BiblioVault - Books about Rodriguez, Ileana

Liberalism at Its Limits

Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text

Ileana Rodriguez

University of Pittsburgh Press

In Liberalism at Its Limits, Ileana Rodríguez considers several Latin American nations that govern under the name of liberalism yet display a shocking range of nondemocratic features. In her political, cultural, and philosophical analysis, she examines these environments in which liberalism seems to have reached its limits, as the universalizing project gives way to rampant nonstate violence, gross inequality, and neocolonialism.
Focusing on Guatemala, Colombia, and Mexico, Rodríguez shows how standard liberal models fail to account for new forms of violence and exploitation, which in fact follow from specific clashes between liberal ideology and local practice. Looking at these tensions within the ostensibly well-ordered state, Rodríguez exposes how the misunderstanding and misuse of liberal principles are behind realities of political turmoil, and questions whether liberalism is in fact an ideology sufficient to empower populations and transition nation-states into democratic roles in the global order.
In this way, Liberalism at Its Limits offers a critical examination of the forced fitting of liberal models to Latin American nations and reasserts cross-cultural communication as crucial to grasping the true link between varying systems of value and politics.

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Transatlantic Topographies

Islands, Highlands, Jungles

Ileana Rodriguez

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Explores the construction of the Americas by and through European eyes

Transatlantic Topographies was first published in 2004. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Transatlantic Topographies studies the representation of American space during the initial confrontation between Europeans and Amerindians and during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Starting from topographical descriptions of land, islands, highlands, and jungles, Ileana Rodríguez shows how existing systems of knowledge broke down with the discovery of the Americas and had to be reinvented through the interpretation of signs, the accumulation of evidence, material exchange, and, finally, through the learning, teaching, and “kidnapping” of language. Proceeding from the period of exploration to the modern creation of a “twentieth-century frontier,” Rodríguez charts the path that led from island paradise to jungle chaos, from representations of natural beauty to the racialization of the islands. Drawing attention to cross-cultural miscommunication and the riddles of meaning and message it produces, Transatlantic Topographies develops a highly nuanced understanding of the evolving forces of imperialism as they gave way to postcolonialism and then to transnationalism—and newly re-inscribed notions of imperial economic practices.

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Women, Guerrillas, and Love

Understanding War in Central America

Ileana RodriguezTranslated by Ileana Rodriguez and Robert Carr

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Women, Guerrillas, and Love was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

How can literature show us what went awry in the process of liberation, and in the construction of a different, better world? Ileana Rodriguez pursues this question through a reading of "politically committed" literature—texts produced within the context of Latin American guerrilla movements. Che Guevara's diary, testimonios by Omar Cabezas and Tomás Borge, novels and short stories by Sergio Ramírez and Arturo Arias: These are among the works Rodriguez examines.

Rodriguez seeks to pinpoint the relationship between the collective and woman, and between woman and the nation-state. Women, Guerrillas, and Love challenges current assumptions about the relationship of gender and sexuality to writing and state building during revolutionary moments. Employing several theoretical paradigms—Marxism, feminism, deconstruction—these readings take into account the "implosion" of socialist or socialist-like societies responding to the expansion of positivistic cultures. The book participates in the debate over the subjugation of insolvent nationstates to the mandates of the market, and the consequent substitution of economic master narratives for historical ones.

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