BiblioVault - Books about Page, Joanna

Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema

Joanna Page

Duke University Press, 2009

There has been a significant surge in recent Argentine cinema, with an explosion in the number of films made in the country since the mid-1990s. Many of these productions have been highly acclaimed by critics in Argentina and elsewhere. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is its coinciding with a period of severe economic crisis and civil unrest in the nation. Offering the first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, Joanna Page explains how these productions have registered Argentina’s experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, and economic crisis. In different ways, the films selected for discussion testify to the social consequences of growing unemployment, rising crime, marginalization, and the expansion of the informal economy.

Page focuses particularly on films associated with New Argentine Cinema, but she also discusses highly experimental films and genre movies that borrow from the conventions of crime thrillers, Westerns, and film noir. She analyzes films that have received wide international recognition alongside others that have rarely been shown outside Argentina. What unites all the films she examines is their attention to shifts in subjectivity provoked by political or economic conditions and events. Page emphasizes the paradoxes arising from the circulation of Argentine films within the same global economy they so often critique, and she argues that while Argentine cinema has been intent on narrating the collapse of the nation-state, it has also contributed to the nation’s reconstruction. She brings the films into dialogue with a broader range of issues in contemporary film criticism, including the role of national and transnational film studies, theories of subjectivity and spectatorship, and the relationship between private and public spheres.

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Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

Joanna Page

University College London, 2021

An assembly of a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists.

Projects that bring the sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few have focused on regions beyond the Global North. This book assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens. Page shows how these artworks also “decolonize” science by resisting the exploitation of the natural world that has attended the creation of knowledge in western contexts. Instead, the artists featured in this volume emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. Establishing critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, this book interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas.

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Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America

Edward King and Joanna Page

University College London, 2017

Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Drawing on a range of sophisticated work, these graphic novels experiment with questions of the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and new forms of ethics in the post-human world. As the first book-length study of the topic, this book argues that the graphic novel’s emergence in Latin America acts as a uniquely powerful force exploring the nature of twenty-first-century subjectivity, emphasizing the ways that humans are bound to their non-human environment.

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Science Fiction in Argentina

Technologies of the Text in a Material Multiverse

Joanna Page

University of Michigan Press, 2016

It has become something of a critical commonplace to claim that science fiction does not actually exist in Argentina. This book puts that claim to rest by identifying and analyzing a rich body of work that fits squarely in the genre. Joanna Page explores a range of texts stretching from 1875 to the present day and across a variety of media-literature, cinema, theatre, and comics-and studies the particular inflection many common discourses of science fiction (e.g., abuse of technology by authoritarian regimes, apocalyptic visions of environmental catastrophe) receive in the Argentine context. A central aim is to historicize these texts, showing how they register and rework the contexts of their production, particularly the hallmarks of modernity as a social and cultural force in Argentina. Another aim, held in tension with the first, is to respond to an important critique of historicism that unfolds in these texts. They frequently unpick the chronology of modernity, challenging the linear, universalizing models of development that underpin historicist accounts. They therefore demand a more nuanced set of readings that work to supplement, revise, and enrich the historicist perspective.

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