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The ethnically and geographically heterogeneous countries that comprise Latin America have each produced music in unique styles and genres - but how and why have these disparate musical streams come to fall under the single category of "Latin American music"? Reconstructing how this category came to be, author Pablo Palomino tells the dynamic history of the modernization of musical practices in Latin America. He focuses on the intellectual, commercial, musicological, and diplomatic actors that spurred these changes in the region between the 1920s and the 1960s, offering a transnational story based on primary sources from countries in and outside of Latin America. The Invention of Latin Ameri...
This book chronicles three decades of social and political disintegration in a nation marked by violence, paradox, and hyperbole, a country both blessed and cursed by its wealth of natural resources, its culture, and its strategic location in the western hemisphere. The plays (Soldiers [C. J. Reyes et al.]; Old Baldy [Jairo Nino]; Lucky Strike [Santiago Garcia]; Roadhouse [Teatro La Candelaria]; Pilot Project [Enrique Buenaventura]; Femina Ludens [Nohora Ayala et al.]; and The Orgy [Enrique Buenaventura]) reveal the historical, economic, and social roots of Colombia's tragic circumstances. They are vehicles of critical analysis for making sense of both the causes and the consequences of the violence, as they examine the role of the army, the roots of the drug wars, the situation of women and victims of conflict, and the poisoning of a common ethos. The translations and introductory notes make the works and their subjects equally accessible for staging in the theater and for readings and discussion by groups interested in Latin American Studies. Judith A. Weiss is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Mount Allison University in Canada.
An innovative resource which shatters tango stereotypes to account for the genre's impact on arts, culture, and society around the world. Twenty chapters by North and South American, European, and Asian contributors, some publishing in English for the first time, collectively cover tango's history, culture, and performance practice.
“Latin America” is a concept firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and historical meanings. And yet, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo argues in this landmark book, it is an obsolescent racial-cultural idea that ought to have vanished long ago with the banishment of racial theory. Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea makes this case persuasively. Tenorio-Trillo builds the book on three interlocking steps: first, an intellectual history of the concept of Latin America in its natural historical habitat—mid-nineteenth-century redefinitions of empire and the cultural, political, and economic intellectualism; second, a serious and uncompromising critique of the current “Latin Ame...
Though some dismiss opera as old-fashioned, it shows no sign of disappearing from the world’s stage. So why do audiences continue to flock to it? Given its association with wealth, one might imagine that opera tickets function as a status symbol. But while a desire to hobnob with the upper crust might motivate the occasional operagoer, for hardcore fans the real answer, according to The Opera Fanatic, is passion—they do it for love. Opera lovers are an intense lot, Claudio E. Benzecry discovers in his look at the fanatics who haunt the legendary Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires, a key site for opera’s globalization. Listening to the fans and their stories, Benzecry hears of two-hundred-mile trips for performances and nightlong camp-outs for tickets, while others testify to a particular opera’s power to move them—whether to song or to tears—no matter how many times they have seen it before. Drawing on his insightful analysis of these acts of love, Benzecry proposes new ways of thinking about people’s relationship to art and shows how, far from merely enhancing aspects of everyday life, art allows us to transcend it.
The Business of Leisure critically surveys a wide selection of travel practices, places, and time periods in considering the development of the hospitality industry in Latin America and the Caribbean. Considering tourism from early sojourners to contemporary dark tourism thrill seekers, contributors to The Business of Leisure examine key economic, political, social, and environmental issues. A number of eminent scholars in the field draw on original research focusing on Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. In addition to describing key aspects of industry development in a variety of settings, contributors also consider diverse ways in which histories of travel relate to larger political and cultural questions.
A rich, pathbreaking study on nineteenth-century rural Cuba, and how Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom through litigation and land occupation.
Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.
An innovative account of the first nuclear programme in independent Africa, centring on the promises and perils of atomic research in Ghana.
The Latin American centennial celebrations of independence (ca.1909-1925) constituted a key moment in the consolidation of national symbols and emblems, while also producing a renewed focus on transnational affinities that generated a series of discourses about continental unity. At the same time, a boom in archaeological explorations, within a general climate of scientific positivism provided Latin Americans with new information about their grandiose former civilizations, such as the Inca and the Aztec, which some argued were comparable to ancient Greek and Egyptian cultures. These discourses were at first political, before transitioning to the cultural sphere. As a result, artists and part...