Offers a new model for interpreting popular national culture through Uruguay's carnival theater troupes. The murgas are troupes of performers, musicians, writers, and creators who, during Montevideo's Carnival, perform on the tablados, temporary stages built in the neighborhoods of Uruguay's capital city each year. Throughout the period of Uruguay's subjection to a brutal dictatorship and in the following era of "democratization," the murgas, envisioned originally as popular theater, were transformed into a symbol of social resistance, celebrated by many and perceived by others as menacing and subversive. Focusing on the cultural practices of the lower classes and more specifically on the processes and productions of the murgas, Gustavo Remedi's Carnival Theater is a deeply thoughtful consideration of Uruguayan society's identity crisis and subsequent redefinition in the wake of the authoritarian-bureaucratic-technocratic regimes of the 1970s. A revealing work of cultural criticism, the book proposes a new set of criteria for the interpretation and critique of national culture. Gustavo Remedi is associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Trinity College. Amy Ferlazzo teaches at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. The idea that "all men are created equal" is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire--one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations. Kazanjian traces tensions between universal equality and racial or national particularity through theoretically informed critical readings of a wide range of texts: the political writings of David Walker and Maria Stewart, the narratives of black mariners, economic treatises, the personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown's fiction, congressional tariff debates, international treaties, and popular novelettes about the U.S.-Mexico War and the Yucatán's Caste War. Kazanjian shows how emergent racial and national formations do not contradict universalist egalitarianism; rather, they rearticulate it, making equality at once restricted, formal, abstract, and materially embodied. David Kazanjian is associate professor of English, Queens College, and visiting associate professor of English, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.