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Syphilis was a prevalent affliction in the era of the Americas' colonization, creating widespread anxiety that is indicated in the period's literature across numerous fields. Reflecting Spaniards' political prejudices of the period, it was alternately labeled "mal francés" or "el mal de las Indias." Sifilografía offers a cultural history that traces syphilis and its consequences in the transatlantic Spanish-speaking world throughout the long eighteenth century. Juan Carlos González Espitia charts interrelated literary, artistic, medical, and governmental discourses, exploring how fears of the disease and the search for its cure mobilized a transoceanic dialogue that forms an underside of ...
How did culture and identity take root as the new nations and state institutions were being fashioned across Latin America after the wars of independence? These original essays tease out the power of print and visual cultures, examine the impact of carnival, delve into religion and war, and study the complex histories of gender identities and disease.
In 1682 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle claimed the Mississippi River basin for France, naming the region Louisiana to honor his king, Louis XIV. Until the United States acquired the territory in the Louisiana Purchase more than a century later, there had never been a revolution, per se, in Louisiana. However, as Jennifer Tsien highlights in this groundbreaking work, revolutionary sentiment clearly surfaced in the literature and discourse both in the Louisiana colony and in France with dramatic and far-reaching consequences. In Rumors of Revolution, Tsien analyzes documented observations made in Paris and in New Orleans about the exercise of royal power over French subjects and colonial Louisiana stories that laid bare the arbitrary powers and abuses that the government could exert on its people against their will. Ultimately, Tsien establishes an implicit connection between histories of settler colonialism in the Americas and the fate of absolutism in Europe that has been largely overlooked in scholarship to date.
In a Mexico City mansion on October 23, 1789, Don Joaquín Dongo and ten of his employees were brutally murdered by three killers armed with machetes. Investigators worked tirelessly to find the perpetrators, who were publicly executed two weeks later. Labelled the 'crime of the century,' these events and their aftermath have intrigued writers of fiction and nonfiction for over two centuries. Using a vast range of sources, Nicole von Germeten recreates a paper trail of Enlightenment-era greed and savagery, and highlights how the violence of the Mexican judiciary echoed the acts of the murderers. The Spanish government conducted dozens of executions in Mexico City's central square in this era, revealing how European imperialism in the Americas influenced perceptions of violence and how it was tolerated, encouraged, or suppressed. An evocative history, Death in Old Mexico provides a compelling new perspective on late colonial Mexico City.
One of Latin America's most famous historical figures, Simón Bolívar has become a mythic symbol for many nations, empires, and revolutions, used to support wildly diverse--sometimes opposite--ideas. From colonial Cuba to Nazi-occupied France to Soviet Slovenia, the image of "El Libertador" has served a range of political and cultural purposes. Here, an array of international and interdisciplinary scholars shows how Bolívar has appeared over the last two centuries in paintings, fiction, poetry, music, film, festivals, dance traditions, city planning, and even reliquary adoration. Whether exalted, reimagined, or fragmented, Bolívar's body has taken on a range of different meanings to represent the politics and poetics of today's national bodies. Through critical approaches to diverse cultural Bolivarianisms, this collection demonstrates the capacity of the arts and humanities to challenge and reinvent hegemonic narratives and thus vital dimensions of democracy.
The power of literacy in revolution and daily life
This book is an interdisciplinary study that addresses the critical role that gender plays in the formation of national identities in Latin America that are negotiated and challenged within extreme struggles for power. This study, which traverses the national landscapes of Argentina, Cuba, Venezuela, and Guatemala and covers the time span between 1837 and 1946, is linked by the author's common strategy of employing gender codes in order to challenge overtly masculinist hegemonic political orders. One of the goals of this investigation is to explore the fissures that surface as a result of the ongoing fluctuations of gender codes, due in part to the diverse shifting of institutions of power during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By disturbing deleterious conceptualizations associated with femininity and masculinity, one can embark upon new and open-ended readings of these historical national texts, and appreciate the groundbreaking strides of early revolutionary Latin American writers. -- Publisher description.
Exemplary Ambivalence in Late Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: Narrating Creole Subjectivity casts new light on the role of exemplary narrative in nineteenth-century Spanish America, highlighting the multiplicity of didactic writing and its dynamic relationship with readers as interpretive agents. Drawing on literary and historical models of creole heterogeneity, Austin’s study probes the unstable social and ethnic fictions of the creole elite as they portray themselves through the flawed canvas of exemplary discourse. Exemplary Ambivalence examines creole subjectivity through postcolonial and Latin American theoretical lenses to show that Spanish American creole subjects, always multip...
Challenging the distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in the Guatemalan highlands, Tiffany D. Creegan Miller discusses images that are sonic, pictorial, gestural, and alphabetic. She reveals various forms of creativity and agency that are woven through a rich media landscape in Indigenous Guatemala, as well as Maya diasporas in Mexico and the United States. Miller discusses how t...
The state of Yucatán has its own distinct culinary tradition, and local people are constantly thinking and talking about food. They use it as a vehicle for social relations but also to distinguish themselves from “Mexicans.” This book examines the politics surrounding regional cuisine, as the author argues that Yucatecan gastronomy has been created and promoted in an effort to affirm the identity of a regional people and to oppose the hegemonic force of central Mexican cultural icons and forms. In particular, Yucatecan gastronomy counters the homogenizing drive of a national cuisine based on dominant central Mexican appetencies and defies the image of Mexican national cuisine as rooted ...