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A leading figure in cultural studies worldwide, Néstor García Canclini is a Latin American thinker who has consistently sought to understand the impact of globalization on the relations between Latin America, Europe, and the United States, and among Latin American countries. In this book, newly available in English, he considers how globalization is imagined by artists, academics, migrants, and entrepreneurs, all of whom traverse boundaries and, at times, engage in conflicted or negotiated multicultural interactions.

García Canclini contrasts the imaginaries of previous migrants to the Americas with those who live in transnational circuits today. He integrates metaphor and narrative, working through philosophical, anthropological, and socioeconomically grounded interpretations of art, literature, crafts, media, and other forms of expression toward his conclusion that globalization is, in important ways, a collection of heterogeneous narratives. García Canclini advocates global imaginaries that generate new strategies for dealing with contingency and produce new forms of citizenship oriented toward multiple social configurations rather than homogenization. This edition of Imagined Globalization includes a significant new introduction by George Yúdice and an interview in which the cultural theorist Toby Miller and García Canclini touch on events including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.

Twice the winner of the Brazilian national book award, Silviano Santiago caused a sensation in 1985 with the publication of Stella Manhattan, a story of sexual scandal and political intrigue. Set in the Brazilian exile community in New York City in the late 1960s, this noir novel is an electrifying adventure story of a young gay Brazilian man trying to make a go of it in New York.
After being forced from his native country by an unforgiving father who embodies the authoritarian temper of the Brazilian dictatorship and is embarrassed by his son’s homosexuality and transvestism, Stella Manhattan, alter ego of Eduardo da Costa e Silva, lands a job in the Brazilian consulate with the help of his father’s friend, Colonel Valdevinos Vianna. Eduardo is also recruited by Vianna to help him bring his own alter ego, the sadomasochist Black Widow, out of the closet. Transformed by black leather, the Black Widow cruises the streets and bars of New York in search of American flesh. Surrounding the relationship between these two men is a group of Brazilian guerrillas who attempt to press Eduardo into their service in order to entrap the colonel. The guerrillas are at the center of a network of revolutionaries, from the Cubans to the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. Virtually apolitical, Eduardo/Stella is drawn by desire into the conflict between the Brazilian government and its communist opposition.
Eduardo also gets caught in the designs of other memorable characters of various sexual and political persuasions: the reactionary professor Aníbal, confined to a wheelchair, who enjoys watching his wife Leila make love with men she picks up on the street; and Paco, alias La Cucaracha, a flamboyant queen, a rabid anti-Castro Cuban exile, and the most sympathetic of this gallery of outcasts.
Working through two complex themes—politics and sex—Santiago sets the action in New York to emphasize the interaction of the seemingly contradictory impulses of liberation and Americanization that Brazil underwent in the late 1960s. As in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, political and sexual liberation cut two ways—neither one necessarily compatible with the other. Exploring the complexities of repression that affect all forms of identity, Santiago mingles tragedy and farce as international intrigues are played out in New York’s Latino and black neighborhoods, and the genteel world of international diplomacy is thrust into the milieu of urban gay street life.

The Expediency of Culture is a pioneering theorization of the changing role of culture in an increasingly globalized world. George Yúdice explores critically how groups ranging from indigenous activists to nation-states to nongovernmental organizations have all come to see culture as a valuable resource to be invested in, contested, and used for varied sociopolitical and economic ends. Through a dazzling series of illustrative studies, Yúdice challenges the Gramscian notion of cultural struggle for hegemony and instead develops an understanding of culture where cultural agency at every level is negotiated within globalized contexts dominated by the active management and administration of culture. He describes a world where “high” culture (such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain) is a mode of urban development, rituals and everyday aesthetic practices are mobilized to promote tourism and the heritage industries, and mass culture industries comprise significant portions of a number of countries’ gross national products.

Yúdice contends that a new international division of cultural labor has emerged, combining local difference with transnational administration and investment. This does not mean that today’s increasingly transnational culture—exemplified by the entertainment industries and the so-called global civil society of nongovernmental organizations—is necessarily homogenized. He demonstrates that national and regional differences are still functional, shaping the meaning of phenomena from pop songs to antiracist activism. Yúdice considers a range of sites where identity politics and cultural agency are negotiated in the face of powerful transnational forces. He analyzes appropriations of American funk music as well as a citizen action initiative in Rio de Janeiro to show how global notions such as cultural difference are deployed within specific social fields. He provides a political and cultural economy of a vast and increasingly influential art event— insite a triennial festival extending from San Diego to Tijuana. He also reflects on the city of Miami as one of a number of transnational “cultural corridors” and on the uses of culture in an unstable world where censorship and terrorist acts interrupt the usual channels of capitalist and artistic flows.

Presented as the authentic testimony of the disenfranchised, the colonized, and the oppressed, testimonio has in the last two decades emerged as one of the most significant genres of Latin America’s post-boom literature. In the political battles that have taken place around the formation of the canon, the testimonio holds a special place: no other single genre of literature has taken up such a large part of current debate. Initially hailed in the 1970s as a genuine form of resistance literature, testimonio has since undergone a significant change in its critical reception. The essays in The Real Thing analyze the testimonio, its history, and its place in contemporary consciousness.
Although the literature of testimony arose on the margins of institutional power and its ends were in large part political change, the canonization of testimonio by the academic Left has moved it from margin to center, ironically bringing about the institutionalization of its transgressive and counter-hegemonic qualities. Discussing Latin American works ranging from Salvadorian writer Roque Dalton’s Miguel Marmol to I . . . Rigoberta Menchu, a work that earned its author a Nobel Prize, this collection explores how critical writing about testimonio has turned into discourse about the institution of academia, the canon, postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of Latin American studies generally.

Contributors. John Beverley, Santiago Colás, Georg M. Gugelberger, Barbara Harlow, Fredric Jameson, Alberto Moreiras, Margaret Randall, Javier Sanjines, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Doris Sommer, Gareth Williams, George Yúdice, Marc Zimmerman