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Winner of the Montserrat Ordóñez Prize 2018 This book provides an original and exciting analysis of Colombian women’s writing and its relationship to feminist history from the 1970s to the present. In a period in which questions surrounding women and gender are often sidelined in the academic arena, it argues that feminism has been an important and intrinsic part of contemporary Colombian history. Focusing on understudied literary and non-literary texts written by Colombian women, it traces the particularities of Colombian feminism, showing how it has been closely entwined with left-wing politics and the country’s history of violence. This book therefore rethinks the place of feminism in Latin American history and its relationship to feminisms elsewhere, challenging many of the predominant critical paradigms used to understand Latin American literature and culture.
This book interrogates the identity politics involved in framing Colombian diasporas, examining the ways that creative writers, directors, performers and artists negotiate collective and personal experiences that shape their identities through their art and cultural productions. New consideration of the diversity of Afro-Latin American and Indigenous communities within the overarching categorization of "Colombianness" or Colombianidad have led to increased focus on the representation of Colombia and Colombian diasporic communities. By focusing on different cultural productions—novels, memoirs, films, plays and visual arts—this book analyzes the performance of Colombianidad by communities...
The essays in this book, ably edited by Dr. Racz, attempt to read Borges in this counter-monumental mode using the centennial of his birth as a point of departure. It is a fitting way to do Borges in our tangled era, keenly aware of the perils of public memorializing-in Buenos Aires's Memory Park to the disappeared, in New York's Ground Zero memorial to the blown apart-yet striving for the kind of open and fluid remembrance of the past that encourages new telling(s) of what inevitably will become old tales.
This book discusses an archival turn in the work of contemporary Caribbean writers and visual artists across linguistic locations and whose work engages critically with various historical narratives and colonial and postcolonial records. This refiguration opens a critical space and retells stories and histories previously occluded in/by those records, and in spaces of the public sphere. Through poetics and aesthetics of fragmentation largely influenced by music and popular culture, their work encourages contrapuntal ways of (re)thinking histories; ways that interrogate the influence of colonial narratives in processes of silencing but also centre the knowledge found in oral histories and other forms of artistic archives outside official repositories. Discussing literature and selected artwork by artists from Britain, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago, Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture demonstrates the historiographical significance of artistic and cultural production.
In recent decades, the international recognition of Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez has placed Colombian writing on the global literary map. A History of Colombian Literature explores the genealogy of Colombian poetry and prose from the colonial period to the present day. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction that charts the development of a national literary tradition, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of Colombian literature. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse and fiction of such diverse writers as José Eustacio Rivera, Tomás Carrasquilla, Alvaro Mutis, and Darío Jaramillo Agudelo. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism and multiculturalism in Colombian literature. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Colombian writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.
There is nothing in the universe like water. It is unique and beautiful and without it there could be no life on earth. Little wonder, then, that people have always expressed such awe, delight, and reverence for it. The Bird in the Waterfall is a celebration of the wonders of water and the creatures that live in it. While exploring waterfalls and artesian springs, ocean waves and tidal bores, whirligig beetles and torrent ducks, author Jerry Dennis and artist Glenn Wolff address age-old aquatic mysteries: Why do rivers meander? What are the sources of hot springs and geysers? What causes tsunamis and rogue waves? Why is water blue—and sometimes green, black, yellow, or red? Why do we gathe...
This book examines postmodern parody in Latin American literature as the intersection between ideology construction and deconstruction. Parody’s chief task is to deconstruct and criticize the ideologies behind previous texts. During this process, new ideologies are inevitably constructed. However, postmodernism simultaneously recognizes the partiality of all ideologies and rejects their enthronement as absolute truth. This raises the question of how postmodern parody deals with the paradox inherent in its own existence on the threshold between ideology construction/deconstruction and the rejection of ideology. This book explores the relationship between parody and ideology, as well as this paradox of postmodern parody in works written by writers ranging from early twentieth-century poets to the most recent novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Mario Vargas Llosa. The analyses include such authors as Cristina Peri Rossi, Manuel Puig, Luisa Valenzuela, Enrique Sánchez, Roberto Bolaño, Claudia Piñeiro, Margarita Mateo Palmer, Boris Salazar and Rosario Ferré.
Legislatures are the core representative institutions in modern democracies. Citizens want legislatures to be decisive, and they want accountability, but they are frequently disillusioned with the representation legislators deliver. Political parties can provide decisiveness in legislatures, and they may provide collective accountability, but citizens and political reformers frequently demand another type of accountability from legislators – at the individual level. Can legislatures provide both kinds of accountability? This book considers what collective and individual accountability require and provides the most extensive cross-national analysis of legislative voting undertaken to date. It illustrates the balance between individualistic and collective representation in democracies, and how party unity in legislative voting shapes that balance. In addition to quantitative analysis of voting patterns, the book draws on extensive field and archival research to provide an extensive assessment of legislative transparency throughout the Americas.
The authors of Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism argue that, while the more traditional feminists of the 20th century did not recognize in their theoretical and literary work the diversity of women’s experiences, current Latin American post-feminist and post-modern writers are proposing a transgressive new social order, resulting in a more significant cultural resistance to the society they represent. The authors included in this volume show that the narrative of the writers analyzed here is not limited to recognizing issues focused on gender or even sexuality, but also explores the female aspiration of a dignified life and overcoming the dominant struct...