Winner of the 2024 ACLA Harry Levin Prize 

A bold comparative study illustrating the creative potential of translations that embrace mutuality and resist assimilation

Cannibal translators digest, recombine, transform, and trouble their source materials. Isabel C. Gómez makes the case for this model of literary production by excavating a network of translation projects in Latin America that includes canonical writers of the twentieth century, such as Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Rosario Castellanos, Clarice Lispector, José Emilio Pacheco, Octavio Paz, and Ángel Rama. Building on the avant-garde reclaiming of cannibalism as an Indigenous practice meant to honorably incorporate the other into the self, these authors took up Brazilian theories of translation in Spanish to fashion a distinctly Latin American literary exchange, one that rejected normative and Anglocentric approaches to translation and developed collaborative techniques to bring about a new understanding of world literature. 

By shedding new light on the political and aesthetic pathways of translation movements beyond the Global North, Gómez offers an alternative conception of the theoretical and ethical challenges posed by this artistic practice. Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America mobilizes a capacious archive of personal letters, publishers’ records, newspapers, and new media to illuminate inventive strategies of collectivity and process, such as untranslation, transcreation, intersectional autobiographical translation, and transpeaking. The book invites readers to find fresh meaning in other translational histories and question the practices that mediate literary circulation.

A study of liberationist Christianity in Latin America, offering new insights for discussing liberation theology.

This highly interdisciplinary collection brings together diverse and complementary approaches from history, theology, cultural studies, architecture, sociology, and anthropology to reevaluate the legacy of liberation theology in Latin America.

Liberation theology was born in the 1960s at a time of Church renewal and socio-economic ferment, as many sought more radical solutions in the context of the exhaustion of developmentalist projects and the institutionalized violence of capitalism. The book’s central focus on the lived experiences and embodied practices of those engaged in social action in the region challenges the narrative that suggests that liberation theology had reached its decline by the end of the 1970s. It demonstrates that liberationist Christianity was at once more diverse and internally conflicted, more widely resonant outside ecclesial confines, and more interconnected over time than often allowed.

The chapters investigate a range of topics: the ecclesiology of a revolutionary movement of Argentine priests in the 1960s and ́1970s, the engagement of liberation theology with Participatory Action Research and its influence on architectural approaches and urbanism, 1980s feminist liberation theology, encounters with Western human rights at a time of Cold War repression and exile, and ecofeminist political theology in contemporary Latin America. Pulling these threads together, Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America invites us to reconsider how we understand liberation theology’s history as well as its reach into the present day.