SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
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Minima Cuba
Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba
by Marta Hernández Salván
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Explores the ideological and emotional trauma created after the withering of the socialist utopia in Cuba.
Mínima Cuba analyzes the reconfiguration of aesthetics and power during the Cuban post-revolutionary transition (1989 to 2005, the conclusion of the "Special Period"). It explores the marginal cultural production on the island by the first generation of intellectuals born during the Revolution. The author studies the work of post-revolutionary poets and essayists Antonio José Ponte, Rolando Sánchez Mejías, and Iván de la Nuez, among others. In their writing we find the exhaustion of the allegorical and melancholic rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution, and the poetics of irony developed in the current biopolitical era. The book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary literary and cultural studies, poetics, and film studies in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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Creative Transformations
Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas
by Krista Brune
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Explores the role of travel and translation in Brazilian literature and culture from the 1870s to the present.
In Creative Transformations, Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary and cultural history, translation becomes a way of navigating and representing the resulting encounters between languages, interactions with Spanish Americans, and negotiations of complex identities. While Creative Transformations engages extensively with theories of translation from different national and disciplinary contexts, it also constructs a vision of translation uniquely attuned to the place of Brazil in the Americas. Brune reveals the hemispheric underpinnings of works by renowned Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Sousândrade, Mário de Andrade, Silviano Santiago, and Adriana Lisboa. In the process, she rethinks the dynamics between cosmopolitan and national desires and between center and periphery in global literary markets.
Krista Brune is Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Spanish at Pennsylvania State University.
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Contingency and Commitment
Mexican Existentialism and the Place of Philosophy
by Carlos Alberto Sánchez
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Offers the first comprehensive survey of Mexican existentialism to appear in English.
This book examines the emergence of existentialism in Mexico in the 1940s and the quest for a genuine Mexican philosophy that followed it. It focuses on the pivotal moments and key figures of the Hyperion group, including Emilio Uranga, Luis Villoro, Leopoldo Zea, and Jorge Portilla, who explored questions of interpretation, marginality, identity, and the role of philosophy. Carlos Alberto Sánchez was the first to introduce and emphasize the philosophical significance of the Hyperion group to readers of English in The Suspension of Seriousness, and in the present volume he examines its legacy and relevancy for the twenty-first century. Sánchez argues that there are lessons to be learned from Hyperion's project not only for Latino/a life in the United States but also for the lives of those on the fringes of contemporary, postmodern or postcolonial, economic, political, and cultural power.
Carlos Alberto Sánchez is Professor of Philosophy at San José State University and the author of The Suspension of Seriousness: On the Phenomenology of Jorge Portilla, With a Translation of Fenomenología del relajo, also published by SUNY Press.
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Forms of Disappointment
Cuban and Angolan Narrative after the Cold War
by Lanie Millar
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Analyzes parallel developments in post-Cold War literature and film from Cuba and Angola to trace a shared history of revolutionary enthusiasm, disappointment, and solidarity.
In Forms of Disappointment, Lanie Millar traces the legacies of anti-imperial solidarity in Cuban and Angolan novels and films after 1989. Cuba's intervention in Angola's post-independence civil war from 1976 to 1991 was its longest and most engaged internationalist project and left a profound mark on the culture of both nations. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Millar argues, Cuban and Angolan writers and filmmakers responded to this collective history and adapted to new postsocialist realities in analogous ways, developing what she characterizes as works of disappointment. Revamping and riffing on earlier texts and forms of revolutionary enthusiasm, works of disappointment lay bare the aesthetic and political fragmentation of the public sphere while continuing to register the promise of leftist political projects. Pushing past the binaries that tend to dominate histories of the Cold War and its aftermath, Millar gives priority to the perspectives of artists in the Global South, illuminating networks of anticolonial and racial solidarity and showing how their works not only reflect shared feelings of disappointment but also call for ethical gestures of empathy and reconciliation.
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With a Diamond in My Shoe
A Philosopher's Search for Identity in America
by Jorge J. E. Gracia
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
The intellectual autobiography of a leading figure in the field of Latin American philosophy.
In 1961, at the age of nineteen, Jorge J. E. Gracia escaped from the island of Cuba by passing himself off as a Catholic seminarian. He arrived in the United States with just a few spare belongings and his mother's diamond ring secured in a hole in one of his shoes. With a Diamond in My Shoe tells the story of Gracia's quest for identity-from his early years in Cuba and as a refugee in Miami to his formative role in institutionalizing the field of Latin American philosophy in the US academy. Committed to integrating into Anglo America without forgetting his roots, Gracia reflects on his struggles and successes as an immigrant and academic, bringing a philosopher's eye to bear on his personal and professional development as a leading Latinx scholar.
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Radical Poetry
Aesthetics, Politics, Technology, and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes, 1900-2015
by Eduardo Ledesma
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Engages in a critical reanalysis of historical Ibero-American experimental poetry in order to demonstrate how the contemporary digital vanguard owes much to this tradition.
With a broad geographic and linguistic sweep covering more than one hundred years of poetry, this book investigates the relationships between and among technology, aesthetics, and politics in Ibero-American experimental poetry. Eduardo Ledesma analyzes visual, concrete, kinetic, and digital poetry that questions what the "literary" means, what constitutes poetry, and how, if at all, visual and verbal arts should be differentiated. Radical Poetry examines how poets use the latest technologies (cinematography, radio, television, and software) to create poetry that self-consciously interrogates its own form, through close alliances with conceptual and abstract art, performance, photography, film, and new media. To do so, Ledesma draws on pertinent theories of metaphor, affect, time, space, iconicity, and cybernetics. Ledesma shows how José Juan Tablada (Mexico), Joan Salvat-Papasseit (Catalonia), Clemente Padín (Uruguay), Fernando Millán (Spain), Décio Pignatari (Brazil), Ana María Uribe (Argentina), and others turn words, machines, and, more recently, the digital into flesh, making word-objects "come alive" by assembling text to act and seem human, whether on the page, on walls, or on screens.
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Unsettling Colonialism
Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
An interdisciplinary analysis of gender, race, empire, and colonialism in fin-de-siècle Spanish literature and culture across the global Hispanic world.
Unsettling Colonialism illuminates the interplay of race and gender in a range of fin-de-siècle Spanish narratives of empire and colonialism, including literary fictions, travel narratives, political treatises, medical discourse, and the visual arts, across the global Hispanic world. By focusing on texts by and about women and foregrounding Spain's pivotal role in the colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, this book not only breaks new ground in Iberian literary and cultural studies but also significantly broadens the scope of recent debates in postcolonial feminist theory to account for the Spanish empire and its (former) colonies. Organized into three sections: colonialism and women's migrations; race, performance, and colonial ideologies; and gender and colonialism in literary and political debates, Unsettling Colonialism brings together the work of nine scholars. Given its interdisciplinary approach and accessible style, the book will appeal to both specialists in nineteenth-century Iberian and Latin American studies and a broader audience of scholars in gender, cultural, transatlantic, transpacific, postcolonial, and empire studies.
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Life Streams
Alberto Rey's Cuban and American Art
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Incisive exploration of the work of Cuban-American artist Alberto Rey.
Life Streams explores the paintings, videos, sculptures, and installations of Alberto Rey, an artist whose work addresses issues of identity, cultural diversity, environmental studies, and global sustainability. As a Cuban-born artist living in western New York State, Rey's current work emphasizes his involvement with his community and its local landscape, especially its trout streams and their surrounding environment. Through Rey's travels from his home in the upstate New York village of Fredonia to the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and to almost every state in the United States, he has gained an understanding of people, places, flora, and fauna.
This book provides biographical information about Rey and a contextual study of his work. The contributors have written about Rey's work from perspectives based on cultural studies, identity studies, literary studies, and philosophical studies. Interest in his Cuban and American identities are linked to his interest in global culture and his recent study of fish species and environmental issues. As such, this book reflects current approaches that focus attention on connected cultural issues and contemporary concerns about the environment, conservation, restoration, and preservation. Rey's work provides a new perspective on these topics as he combines art with activism on a local, regional, national, and international level.
Lynette M. F. Bosch is Professor of Art History at the State University of New York at Geneseo and the coeditor (with Isabel Alvarez Borland) of Cuban-American Literature and Art: Negotiating Identities, also published by SUNY Press. Mark Denaci is Associate Professor of Art History at St. Lawrence University.
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The Space of Disappearance
A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror
by Karen Elizabeth Bishop
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Examines the evolution of disappearance as a formal narrative and epistemological phenomenon in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction.
More than thirty thousand people were forcibly disappeared during the military dictatorship that governed Argentina from 1976 to 1983, leaving behind a cultural landscape fractured by absence, denial, impunity, and gaps in knowledge. This book is about how these absences assume narrative form in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction and the formal strategies and structures authors have crafted to respond to the country's use of systematic disappearance as a mechanism of state terror. In incisive close readings of texts by Rodolfo Walsh, Julio Cortázar, and Tomás Eloy Martínez, Karen Elizabeth Bishop explores how techniques of dissimulation, doubling, displacement, suspension, and embodiment come to serve both epistemological and ethical functions, grounding new forms of historical knowledge and a new narrative commons whose work continues into the twenty-first century. Their writing, Bishop argues, recalibrates our understanding of the rich and increasingly urgent reciprocities between fiction, history, and the demands of human rights. In the end, The Space of Disappearance asks us to reexamine in fiction what we think we cannot see; there, at the limits of the literary, disappearance appears as a vital agent of resistance, storytelling, and world-building.
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Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America
by Estelle Tarica
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
This book proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust consciousness in Latin America since the 1970s. Community leaders, intellectuals, writers, and political activists facing state repression have seen themselves reflected in Holocaust histories and have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries. In so doing, they have developed a unique, controversial approach to the memory of the Holocaust that is little known outside the region. Estelle Tarica deepens our understanding of Holocaust awareness in a global context by examining diverse Jewish and non-Jewish voices, focusing on Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala. What happens, she asks, when we find the Holocaust invoked in unexpected places and in relation to other events, such as the Argentine "Dirty War" or the Mayan genocide in Guatemala? The book draws on meticulous research in two areas that have rarely been brought into contact-Holocaust Studies and Latin American Studies- and aims to illuminate the topic for readers who may be new to the fields.
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States of Grace
Utopia in Brazilian Culture
by Patrícia I. Vieira
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Provides in-depth analyses of key moments in Brazilian utopianism, including theological-political, matriarchal, environmental, and work-free utopias.
States of Grace offers a novel approach to the study of Brazilian culture through the lens of utopianism. Patrícia I. Vieira explores religious and political writings, journalistic texts, sociological studies, and literary works that portray Brazil as a utopian "land of the future," where dreams of a coming messianic age and of social and political emancipation would come true. The book discusses crucial utopian moments such as the theological-political utopia proposed by Jesuit Priest Antnio Vieira; matriarchal utopias, like the egalitarian society of the Amazons; work-free utopias that abolished the boundaries separating toil and play; and ecological utopias, where humans and nonhumans coexist harmoniously. The uniqueness of the book's approach lies in rethinking the link between messianic and utopian texts, as well as the alliances forged between progressive religious, socioeconomic, political, and ecological ideas.
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The Everyday Atlantic
Time, Knowledge, & Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian & Latin American Newspaper Chronicl
by Tania Gentic
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Rethinks the concepts of nation, imperialism, and globalization by examining the everyday writing of the newspaper chronicle and blog in Spain and Latin America.
In The Everyday Atlantic, Tania Gentic offers a new understanding of the ways in which individuals and communities perceive themselves in the twentieth-century Atlantic world. She grounds her study in first-time comparative readings of daily newspaper texts, written in Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. Known as chronicles, these everyday literary writings are a precursor to the blog and reveal the ephemerality of identity as it is represented and received daily. Throughout the text Gentic offers fresh readings of well-known and lesser-known chroniclers (cronistas), including Eugeni d'Ors (Catalonia), Germán Arciniegas (Colombia), Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Carlos Monsiváis (Mexico), and Brazilian blogger Ricardo Noblat.<
While previous approaches to the Atlantic have focused on geographical crossings by subjects, Gentic highlights the everyday moments of reading and thought in which discourses of nation, postcolonialism, and globalization come into conflict. Critics have often evaluated in isolation how ideology, ethics, affect, and the body inform identity; however, Gentic skillfully combines these approaches to demonstrate how the chronicle exposes everyday representations of self and community.
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Libre Acceso
Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Analyzes the diverse roles and pervasive presence of disability in Latin American literature and film.
Libre Acceso stages an innovative encounter between disciplines that have remained quite separate: Latin American literary, film, and cultural studies and disability studies. It offers a much-needed framework to engage the representation, construction, embodiment, and contestation of human differences, and provides tools for the urgent resignification of a robust and diverse Latin American literary and filmic tradition. The contributors discuss such topics as impairment, trauma, illness and the body, performance, queer theory, subaltern studies, and human rights, while analyzing literature and film from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru. They explore these issues through the work of canonical figures Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, João Guimarães Rosa, and others, as well as less well-known figures, including Mario Bellatin and Miriam Alves.
Susan Antebi is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Toronto and the author of Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability. Beth E. Jörgensen is Professor of Spanish at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Documents in Crisis: Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico and the coeditor (with Ignacio Corona) of The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle: Theoretical Perspectives on the Liminal Genre, both also published by SUNY Press.
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Painting Borges
Philosophy Interpreting Art Interpreting Literature
by Jorge J. E. Gracia
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
A provocative examination of the artistic interpretation of twelve of Borges's most famous stories.
In this groundbreaking book, Jorge J. E. Gracia explores the artistic interpretation of fiction from a philosophical perspective. Focusing on the work of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most celebrated literary figures of Latin America, Gracia offers original interpretations of twelve of Borges's most famous stories about identity and memory, freedom and destiny, and faith and divinity. He also examines twenty-four artistic interpretations of these stories-two for each-by contemporary Argentinean and Cuban artists such as Carlos Estévez, León Ferrari, Mirta Kupferminc, Nicolás Menza, and Estela Pereda. This philosophical exploration of how artists have interpreted literature contributes to both aesthetics and hermeneutics, makes new inroads into the understanding of Borges's work, and introduces readers to two of the most vibrant artistic currents today. Color images of the artworks discussed are included.
Jorge J. E. Gracia is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Chair in Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. His many books include Images of Thought: Philosophical Interpretations of Carlos Estévez's Art and Identity, Memory, and Diaspora: Voices of Cuban-American Artists, Writers, and Philosophers, both also published by SUNY Press.
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A Latin American Existentialist Ethos
Modern Mexican Literature and Philosophy
by Stephanie Merrin
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
With their emphasis on freedom and engagement, European existentialisms offered Latin Americans transformative frameworks for thinking and writing about their own locales. In taking up these frameworks, Latin Americans endowed them with a distinctive ethos, a turn towards questions of identity and ethics. Stephanie Merrim situates major literary and philosophical works-by the existentialist Grupo Hiperión, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, and Rodolfo Usigli-within this dynamic context. Collectively, their writings manifest an existentialist ethos attuned to the matters most alive and pressing in their specific situations-matters linked to gender, Indigeneity, the Mexican Revolution, and post-Revolution politics. That each of these writers orchestrates a unique center of gravity renders Mexican existentialist literature an always shifting, always passionate adventure. A Latin American Existentialist Ethos takes readers on this adventure, conveying the passions of its subjects lucidly and vibrantly. It is at once a detailed portrait of twentieth-century Mexican existentialism and an expansive look at Latin American literary existentialism in relation-and opposition-to its European counterparts.
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Lens, Laboratory, Landscape
Observing Modern Spain
by Claudia Schaefer
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
An interdisciplinary study of the rise of empirical observation in the Spanish arts and sciences as the principle vehicle for acquiring knowledge about the natural world.
Lens, Laboratory, Landscape focuses on competing views about the power of vision in Spain between the 1830s and the 1950s. The photographic lens, laboratory microscope, "retinal vision" of philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and the topographical studies of Manuel de Terán are woven together in and around a European cultural milieu that gave observation primacy. For once, Spain-now bereft of its empire-was not on the outside of such debates. Whether in the laboratory, family home, darkroom, art gallery, or on the road, in Cuba or Zaragoza, Madrid or Massachusetts, Spanish artists and scientists were engaged with the social and economic power of observation at a time when the speed of modern life made observing a challenge. Claudia Schaefer brings the technologies of the eye-photograph, microscope, lens, tools for land surveying-to light as markers on the nation's touted path to modernity.
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Painting Modernism
by Ivan A. Schulman
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Studies the influence of the plastic arts on the major writers of Latin American modernism.
Painting Modernism demonstrates the influence of painting and sculpture on the work of the major writers of Latin American modernism. Through his analysis, Ivan A. Schulman, a foundational figure in the field, offers a concise and new interpretation of works by José Asunción Silva, Julián del Casal, Rubén Darío, José Juan Tablada, and José Martí. Traditional critical discourse on modernism has emphasized the nature of this movement in terms of its self-referentiality, fragmentation, elitist/escapist concepts, and subjective notions of cultural and aesthetic authenticity. Schulman breaks from this approach and examines these works as products of subjectively generated social/artistic practices that are inseparable from socioeconomic transformations and the chaotic cultural crises of the modern world.
Ivan A. Schulman is Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author and editor of many Spanish-language books on modernism.
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Two Confessions
by María Zambrano
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
First English translation of these important works by two of Spain's most gifted writers and intellectuals.
Following the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic, María Zambrano (1904—1991) and Rosa Chacel (1898—1994), two of Spain's most gifted intellectuals and writers, wrote compelling meditations on the meaning of confession in life and literature. Noël Valis and Carol Maier provide the first complete English-language translations of these essays. Zambrano and Chacel were friends, if not always amicably so; supporters of the Republic; and exiles. Both disciples of the philosopher Ortega y Gasset, they were nevertheless able to establish their own creative independence in their writing. Not only do the essays address national issues centered on Spanish literature, culture, and history, they also offer a unique philosophical-spiritual and literary approach to confession within the areas of philosophy, literature, religion, autobiography, women's and gender studies, and cultural studies. The translators' introduction, afterword, and meticulous annotations supplement the texts.
Noël Valis is Professor of Spanish at Yale University, and her many books include the award-winning translation of Noni Benegas's poetry, Burning Cartography. Carol Maier is Professor Emerita of Spanish and Translation Studies at Kent State University and the translator of several books, including the award-winning translation of Rosa Chacel's Memoirs of Leticia Valle and María Zambrano's Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in Her Twenties, also published by SUNY Press.
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Changing Women, Changing Nation
Female Agency, Nationhood, and Identity in Trans-Salvadoran Narratives
by Yajaira M. Padilla
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Analyzes the literary representations of women in Salvadoran and US-Salvadoran narratives since 1980.
Changing Women, Changing Nation explores the literary representations of women in Salvadoran and US-Salvadoran narratives during the span of the last thirty years. This exploration covers Salvadoran texts produced during El Salvador's civil war (1980-1992) and the current postwar period, as well as US-Salvadoran works of the last two decades that engage the topic of migration and second-generation ethnic incorporation into the United States. Rather than think of these two sets of texts as constituting separate literatures, Yajaira M. Padilla conceives of them as part of the same corpus, what she calls "trans-Salvadoran narratives"-works that dialogue with each other and draw attention to El Salvador's burgeoning transnational reality. Through depictions of women in trans-Salvadoran narratives, Padilla elucidates a "story" of female agency and nationhood that extends beyond El Salvador's national borders and imaginings.
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Major Concepts in Spanish Feminist Theory
by Roberta Johnson
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
First book in English to offer a thorough introduction to key concepts and figures in Spanish feminist thought.
Major Concepts in Spanish Feminist Theory is the first book in English to offer a substantial overview of Spanish feminist thought. It focuses on six concepts-solitude, personality, social class, work, difference, and equality-and distinguishes Spanish feminist theory from that of other countries. Roberta Johnson employs a chronological format to highlight continuity and polemics in Spanish feminist thinking from the eighteenth century to the present. She brings together arguments from well-known names such as Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Concepción Arenal, Emilia Pardo Bazán, María Martínez Sierra, Carmen de Burgos, and Carmen Laforet, as well as less familiar figures such as the Countess Campo Alange María Laffitte and Lilí Álvarez, who defied restrictions on feminist activity during the Franco dictatorship to publish feminist books. The topics of difference and equality are explored, and the book recounts the long tension between theorists of each persuasion-a tension that erupted publicly during Spain's democratic era. Each theorist's arguments are laid out in straightforward, non-jargonistic prose, making this book a useful classroom tool for courses on Spanish women writers, Spanish culture, and cross-cultural feminist studies.
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City in Common
Culture and Community in Buenos Aires
by James Scorer
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Addresses ways that cultural imaginaries point toward alternative urban futures.
In this book James Scorer argues that culture remains a force for imagining inclusive urban futures based around what inhabitants of the city have in common. Using Buenos Aires as his case study, Scorer takes the urban commons to be those aspects of the city that are shared and used by its various communities. Exploring a hugely diverse set of works, including literature, film, and comics, and engaging with urban theory, political philosophy, and Latin American cultural studies, City in Common paints a portrait of the city caught between opposing forces. Scorer seeks out alternatives to the current trend in analysis of urban culture to read Buenos Aires purely through the lens of segregation, division, and enclosure. Instead, he argues that urban imaginaries can and often do offer visions of more open communities and more inclusive urban futures.
James Scorer is Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom.
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The Afterlife of al-Andalus
Muslim Iberia in Contemporary Arab and Hispanic Narratives
by Christina Civantos
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
The first study to undertake a wide-ranging comparison of invocations of al-Andalus across the the Arab and Hispanic worlds.
Around the globe, concerns about interfaith relations have led to efforts to find earlier models in Muslim Iberia (al-Andalus). This book examines how Muslim Iberia operates as an icon or symbol of identity in twentieth and twenty-first century narrative, drama, television, and film from the Arab world, Spain, and Argentina. Christina Civantos demonstrates how cultural agents in the present ascribe importance to the past and how dominant accounts of this importance are contested. Civantos's analysis reveals that, alongside established narratives that use al-Andalus to create exclusionary, imperial identities, there are alternate discourses about the legacy of al-Andalus that rewrite the traditional narratives. In the process, these discourses critique their imperial and gendered dimensions and pursue intercultural translation.
Christina Civantos is Associate Professor of Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami and the author of Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity, also published by SUNY Press.
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Documents in Crisis
Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico
by Beth E. Jörgensen
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Examines the theory and practice of nonfiction narrative literature in twentieth-century Mexico.
In the turbulent twentieth century, large numbers of Mexicans of all social classes faced crisis and catastrophe on a seemingly continuous basis. Revolution, earthquakes, industrial disasters, political and labor unrest, as well as indigenous insurgency placed extraordinary pressures on collective and individual identity. In contemporary literary studies, nonfiction literatures have received scant attention compared to the more supposedly "creative" practices of fictional narrative, poetry, and drama. In Documents in Crisis, Beth E. Jörgensen examines a selection of both canonical and lesser-known examples of narrative nonfiction that were written in response to these crises, including the autobiography, memoir, historical essay, testimony, chronicle, and ethnographic life narrative. She addresses the relative neglect of Mexican nonfiction in criticism and theory and demonstrates its continuing relevance for writers and readers who, in spite of the contemporary blurring of boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, remain fascinated by literatures of fact.
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Borges, the Jew
by Ilan Stavans
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Explores Borges' infatuation with Jewish history and culture.
A Seminary Co-op Notable Book of 2016
In this volume, award-winning cultural critic and controversial public intellectual Ilan Stavans focuses his attention on Jorge Luis Borges's fascination with Jewish culture. Despite not being Jewish himself, Borges wrote essays, poems, and stories dealing with various aspects of Jewish history and culture-from the Holocaust to Kabbalah and from Franz Kafka to the creation of the State of Israel. In periods when anti-Semitism in Argentina was on the rise, Borges was clear in his refutation of such xenophobia, and when Jewish writers were hardly available in Spanish, he was among the first to translate them. Throughout Stavans's discussion of these topics he weaves in personal anecdotes on reading Borges for the first time, hearing him read in Mexico, and looking for him in Buenos Aires. No fan of Borges's classic oeuvre will ever see his legacy in the same way after reading this book.
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is the author of many books, including Quixote: The Novel and the World and The United States of Mestizo.
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Argentina Noir
New Millennium Crime Novels in Buenos Aires
by Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
An engaging and insightful guide to Argentine crime fiction since 2000.
Argentina Noir offers a guide to Argentine crime fiction, with a focus on works published since the year 2000. It argues that the novela negra, or crime novel, has become the favored genre for many writers to address the social malaise brought about by changes linked to globalization and market-driven economic policies. Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz presents close readings and original interpretations of eleven novels, all set in or around Buenos Aires, and explores the ways these texts adapt major motifs, figures, and literary techniques in Hispanic crime fiction in order to give voice to wide-ranging social critiques. Schmidt-Cruz addresses such topics as organized crime and institutional complicity, corruption during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989—1999), terrorist attacks on Jewish institutions in Buenos Aires and the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, and the winners and the losers of neoliberal structural changes. With a solid underpinning in sociological studies and criticism of the genre and its historical context, Argentina Noir reveals how these novels are renovating the genre to engage pressing issues confronting not only Argentina but also countries throughout Latin America and around the globe.
Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Center for Global and Area Studies at the University of Delaware. Her previous books include Mothers, Lovers, and Others: The Short Stories of Julio Cortázar, also published by SUNY Press.
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Borges
The Passion of an Endless Quotation
by Lisa Block De Behar
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Expanded edition with new chapters and updates to the translation and bibliography.
Borges cites innumerable authors in the pages making up his life's work, and innumerable authors have cited and continue to cite him. More than a figure, then, the quotation is an integral part of the fabric of his writing, a fabric made anew by each reading and each re-citation it undergoes, in the never-ending throes of a work-in-progress. Block de Behar makes of this reading a plea for the very art of communication; a practice that takes community not in the totalized and totalizable soil of pre-established definitions or essences, but on the ineluctable repetitions that constitute language as such, and that guarantee the expansiveness-through etymological coincidences of meaning, through historical contagions, through translinguistic sharings of particular experiences-of a certain index of universality. This edition includes a new introduction by the author and three entirely new chapters, as well as updated images and corrections to the original translation.
Lisa Block de Behar is Professor of Communications at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay and is a renowned Jorge Luis Borges scholar. William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several books, including In Defense of Religious Moderation. Christopher RayAlexander is a graduate student and language instructor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University.
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Kant's Dog
On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation
by David E. Johnson
Part of the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture series
Situates Borges at the limit of philosophy and literature.
Kant's Dog provides fresh insight into Borges's preoccupation with the contradiction of the time that passes and the identity that endures. By developing the implicit logic of the Borgesian archive, which is most often figured as the universal demand for and necessary impossibility of translation, Kant's Dog is able to spell out Borges's responses to the philosophical problems that most concerned him, those of the constitution of time, eternity, and identity; the determination of original and copy; the legitimacy of authority; experience; the nature of language and the possibility of a decision; and the name of God. Kant's Dog offers original interpretations of several of Borges's best known and most important stories and of the works of key figures in the history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Saint Paul, Maimonides, Hume, Locke, Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida. This study outlines Borges's curious relationship to literature and philosophy and, through a reconsideration of the relation between necessity and accident, opens the question of the constitution of philosophy and literature. The afterword develops the logic of translation toward the secret at the heart of every culture in order to posit a Borgesian challenge to anthropology and cultural studies.
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