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The wide-ranging relations between race and cultural production in modern Mexico
This collection of essays derives from a conference on Violence, Culture and Identity held in St Andrews in June 2003. It is a contribution to the understanding of representations of violence in Latin American narrative. The collected essays are dedicated to the study of the problematic history of violence as a means of 'civilizing' the region: violence used by dictatorial regimes to eradicate the collective memory of their actions; violence as a result of the history of marginalizing segments of the population; sexual violence as an attempt at complete control of the victim. The essays establish a clear link between historical, political and literary constructs spanning the past five hundred years of Latin American history. Close readings of political texts, historical documents, prose, poetry and films employ identity theories, postcolonial discourse, and the principles of mimetic and sacrificial violence. The volume adds to the ongoing critical investigation of the relationship between Latin American history and narrative, and to the key role of representations of violence within that narrative tradition.
Experimentalisms in Practice explores the multiple sites in which experimentalism emerges and becomes meaningful beyond Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. Challenging the notion of experimentalism as defined in conventional narratives, contributors take a broad approach to a wide variety of Latin@ and Latin American music traditions conceived or perceived as experimental. The conversation takes as starting point the 1960s, a decade that marks a crucial political and epistemological moment for Latin America; militant and committed aesthetic practices resonated with this moment, resulting in a multiplicity of artistic and musical experimental expressions. Experimentalisms in Practice responds to recent efforts to reframe and reconceptualize the study of experimental music in terms of epistemological perspective and geographic scope, while also engaging traditional scholarship. This book contributes to the current conversations about music experimentalism while providing new points of entry to further reevaluate the field.
With their emphasis on freedom and engagement, European existentialisms offered Latin Americans transformative frameworks for thinking and writing about their own locales. In taking up these frameworks, Latin Americans endowed them with a distinctive ethos, a turn towards questions of identity and ethics. Stephanie Merrim situates major literary and philosophical works—by the existentialist Grupo Hiperión, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, and Rodolfo Usigli—within this dynamic context. Collectively, their writings manifest an existentialist ethos attuned to the matters most alive and pressing in their specific situations—matters linked to gender, Indigene...
"Since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States and Mexico have been inextricably linked. The blending of the American and Mexican cultures has enriched both nations. Through a partnership to promote wider access to literary voices of Mexican artists in the U.S. and American writers in Mexico, the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Embassy in Mexico, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico have joined together to support a program of anthology publications and public outreach activities. The two-volume set-Lineas conectadas: nueva poesia de los Estados Unidos and Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico-is the first installment in the series. With definitive translations by leading writers and scholars, these dual volumes offer a glimpse into the beauty of the Mexican and the American experience through the microscopic lens of poetry. Whether read for personal pleasure or classroom study, Lineas conectadas and Connecting Lines are a must-read for anyone curious of our ever-increasing multicultural identity."--Publisher's website.
Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams uses Elena Garro’s eccentric life and work as a lens through which to examine mid-twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals' desire to reconcile mexicanidad with modernidad. The famously scandalous first wife of Nobel Prize winner poet Octavio Paz, and an award-winning author in her own right, Garro constructed a mysterious and often contradictory persona through her very public participation in Mexican political conflicts. Herself an anxious and contentious Mexican writer, Elena Garro elicited profound political and aesthetic anxiety in her Mexican readers. She confused the personal and the public in her creative fictions as well as in her vision of Me...
This book is a detailed study of salient examples of Mexican travel writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While scholars have often explored the close relationship between European or North American travel writing and the discourse of imperialism, little has been written on how postcolonial subjects might relate to the genre. This study first traces the development of a travel-writing tradition based closely on European imperialist models in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. It then goes on to analyse how the narrative techniques of postmodernism and the political agenda of postcolonialism might combine to help challenge the genre's imperialist tendencies in late twentieth-century works of travel writing, focusing in particular on works by writers Juan Villoro, Héctor Perea and Fernando Solana Olivares.
Capitalism and its Discontents presents a series of interpretative essays on a number of key modern and contemporary Latin American novels and films. The overarching theme in the essays is the relation between such textual materials and their regional contexts.
Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Páramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as scriptwriter on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo’s cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Ja...
Science Fusion draws on new materialist theory to analyze the relationship between science and literature in contemporary works of fiction, poetry, and theater from Mexico. In this deft new study, Brian Chandler examines how a range of contemporary Mexican writers “fuse” science and literature in their work to rethink what it means to be human in an age of climate change, mass extinctions, interpersonal violence, femicide, and social injustice. The authors under consideration here—including Alberto Blanco, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Sabina Berman, Maricela Guerrero, and Elisa Díaz Castelo—challenge traditional divisions that separate human from nonhuman, subject from object, culture from nature. Using science and literature to engage topics in biopolitics, historiography, metaphysics, ethics, and ecological crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, works of science fusion offer fresh perspectives to address present-day sociocultural and environmental issues.