy in the anticolonial Atlantic—one through which writers have asked: Who gets to “write” the law, and under what circumstances?
 
Responses to this question take shape across the black Atlantic from Haiti to South Africa, in texts ranging from Haiti’s Declaration of Independence and work by C. L. R. James to South Africa’s Freedom Charter, Aimé Césaire’s poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat. These texts constitute a robust transatlantic tradition of challenging colonial and imperial authority through rhetorical performance. Drawing on the cosmopolitan aspirations and emancipatory energies of the political declaration, this tradition aims to radically reinvent the possibilities for law and political belonging in the postcolonial future.
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Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District
Manlio Argueta
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District is Manlio Argueta's most popular novel in El Salvador, translated into English for the first time by Edward Waters Hood. A kaleidoscopic tale of political romance, the story revolves around the relationship of two young lovers in a time of social upheaval, evoking characters and themes from the classic fairy tale within the wartime environment of El Salvador and its capital, San Salvador.
 
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The Logic of Disorder
The Art and Writing of Abraham Cruzvillegas
Robin Adele Greeley
Harvard University Press

The Logic of Disorder presents for the first time to the English-speaking world the writings of seminal Mexican contemporary artist Abraham Cruzvillegas. Renowned for his sculptures and drawings, Cruzvillegas’s artistic practice ranges from pedagogy to performance. It is through his writings, however, that we can best recognize the impressive depth of knowledge and theoretic clarity of an artist whose work never ceases to impress audiences across the globe.

Each of the texts included in this volume is fully annotated and is accompanied by a number of critical studies by leading curators and scholars, including Claudio Lomnitz of Columbia University and Mark Godfrey from Tate Modern.

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Looking North
Writings from Spanish America on the US, 1800 to the Present
Edited by John J. Hassett and Braulio Muñoz
University of Arizona Press, 2012

Given recent changes in politics and demographics, Latin America and the United States are becoming increasingly important to one another. Recognition of the two regions' differences and similarities may facilitate a more fruitful relationship, with increased respect and understanding. 

It is with this in mind that editors John J. Hassett and Braulio Muñoz present a collection of writings that provides a look into the ways in which Spanish America has viewed its northern neighbor over the past two centuries. Gathered here are pieces by well-known figures from the worlds of Spanish American politics, history, philosophy, creative writing, and culture—names like Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda.

Divided into three sections, Looking North begins by underscoring the cultural and political differences between the two Americas. It opens with a speech by Simón Bolívar to the Venezuelan Congress in 1819 and closes with an essay by Mario Vargas Llosa from 2006 on the controversial wall being constructed between the United States and Mexico. The second section explores the experiences of Spanish American travelers in the US, beginning with an account of former Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento's fascination with the United States during his travels in 1847 and ending with a 2008 essay by Vargas Llosa on the city of New York. The final section encompasses creative writing and commentaries by some of Spanish America's most gifted poets and novelists. It opens with Rubén Darío's "To Roosevelt" from 1905 and ends with Christine Granados's humorous and profound short story "Inner View," first published in 2006.

Touching on history, sociology, politics, and religion, the writings assembled here will be of interest to humanists, social scientists, and anyone intrigued by the ever-growing connection between the United Sates and Spanish America at all levels.
 


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Los Zetas Inc.
Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico
By Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera
University of Texas Press, 2017

The rapid growth of organized crime in Mexico and the government’s response to it have driven an unprecedented rise in violence and impelled major structural economic changes, including the recent passage of energy reform. Los Zetas Inc. asserts that these phenomena are a direct and intended result of the emergence of the brutal Zetas criminal organization in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. Going beyond previous studies of the group as a drug trafficking organization, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera builds a convincing case that the Zetas and similar organizations effectively constitute transnational corporations with business practices that include the trafficking of crude oil, natural gas, and gasoline; migrant and weapons smuggling; kidnapping for ransom; and video and music piracy.

Combining vivid interview commentary with in-depth analysis of organized crime as a transnational and corporate phenomenon, Los Zetas Inc. proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the emerging face, new structure, and economic implications of organized crime in Mexico. Correa-Cabrera delineates the Zetas establishment, structure, and forms of operation, along with the reactions to this new model of criminality by the state and other lawbreaking, foreign, and corporate actors. Since the Zetas share some characteristics with legal transnational businesses that operate in the energy and private security industries, she also compares this criminal corporation with ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Blackwater (renamed “Academi” and now a Constellis company). Asserting that the elevated level of violence between the Zetas and the Mexican state resembles a civil war, Correa-Cabrera identifies the beneficiaries of this war, including arms-producing companies, the international banking system, the US border economy, the US border security/military-industrial complex, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.

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Lotería
Nocturnal Sweepstakes
Elizabeth Torres
University of Arizona Press, 2023
The vision begins with a river. From this river, you can see a village, marine life, and ancestral rituals. It is here that you recognize origins, and a poison beginning to spread through paradise. Suddenly, a premonition: a wounded animal. The certainty of war cries. What you take with you is what you become, each movement a gamble, a lottery of life that transforms you until this moment, when uncertainty becomes an ally.

Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes is a collection of deeply evocative coming-of-age poems that take the reader on a voyage through the intimate experiences of displacement. Conjuring dreamlike visions of extravagant fruits and rivers animated by the power of divination, these poems follow the speaker from the lash of war’s arrival through an urgent escape and reinvention in a land that saves with maternal instinct but also smothers its children.

In this bilingual collection, Colombian American poet Elizabeth Torres threads together the stories of family dynamics and the realities of migration with the archetypes of tarot and the traditional Lotería game, used for centuries as an object of divination and entertainment. Through these themes and images, the poems in Lotería narrate intimate moments in the lives and journeys of migrants, refugees, and all who have been forced into metamorphosis in order to reach the other side of the river.
 
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Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel
By Aníbal González
University of Texas Press, 2010

The Latin American Literary Boom was marked by complex novels steeped in magical realism and questions of nationalism, often with themes of surreal violence. In recent years, however, those revolutionary projects of the sixties and seventies have given way to quite a different narrative vision and ideology. Dubbed the new sentimentalism, this trend is now keenly elucidated in Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel.

Offering a rich account of the rise of this new mode, as well as its political and cultural implications, Aníbal González delivers a close reading of novels by Miguel Barnet, Elena Poniatowska, Isabel Allende, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Gabriel García Márquez, Antonio Skármeta, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and others. González proposes that new sentimental novels are inspired principally by a desire to heal the division, rancor, and fear produced by decades of social and political upheaval. Valuing pop culture above the avant-garde, such works also tend to celebrate agape—the love of one's neighbor—while denouncing the negative effects of passion (eros). Illuminating these and other aspects of post-Boom prose, Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel takes a fresh look at contemporary works.

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A Luis Leal Reader
Luis Leal
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Since his first publication in 1942, Luis Leal has likely done more than any other writer or scholar to foster a critical appreciation of Mexican, Chicano, and Latin American literature and culture. This volume, bringing together a representative selection of Leal’s writings from the past sixty years, is at once a wide-ranging introduction to the most influential scholar of Latino literature and a critical history of the field as it emerged and developed through the twentieth century.

Instrumental in establishing Mexican literary studies in the United States, Leal’s writings on the topic are especially instructive, ranging from essays on the significance of symbolism, culture, and history in early Chicano literature to studies of the more recent use of magical realism and of individual New Mexican, Tejano, and Mexican authors such as Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, José Montoya, and Mariano Azuela. Clearly and cogently written, these writings bring to bear an encyclopedic knowledge, a deep understanding of history and politics, and an unparalleled command of the aesthetics of storytelling, from folklore to theory. This collection affords readers the opportunity to consider—or reconsider—Latino literature under the deft guidance of its greatest reader.
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