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If language and culture are intimately connected, then cultures involving people who speak more than one language must have special characteristics, as well as particular social issues to negotiate. What are the challenges faced by a people with two or more languages as their heritage? How does that multiple heritage affect cultural forms, including literature and the arts? How does linguistic difference influence the conceptualization and writing of history? And if the meeting of languages within a people has involved contestation and power, how are those conflicts negotiated? 

This volume uses the tools of critical theory to explore such questions with respect to the complex, multilingual history of Ireland. Avoiding the simplistic polarized oppositions popular with cultural nationalists, the contributors examine the nexus of language, tradition, and authority in Ireland that has created such a rich, multivalent culture. 

Although the linguistic interface of Irish and English has dominated cultural negotiations in Ireland over the last five hundred years, the island has an even longer history of linguistic and cultural exchange. Arguing that tradition is never static, the essays in this volume challenge the concept of a monolithic cultural origin, while insisting on the importance of inherited discourses in the continuity of culture through time and across linguistic difference. The chapters cover a broad range of topics from early Irish narratives and Latin hagiography to literary works by such writers as Yeats, Joyce, Friel, Montague, and McGahern, as well as other cultural forms, including traditional Irish music. Several chapters address issues of politics and power, from the role of interpreters in the relations between linguistic communities in Ireland to the politicization of language in Northern Ireland since the 1980s. Taken together, the essays illuminate scholarly domains as varied as postcolonial theory, the relationship between language and nation, the nature of tradition, and Irish literature of all periods.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Michael Cronin, Joanne Findon, Helen Fulton, Declan Kiberd, Jeremy Lowe, Gordon McCoy and Camille O'Reilly, Catherine McKenna, Cóilín Owens, Thomas Dillon Redshaw, and Sally K. Sommers Smith.

Latin America and the Transports of Opera studies a series of episodes in the historical and textual convergence of a hallowed art form and a part of the world often regarded as peripheral. Perhaps unexpectedly, the archives of opera generate new arguments about several issues at the heart of the established discussion about Latin America: the allure of European cultural models; the ambivalence of exoticism; the claims of nationalism and cosmopolitanism; and, ultimately, the place of the region in the global circulation of the arts. Opera’s transports concern literal and imagined journeys as well as the emotions that its stories and sounds trigger as they travel back and forth between Europe—the United States, too—and Latin America.

Focusing mostly on librettos and other literary forms, this book analyzes Calderón de la Barca’s baroque play on the myth of Venus and Adonis, set to music by a Spanish composer at Lima’s viceregal court; Alejo Carpentier’s neobaroque novella on Vivaldi’s opera about Moctezuma; the entanglements of opera with class, gender, and ethnicity throughout Cuban history; music dramas about enslaved persons by Carlos Gomes and Hans Werner Henze, staged in Rio de Janeiro and Copenhagen; the uses of Latin American poetry and magical realism in works by John Adams and Daniel Catán; and a novel by Manuel Mujica Lainez set in Buenos Aires’s Teatro Colón, plus a chamber opera about Victoria Ocampo with a libretto by Beatriz Sarlo. Close readings of these texts underscore the import and meanings of opera in Latin American cultural history.

This book is the recipient of the 2024 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.

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.