Books in the New Directions in Latino American Cultures series

This volume sets out current debates about Puerto Rico. The title simultaneously refers to the results of a non-binding 1998 plebiscite held in San Juan to determine Puerto Rico's political status, the ambiguities that have historically characterized its political agency, and the complexities of its ethnic, national, and cultural identifications.

They are recasting Brasilia as a vibrant city of the arts in which cultural production affirms a creative right to the city. In contrast, the capital's contemporary art is marked by its diversity, challenging norms about who has a voice within the Brasilia art scene.

This book explores one of the most exciting new developments in the literary field to emerge over recent decades: the growing body of work known as 'electronic literature', comprising literary works that take advantage of the capabilities of digital technologies in their enactment.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the Argentine magazine Punto de Vista (1978-2008), a cultural review that gathered together prominent Argentine intellectuals throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century.

While many in the audience still prefer national or regional programs for their cultural proximity, an increasing number among the upper-middle and middle classes, particularly the young, are turning to the new foreign services, like Netflix, Amazon and Disney for class distinction, cosmopolitanism or other motives.

This book discusses new developments of plant studies and plant theory in the humanities and compares them to the exceptionally robust knowledge about plant life in indigenous traditions practiced to this day in the Amazonian region.

Featuring canonical Spanish American and Brazilian texts of the 1920s and 30s, Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature is an innovative analysis of the body as site of inscription for avant-garde objectives such as originality, subjectivity, and subversion.

Exploring the cultural politics of Cuba's epic military engagement in the Angolan civil war, this book narrates the transformation of Cuban national identity from Latin African to Caribbean through the experience of internationalism in Angola.

This book traces the theory of violence from nineteenth-century symmetrical warfare through today's warfare of electronics and unbalanced numbers.

This book explores the textured process of rewriting and revising theatrical works in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean as both a material and metaphorical practice.

Current events, political debates, and the cultural production of artists, authors and public figures, including Cesar Aira, Maria Moreno, Naty Menstrual and Copi, among others, provide case studies where heterosexual social models are rejected and, in their place, queer frameworks become the preferred model for living differently.

This book examines and critiques the fact that Chile's claims to economic exceptionalism have been embodied, often quite aggressively, in a heterosexual, and primarily male, ideal.

A hybrid text - part testimonio, part linguistic and cultural analysis, and part art criticism - this is also a history of New York Latino neighborhoods during this period of devastating disinvestment and gentrification, as well as a personal, heart-felt meditation on the art of listening and the ethical limits of representing queer Latino lives.

Conventional scholarship on written communication positions the Western alphabet as a precondition for literacy. Baca-Espinosa argues that Mestiz@ literacies advance "new" ways of reading and writing, applicable to diverse classrooms of the twenty-first century.

Well-known essayist and Cuban historian Rafael Rojas presents a collection of his best work, one which focuses on - and offers alternatives to - the central myths that have organized Cuban culture from the nineteenth century to the present.

Respected film critic Gonzalo Aguilar offers a lucid and sophisticated analysis of Argentine films of the last decade. This is the most complete and up-to-date work in English to examine the 'new Argentine cinema' phenomenon. Aguilar looks at highly relevant films, including those by Lucrecia Martel and Sergio Rejtman.

This is the first book to comprehensively examine Latin America's literary response to the deadly HIV virus. Proposing a bio-political reading of AIDs in the neoliberal era, Lina Meruane examines how literary representations of AIDS enter into larger discussions of community, sexuality, nation, displacement and globalization.

This book explores manifestations of physical disability in Spanish American narrative fiction and performance, from Jose Marti's late nineteenth century cronicas, to Mario Bellatin's twenty-first century novels, from the performances of Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco to the testimonio and filmic depictions of Gabriela Brimmer.

Brazil under Construction tracks how Brazil's major public works projects and the fiction surrounding them mark a twofold construction of the nation: the functional construction of the country's public infrastructure and the symbolic construction of nationhood.

Addressing the transnational relationships of Freemasonry, politics, and culture in the field of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures, Writing Secrecy provides insight into Pan-Caribbean, transnational and diasporic formations of these Masonic lodges and their influences on political and cultural discourses in the Americas.

This book looks at representations of the male body, sexuality and power in the arts in Mexico. It analyses literature, visual art and cinema produced from the 1870s to the present, focusing on the Porfirian regime, the Post-revolutionary era, the decadence of the revolutionary state and the emergence of the neo-liberal order in the 1980s.

This collection presents a comparative study of the impact of slavery on the literary and cultural imagination of the Americas, and also on the impact of writing on slavery on the social legacies of slavery's history.

Since the 1980s there has been considerable interest in Mexico and its art, as one can see from the sheer number of exhibitions, catalogues, and articles devoted to the subject. New Tendencies in Mexican Art is the first book-length study devoted to a generation of Mexican artists who have had enormous international success.

This book examines the prolific and widely-attended popular theater boom of the genero chico criollo in the context of Argentina's modernization.

This book offers a comprehensive and systematic overview of the flourishing genre of the contemporary Latin American road movie, of which Diarios de motocicleta and Y tu mama tambien are only the best-known examples.

This volume explores the recent 'adolescent turn' in contemporary Latin American cinema, challenging many of the underlying assumptions about the nature of youth and distinguishing adolescence as a distinct and vital area of study. Its contributors examine the narrative and political potential of teenage protagonists in a range of recent films from the region, acknowledging the distinct emotional registers that are at play throughout adolescence and releasing teenage subjectivities from restrictive critical and theoretical emphases on theories of childhood.As the first academic study to examine the figure of the adolescent in contemporary Latin American film, New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema thus presents a timely and innovative analysis of issues of sexuality and gender, political and domestic violence and social class, and will be of significant interest to students and researchers in Latin American Studies, Cultural Studies, World Cinema and Childhood Studies.

This collection examines Cuban cultural production during the Special Period of the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Contributors address the cultural forms; and the associated ethics and practices of labour, leisure, and bureaucratic organization that arose in the transformation of the socialist cultural infrastructure.

This volume explores the recent 'adolescent turn' in contemporary Latin American cinema, challenging many of the underlying assumptions about the nature of youth and distinguishing adolescence as a distinct and vital area of study. Its contributors examine the narrative and political potential of teenage protagonists in a range of recent films from the region, acknowledging the distinct emotional registers that are at play throughout adolescence and releasing teenage subjectivities from restrictive critical and theoretical emphases on theories of childhood.As the first academic study to examine the figure of the adolescent in contemporary Latin American film, New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema thus presents a timely and innovative analysis of issues of sexuality and gender, political and domestic violence and social class, and will be of significant interest to students and researchers in Latin American Studies, Cultural Studies, World Cinema and Childhood Studies.

This book examines the prolific and widely-attended popular theater boom of the genero chico criollo in the context of Argentina's modernization.