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Through a close reading of eight Venezuelan novels published between 2004 and 2012, this book reveals the enduring importance of the national in contemporary Venezuelan fiction, arguing that the novels studied respond to both the nationalist and populist cultural policies of the Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuela's literary isolation.
In this vivid ethnography of social movements in the barrios, or poor shantytowns, of Caracas, Sujatha Fernandes reveals a significant dimension of political life in Venezuela since President Hugo Chávez was elected. Fernandes traces the histories of the barrios, from the guerrilla insurgency, movements against displacement, and cultural resistance of the 1960s and 1970s, through the debt crisis of the early 1980s and the neoliberal reforms that followed, to the Chávez period. She weaves barrio residents’ life stories into her account of movements for social and economic justice. Who Can Stop the Drums? demonstrates that the transformations under way in Venezuela are shaped by negotiatio...
Against a backdrop of rapid urbanization and the growth of a global economy powered by carbon, Rebecca Jarman argues that in Venezuela, urban poverty has become one of the most important resources in national culture and statecraft. Attracting the attentions of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians from within and beyond the limits of Caracas, the barrios are fetishized in the cultural domain as sites of rampant sex, crime, revolution, disease, and violence. The appeal of the urban poor in entertainment is replicated in the policies of autocratic leaders who, operating within an extractivist matrix that prizes the acquisition of land and capital, have sought to expand their reach into ...
Presenting and interrogating an array of texts and discourses, this collection brings into focus a broad range of topics whose common denominator is the intersection between cultural productions and politics in different moments of the history of Latin America and Spain. From the struggles of class distinction, identity and community in 19th and 20th century and contemporary Latin America as explored in photography, literature and film, to how political and sexual transgressions from medieval times to the present are portrayed in Hispanic literature, and the ways that canonical and non-canonical texts in Spain have been defying hegemonic power relations in the 20th century and beyond. This v...
"Beginning with the oil blowout in 1922 that is considered the moment that marked Venezuela's entry into a 'modern' era, Refined Material explores the integral relationship between Venezuelan oil industry and artistic production. In this groundbreaking study, Sean Nesselrode Moncada examines Venezuela's mid-century art and architecture in an argument that reinforces the inextricability of the rise of a capitalist and centralized state from life, activism, and art. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. Looking at five different but interrelated case studies--a print magazine, a planned housing community, a luxury hotel, a kinetic museum installation, and a documentary film--this book brings forth a novel reading to the renowned Venezuelan modernist canon and reveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another"--
Slums: How Informal Real Estate Markets Work shows that unauthorized settlements in rapidly growing cities are not divorced from market forces; rather, they must be understood as complex environments where state policies and market actors play a role.
This book uses the reflection of academics specialized in the urban area of Latin America, Europe and the United States, to initiate a comparative debate of the different dynamics in which Urbicidio expresses itself. The field or focal point of analysis that this publication approaches is the city, but under a new critical perspective of inverse methodology to that has been traditional used. It is about understanding the structural causes of self-destruction to finally thinking better and then going from pessimism to optimism. It is a deep look at the city from an unconventional entrance, because it is about knowing and analyzing what the city loses by the action deployed by own urbani...
To Write What one Could Not Tell Anyone You who live in all tranquility So warm and comfortable in your houses, You who come home at night to find The table laid and friendly faces around you, Consider if this is a man, He who toils in the mud, Who knows no rest, Who fights for a crust of bread, Who dies for the slightest reason. Consider if this is a woman, She who has lost her name and her hair, And even the strength to remember, Her gaze blank and her bosom chilled, Like a frog in winter. Do not forget that this happened, No, do not forget it: Engrave these words in your heart. Think of them in your home, in the street, When you sleep, when you rise; Repeat them to your children. Or else your house will crumble, You will be overcome by illness, And your children will turn away from you (Levi 1987:9, the translations is mine). At Auschwitz, Filip Müller was assigned to the Sonderkommando. Every day, with his fellow prisoners, he emptied the gas chambers of their piles of defiled corpses and loaded them into the crematorium furnaces of the extermination camp.
Public reading programs are flourishing in many Latin American cities in the new millennium. They defy the conception of reading as solitary and private by literally taking literature to the streets to create new communities of readers. From institutional and official to informal and spontaneous, the reading programs all use public space, distribute creative writing to a mass public, foster collective rather than individual reading, and provide access to literature in unconventional arenas. The first international study of contemporary print culture in the Americas, Public Pages reveals how recent cultural policy and collective literary reading intervene in public space to promote social int...
Un joven llega a un remoto pueblo brasileño tras el rastro de un poco conocido episodio en la vida del escritor Albert Camus. En aquel caserío se integra a las rutinas de una pensión regentada por una anciana japonesa, quien le brinda techo, trabajo y amistad. Al muchacho lo mueve el proyecto de dedicarse a las letras: la investigación sobre los días que el novelista francés pasó en aquellos parajes se convierte en la base de lo que será su primer texto literario. No obstante, una enrarecida atmósfera se cierne en torno de su presencia pues nadie sabe qué hace en esa perdida región, cuál es su nacionalidad, qué intenciones alientan su estada en un lugar sin interés económico ni turístico. Con aires de «Bildunsgroman» y de policial, «Los verdaderos paraísos» resulta, asimismo, una pieza donde el uso de ciertos recursos metaficcionales permite difuminar los límites entre realidad y ficción, al tiempo que se convierte en un sutil cuadro sobre el desarraigo, la siempre problemática aceptación del «otro» y los equívocos a los que conduce la maledicencia y el simple y gratuito rencor.