El ensayismo crítico y la transnacionalización del latinoamericanismo en el Cono Sur (1990-2000)

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies and Cultural Autonomy

<i>The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History</i>, by Pablo Palomino

Reviewed by: The Emperor's Kites: A Morphology of Borges' Tales, and: Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature, and: Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, and: García Márquez and Latin America Pamela Finnegan Mary Lusky Friedman . The Emperor's Kites: A Morphology of Borges' Tales. Durham: Duke UP, 1987. 225 pp. $22.50. Alfred J. MacAdam . Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. 106 pp. $19.95. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell . Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 230 pp. $39.50. Alok Bhalla , ed. García Márquez and Latin America. New York: Envoy, 1987. 186 pp. $22.50. Critical and popular acclaim of twentieth-century Latin American letters focuses on Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, the two authors most generally credited with awakening interest abroad in the literature of the Spanish-speaking Western hemisphere. The books reviewed here corroborate the far-reaching influence of these two authors. The Emperor's Kites: A Morphology of Borges' Tales by Mary Lusky Friedman identifies imbedded in each of Borges' tales the ur narrative, "a story that coexists with the plot but does not necessarily coincide with it." To distinguish between these two texts, the individual story and the paradigmatic text, is analogous to Freud's differentiation "between the manifest and latent content of a dream." Lusky Friedman proceeds by first identifying the ur narrative, explicating its [End Page 263] presence in a representative number of Borges' texts, then turning to the questions of how the ur narrative evolved in Borges' A Universal History of Infamy. Next, other of the ur narrative's antecedents are sought in Borges' nonnarrative work, and, finally, the author hypothesizes that the process of mourning for his father provided Borges the emotional experience and state of mind out of which the ur narrative was metamorphosed into the mature texts of Ficciones and The Aleph, disguising "the motif of oedipal strife" and heightening "the irreality of his tales." The Emperor's Kites is a well-researched, well-argued study that deserves critical attention. Lusky Friedman's thoughts on Oedipal strife lead her to consider at length two crucial aspects of Borgean technique: derealization of experience and impoverishment of the individual (the deemphasizing of personal circumstance). The latter topics as well as Lusky Friedman's discussions of the evolution of violence into mystery, the relationship between loss of selfhood, punishment, and mirrors; the development of the double; Borges' postulation of reality (verisimilitude); and other metaphors basic to the Borges oeuvre help, as well as challenge, the reader to decipher Borges' narrative world. Although Lusky Friedman couches in tentative terms her hypothesis that Borges' genius and the vitality of his work are a product of mourning, her recapitulation of Borges' aesthetic, philosophical, and literary preferences is certain and forceful. The only concern one might voice is that in spite of Borges' known playfulness and wryness, Lusky Friedman always reads Borges seriously, taking him at his word. Nevertheless, her scholarship is commendable, the volume has ample documentation with a Borges bibliography, and the physical volume is attractive and nearly error-free. Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature, although not about Borges, is informed throughout by his presence. MacAdam's presentation approximates a reading of Latin American literature through the filter of Borges' oeuvre. MacAdam's goal is to connect Latin American literature, "an eccentic branch of the Western tradition," with British and American literature "in order to reaffirm Latin America's place in that tradition and to explore those factors that render Latin American literature unique." He concludes that eccentricity in any Western national literature makes manifest that the Western tradition is "vast and growing," that Latin American writers share the belief that "literature ought to raise more questions than it resolves," and that Latin American writers share the belief that writers "are entitled to express their moral concerns in their writing, and critics ought to point out those concerns." In spite of the latter assertion, MacAdam elsewhere dismisses history-bound criticism as ignoring the artistic qualities of the text while simultaneously averring that Latin American reality "has...

Reviewed by: Latin America’s New Historical Novel Gareth Williams Seymour Menton. Latin America’s New Historical Novel. Austin: U of Texas P, 1993. 228 pp. No price given. Latin America’s New Historical Novel could be considered to be a useful book for the undergraduate and master-level classroom since it provides an exceptional bibliographic chronology of the Latin American Historical Novel dating from 1949 to 1992 (including the subgenre that the author terms the “New Historical Novel”); it provides, as well, extensive character readings and plot summaries of a wide selection of narratives that could be helpful to a casual or initiate reader of Latin American narrative interested in familiarizing him/herself with the Historical Novel in Latin America. As an example of Latinamericanist critical practice, however, Latin America’s New Historical Novel is somewhat disappointing. The underlying impulse of Latin America’s New Historical Novel, it would appear, is twofold: on the one hand, the book marks an implicit lament for the loss of the Latin American boom aesthetic of the 1960’s and, on the other hand, an attempt to revalidate the lost object by arguing the case for the canonization of a contemporary boom of novelistic production that is presented as the inheritor of the 1960’s “tradition”: the “New Historical Novel”. Unfortunately, any reader interested in identifying the parameters of a possible post-boom boom in Latin American novelistic production will be disappointed by this book since it tends, rather, to reveal the problematic nature of a critical venture designed to delineate dominant [End Page 872] literary trends precisely at a time in which the singularity of dominant trends in Latin American literature, and in Latin American cultural production as a whole, has collapsed, and in particular in which the boom aesthetic and its ideas on the literary as a means and manifestation of Latin American knowledge production, are becoming increasingly derelict for the contemporary analysis, interpretation, and understanding of Latin American cultural formations. As a result of Latin America’s New Historical Novel’s overriding desire for canonization, apparently at all costs, the book tends to fall into the symptomatic revelation of its own self-imposed conceptual confinement. For Menton the “New Historical Novel” is the inheritor of the Latin American boom’s muralistic scope, exuberant eroticism and complex, neobaroque (albeit less hermetic) structural and linguistic experimentation, witnessed by a generalized emphasis on what he terms the novel’s “metafictionality,” “intertextuality” and “carnivalesque” characters. As a result of these properties, however, García-Márquez’s El general en su laberinto, to name just one example, is discarded as a “New Historical Novel” on the grounds that it is the re-creation of a specific period with relatively few characters, that tends to avoid exuberant experimentation. Thus, in spite of Menton’s characterization of the “New Historical Novel” as a narrative whose action takes place completely (and in some cases, predominantly) in the past—arbitrarily defined as a past not directly experienced by the author—the problematization of a single historical figure such as Bolivar does not serve for inclusion into the canonization of this subgenre. Indeed, the book’s stifling production of exclusionary criteria, systematically implemented in such a way as to homogenize what is ultimately a highly complex and heterogeneous corpus of narratives, leads to mass elimination on apparently arbitrary grounds. Thus, Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del metodo and La consagracion de la primavera are excluded from analysis, and presumably from any possibility of pertaining to a “dominant trend,” because they do not conform to the author’s definition of the historical novel since they present events concurrent with the author’s own life. Obviously, if the reader follows this logic, then we are confronted with a problematic critical practice in which lived experience cannot be an experience of the historical, nor of historicity, and novelistic production such as that of the Southern Cone post-dictatorship novel (Miguel Bonasso, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Diamela Eltit, to name just a few), or the production of testimonial [End Page 873] narratives over the last fifteen years or so in the Southern Cone and in Central America, are excluded from the contemporary...

Voice-Overs: and Latin American Literature. Ed. Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz. Albany: SUNY P, 2002. 266 pages.Despite the increase in critical writings on translation in the last twenty-some years, there is still much uncertainty in the profession over what, exactly, translation studies can encompass. Voice-Overs, edited by Daniel Balderston and Marcy Schwartz, goes a long way towards illustrating the potential of studying translation, especially with respect to Latin American literature. As Balderston and Schwartz state in their excellent introduction: has become both a mechanism and a metaphor for contemporary transnational in the Americas... continues to be one of the main tools, and defining images, of Latin American culture in its relation to world cultures (1).Voice-Overs is divided into three sections: the first contains essays and reflections by Latin American and U.S. Latino writers; the second by translators; the third by critics. first section, Writers on Translation, begins with Borges's The Homeric Versions (as translated by Eliot Weinberger). This essay is an especially apt place to start, as nearly every discussion of translation and Latin American literature begins-or ought to begin-with Borges. This section continues with light-toned commentaries by Cortazar and Garcia Marquez on the difficulties and under-appreciation of translation, and continues with the provocative interventions of the Argentine poets Diana Bellessi and Luisa Futoransky, who link translation with considerations of exile, language, and identity. connections that Bellessi draws between translation and otherness are key here; Bellessi states: is above all an attempt at alterity (26). Of related relevance is Rosario Ferre's essay, which focuses on the (un)translatability of cultures. Writers on Translation section also includes texts by the Brazilian Nelida Pinon and by four additional Southern Cone writers: Ariel Dorfman, Cristina Peri Rossi, Tomas Eloy Martinez, and Ricardo Piglia. Here the contributions of Peri Rossi and Piglia stand out.The only major voice probably missing from the first part of Voice-Overs is that of Octavio Paz (sections from Traduccion: Literatura y literalidad would have been useful here). On the other hand, the inclusion of texts by U.S. Latino writers Junot Diaz, Cristina Garcia, and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith is a definite strength. An important breakthrough of the anthology, in fact, is the dialogue it establishes between Latin American and U.S. Latino literatures through discussions of translation.The second section of the anthology, Translating Latin America, contains essays and reflections by some of the leading translators of Latin American literature into English: Margaret Sayers Peden, Gregory Rabassa, Suzanne Jill Levine, James Hoggard, Eliot Weinberger, and John Felstiner. …

Reviewed by: Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastro-Narrative by Rocío Del Águila and Vanesa Miseres Lara Anderson Del Águila, Rocío and Vanesa Miseres. Food Studies in Latin American Literature:Perspectives on the Gastro-Narrative. U of Arkansas P, 2021. 280 pp. ISBN: 978-1-68226-181-1. Food Studies in Latin American Literature is a welcome addition to the growing fields of Iberian, Latin American and Hispanic Cultural Food Studies/Food Studies. This volume offers many strong chapters, which look at topics such as culinary fusion at the time of colonialism, nineteenth-century modernity and transnational foodways, gender and food consumption, as well as issues pertaining to food writing. The aim of the introduction is mainly clear and well argued, that is to show how the different chapters are linked to key moments of Latin American history and Latin America literature. Although the authors state that gastro-narrative is both object of study and methodology, I would suggest that the term gastro-criticism, a recognised [End Page 157] subcategory of socio/cultural-criticism, be also used to describe the study's methodology. It is not clear how all the chapters and/or food texts fall under the rubric of literature since some are recipe books, commentary, advertising, and chronicles. If the aim of the current volume is indeed to understand the essence of Latin American literary food studies, then the focus of this study should be just on literature rather than other cultural texts as well. The texts could be described as food texts, literary or otherwise which make up Latin American Food Cultural Studies and are part of a body of texts that take part in the creation and or subversion of identities and mapping of food and foodways onto the continent. Part 1 focuses on indigenous traditions, food legacies and exchanges starting from the time of colonialism, Part 2 on 19th century food cultures, Part 3 on gender and food, and Part 4 on food writing. Chapter 1 offers a fascinating account of how the Crown used food to control the Andeans, yet there were often ways of subverting hegemonic food discourse with indigenous writings that reflected a deep pride in native cuisine. Chapter 2 which focuses on the potato has lots of fascinating material but is too broad in its focus which includes chronicles, songs, and drawings from the early modern period to film prose and poetry from the contemporary Peruvian and Chilean contexts. Chapter 3's discussion of the culinary word of Sor Juana is most fascinating and provides insight into the material culture of New Spain. Her recipes which evince a mix of European, Arab-Andalusian, and Mesoamerican culinary traditions are cultural reflections of the time and demonstrate how food texts most often transcend the kitchen. She also upturns gender dictates in her fusion of cuisine and philosophy. Chapter 4 which starts Part 2 provides a most interesting discussion of how food changed in Mexico and Peru in the 19th century because of waves of migration. Food in this context was used to show class status and domestic imported foods was one of the ways to enhance status. Chapter 5 shows how male travel writing was replete with reactions of disgust in the face of food that was considered inedible thereby reinforcing the racist logic of colonialism which was based on white male supremacy. And in a similar fashion Chapter 6 describes Eduarda Mansilla's trip to New York during which she wrote travel literature with a multitude of references to how bad American food was, she judges American eating habits poorly indeed. I have written a great deal about the potential for food to act divisively during times of conflict or intercultural conflict and these negative descriptions of other people's food culture reminds us that we must find ways of using food as a force of good. Chapter 7 provides a fascinating account of homemaking in 1950's Mexico showing how through the food discourse they read or consumed, housewives were instructed in the uptake of modernization and mestizaje, deemed as superior to traditional indigenous culinary traditions. Chapter 8 focuses on Rosario Castellano's...

Latin American literature was not canonized within world literature until the 20th century. Since the colonial era, it has been perceived as navigating a tension between emancipation from and conformity to Europe; the pressure to conform to European trends was more dominant than the drive for emancipation until the rise of the Modernismo movement in the late 19th century. Since then, the literature produced has been increasingly received as independent and genuinely “Latin American.” These dynamics are closely interwoven with the reality that, from the early colonial era to the present day, decisions as to which works of Latin American literature should be included in the canon have been made in European centers of publishing, with significant publishing institutions also emerging in the United States from the mid-20th century onward. Publishing houses such as Seix Barral, Anagrama, or Alfaguara in Spain; Gallimard with the collection “La Croix du Sud” in France; Suhrkamp in Germany; Mondadori in Italy; or Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States have played a significant role in establishing Latin American literatures as world literature. In addition to actors in publishing and literary agencies, translation initiatives, the field of literary criticism and academia, as well as international literary organizations, literary awards, and honors such as the Nobel Prize in Literature, also contribute to the international recognition of Latin American literature as world literature. Accordingly, any discussion of the history of Latin American literature as world literature requires a reflection on how the centers of denomination have developed over the centuries: when and where did the systems originate that caused or significantly shaped the reception of literary works from Latin America as “world literature”? And what enabled certain works, but not others, to assert themselves and become part of the canon of world literature as it is known in the 21st century? Painting a picture of the history of Latin American literature as world literature at decisive points of its crystallization allows reflecting on the making of world literature from Latin America. In Jorge Luis Borges, we encounter the first Latin American author whose work was negotiated as world literature on the strength of its broad international impact. When a group of Spanish-speaking authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa found world renown during the so-called Boom of the mid-to-late 20th century and achieved overwhelming success in the international book market for the first time in the history of Latin American literature, the decisive factors were not merely the distinctiveness of a new literary style or the realities they portrayed. Above all, it was the compatibility of their “exotic” themes with European models and reception patterns that made the Boom novels eligible for the label of “world literature.” In addition, all of the successful authors of the Boom were, without exception, men, raising questions about gender as a factor of exclusion. The history of Brazilian literature that was not part of the Boom differs significantly from that of the literatures of Spanish-speaking America, particularly with regard to the treatment of Brazilian Portuguese in the context of translation and circulation. Jorge Amado and João Guimarães Rosa became more widely known in the middle of the 20th century and stand for this own publication history, just like the author Clarice Lispector, who was only belatedly more widely recognized and experienced a new, intensified reception in the 21st century. With regard to Portuguese- and Spanish-language literature from Latin America, it can be currently stated that the 21st century has developed new terms in which to pose the question of the connections between Latin American literature and world literature by considering postglobal developments and working out innovative South-South perspectives on the question.

A Latin Americanist Looks at Early American Literature Rolena Adorno (bio) In her letter inviting me to participate in this anniversary commemoration, Early American Literature editor Sandra Gustafson wrote: “I see this anniversary as an opportunity to reflect on the maturation of the area of literary studies covered by EAL and to build ties to neighboring fields.” Coming from the neighboring field of colonial Latin American literary studies, I was delighted to accept her invitation because, nearly forty years ago, I had answered a call for papers for an MLA convention panel on Native American studies. As I recall, the panel’s sponsor was the the MLA-affiliated Association for Studies in American Indian Literatures. In any case, my proposal was rejected on the basis that I had my “own” division, that is, “Latin American Literature before 1900,” under whose rubric Native American studies that focused on areas south of the Rio Grande could be entertained. (I was working at the time on the account of an extraordinary native Andean writer from Spanish colonial Peru, whose manuscript work remains part of my scholarly signature to this day.)1 Revealing the dilemma of inclusion versus exclusion that we debated in the 1970s, the Native Americanist panel’s topic was: “Is American Indian Literature a Separate and Distinct Literature of This Continent or Is It a Sub-Branch of American Literature, an Ethnic Sub-Branch, or Are There Two Bodies of Indian Literature, the Quick and the Dead?” (Program of the 1976 MLA 1023). Had my paper proposal been accepted, I would have answered that American Indian Literature was not a “separate and distinct literature of this [North American] continent” but that it could include not only Mexico, which sits on the North American continent, but also Central and South America, too. Yet a project in “my” field, the creation of the journal Latin American Indian Literatures, affirmed the tendency of that time, which was to keep separate the geographical and therefore cultural [End Page 41] areas of study of Native American cultures. In short, the exclusionary tactic was practiced in the hemispheric South as well as the North. Yet in the period that extends from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the objective was not to exclude from consideration but rather, for the first time, to identify, highlight, and make worthy of study areas of cultural production that had been ignored. These efforts to “create space” characterize scholarly initiatives for all Americanist literatures (Anglo-, African-, Asian-, Latin-, Latino-, and so forth) of the late 1960s and 1970s, when women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies also emerged. Suzanne Bost has observed, with respect to her areas of scholarship in postmodern and feminist theories and Chicana/o studies: “After all, the intellectual formations and identities I study did not exist prior to 1848, maybe not even prior to 1968” (235).2 Today’s ongoing efforts to be both precise and inclusive are exemplified by the evolution of my principal division’s name from “Latin American Literature before 1900” to “Latin American Colonial Literature” to the current “Latin American Colonial Literatures,” to the proposed “Colonial and Pre-Columbian Latin American Literature.” The current mission statement of Early American Literature supports the same goals of precision and inclusiveness: Early American Literature, published three times a year, is the journal of the Society of Early Americanists and of the MLA’s Division on American Literature to 1800. Its province is American literature through the early national period (about 1830). Founded in 1965, EAL invites work treating Native American traditional expressions, colonial Ibero-American literature from North America, colonial American Francophone writings, Dutch colonial, and German American colonial literature as well as writings in English from British America and the US. While honoring the journal’s current inclusion of “colonial Ibero-American literature from North America,” I want to go back in time to highlight some of the studies in the nearly fifty years of EAL, from 1967 to the present, that track its engagement with the Ibero-American world. Several of those essays slip farther south than the North American continent (which, we must always remind ourselves, includes Mexico...

Postcolonialism is briefly presented as an academic approach in contemporary literary studies, with two opposite currents as far as the study of Latin American literature is concerned. The first constructs the relationship between Latin American and European literature as oppositional, whereas the second focuses in a more harmonious way on their interrelationship. It is argued that both currents cluster around a divergent reading of the ‘cannibal’ metaphor. The article then centres on the position of the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, who covers both postcolonial tendencies. This is shown by focusing upon a specific case, his early novella Aura. Attention is paid to the tension between Europe and Latin America, both on a literary level (intertextuality) and on a historical level (colonization and nation-building).

Reviewed by: The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier Anne Garland Mahler Birkenmaier, Anke. The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. 224 pp. In The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars, Anke Birkenmaier resituates discussions of race and culture in the 1930s-40s in Latin America within the rise of anthropology in the region. Spanning broad geography and texts published in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, each of the four chapters centers on an anthropologist-writer: Fernando Ortiz of Cuba, French Americanist Paul Rivet, Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre. The book considers not only the less frequently studied works of these writers but also the networks and debates within anthropology through which each writer formulated his notions of race and cultural contact. In this way, Birkenmaier introduces readers to a number of lesser-known figures within these heavyweights' broader professional milieus. The four writers that structure the study, as Birkenmaier points out, "were temporary or permanent exiles" in the interwar years, a condition that "instigated new reflections on one's own culture and that of 'others'" (9). They all participated in an exchange among Latin American, US, and French Americanist anthropologists that would forge the "Americanist years," a reference to Paul Rivet's French Société des Américanistes that would profoundly influence the development of the discipline in Latin America. These anthropologists engaged in a hemispheric and comparatist dialogue, employed a varied range of methods, and founded their approach in an anti-racist politics intended to undermine the rise of fascism. As transnational American studies continues to gain ground within our contemporary academic sphere, Birkenmaier's study details a deep history of interdisciplinary methodology and political engagement that undergirds contemporary hemispheric approaches to cultural studies and critical race theory. Through the meticulous tracing of the formation of Latin Americanist applied cultural anthropology in the interwar years––such as in the founding of museums, the creation of journals, critical editions, excavations, conferences, and lecture series––the book's intellectual history of anthropology informs its insightful readings of both well-known and understudied texts. The writers at the center of the book, Birkenmaier argues, practiced the discipline in unique ways, relying on linguistic analysis and the study of colonial chronicles and writing in a style that "straddled the pamphlet and the scientific essay, the novel and the political speech" (144). Their fusion of humanistic and scientific approaches requires an equally interdisciplinary critical lens, which Birkenmaier––who significantly is a literary and cultural studies scholar and not an anthropologist––readily provides. Known [End Page 693] for scholarship on Caribbean literature and Latin American avant-gardes in such studies as Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings After 1989 (2011, co-ed. Esther Whitfield) and Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina (2006), which was awarded the 2007 Premio Iberoamericano from the Latin American Studies Association, Birkenmaier's recent book exhibits an innovative cultural studies approach to the intellectual history of a social science discipline. In this way, The Specter of Races pushes against an Area Studies model of Latin Americanist scholarship––in which humanities-based literature departments and social science programs are kept separate––returning to a moment of scholarly "synergy among literature, linguistics, the visual arts, anthropology, and history in regard to Latin America" (144). Perhaps surprisingly, Paul Rivet, the intellectual on which the book hinges, is also the least known of the four within Latin Americanism. Rivet's comparatist model of material cultures, or "diffusionism," through which he studied American "culture areas," greatly influenced the development of a Latin Americanist regionalist anthropology (17). Birkenmaier links Rivet's impact in Latin America to the study of Chaco indigenous people in 1930s Tucumán, Argentina by Rivet's student Alfred Métraux. The book also considers Rivet's exile in Mexico and Colombia, where politically-engaged indigenista intellectuals criticized Rivet for his tendency to relegate the study of indigenous cultures to a removed and forgotten past. Whereas Rivet is lesser known, the chapters on widely-studied writers Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz...

Reviewed by: Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America, and: Women's Voice in Latin American Literature, and: Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende Sharon Magnarelli Susan Bassnett , ed. Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America. London: Zed, 1990. 202 pp. $49.95 cloth; pb. $15.00. Naomi Lindstrom . Women's Voice in Latin American Literature. Washington: Three Continents, 1989. 159 p. $26.00 cl; pb $16.00. Patricia Hart . Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende. Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989. 196 pp. $34.50. An eclectic group of essays, Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America "redevises" the map of Latin American creativity to include women and acknowledge the long line of gifted women, descended from Sor Juana, whose works are marked by "violence and sensuality, terror and feeling, the disgusting and the beautiful, knives and angels." Contrary to the subtitle of the collection, the creative women discussed in the thirteen essays are not limited to writers but rather include filmmakers and one woman (Victoria Ocampo) perhaps better known as a publisher and cultural patron than as a writer. The quality and intent of the essays varies: some aim to provide an historical overview or personal insight into the life of the woman; others proffer sophisticated analyses of works. Most include useful bibliographies. Of particular note are the essays by Furnival, Díaz-Diocaretz, Bruce-Novoa, Ordóñez, and Boyle. Furnival analyzes Rosario Castellanos's stories as representations of society's juxtaposition of reality and myth that is sustained by the process of naturalization (the discourse of common sense). Such a juxtaposition produces the complex web of power relations that constitute patriarchal systems and the asymmetrical relations between the sexes. Continuing along similar theoretical lines in her essay on women poets, Díaz-Diocaretz notes, "the subject position in the poetics of the lyric by women is a conjunction of the speaker(s) and the world vision(s) in complex webs of overt or covert relationships in which the poet is evaluating the world of reality which has formed her and which she has chosen to represent textually." Although Díaz-Diocaretz does not assume that all women poets resist patriarchy, she finds a shared (but ever evolving) continuity of intertextuality. Defining "woman's voice" as "a distinctive set of discursive strategies [determined by the poet's subject positions] rather than a biologically determined characteristic," she concludes that the contemporary poets she discusses "develop and potentialize what could be called a woman's register, against the modality of the practice of writing and the semantic domain of hegemonic and patriarchal subject matters." Bruce-Novoa reads Poniatowska's works as an attempt to present the voice of the oppressed that, when not silenced by the dominant group, may express itself in the language and forms of that group and reflect its interiorization of a repressive ideology. For him, Poniatowska's first-person narratives (where women speak) are a complex play of the "apparently sincere text of the narrator, who to some extent incarnates the ideologemes of the dominant culture, and the ironic subtext of the feminist author, who infiltrates the character's monologue to subvert [End Page 284] it and, in the end, transform it into a dialogical space." Applying these generalizations to Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, he convincingly concludes that the author's strategy was "to create a text and simultaneously undermine it with contradictions that her character Beloff lives, expresses within her written communiqués, but does not consciously confront." Ordóñez considers three Colombian women writers from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Soledad Acosta, Elisa Mujica, and Marvel Moreno, who have been omitted from the Colombian literary history that "com[es] from and [is] geared to a world of exclusively masculine values." Boyle studies the works of Argentine dramatist, Griselda Gambaro, whose theatre is fraught with constant friction between what we see and what we hear: "the words that tell us that violence exists and the words that deny its existence are both revealed as barriers to our awareness of the violence around us." Less ambitious in its scope, Women's Voice studies the works of four Latin...

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 301 Voice-overs: Transiten and Latin American Literature SUNY Press, 2002 Edited by Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz Voice-overs is divided into three sections, which correspond to a tripartite division of labor: writing, translation, and criticism. Part I, "Writers on Translation," includes essays by, or transcribed conversations with, fourteen Latin American and U.S. Latino authors; Part II, "Translating Latin America," contains essays by six translators; and Part III is comprised of eleven critical essays. Although somewhat artificial (many of the contributors are active in all three fields), this format allows for the discussion of key questions from several distinct perspectives. The authors included in Part I are, in order of appearance, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel GarcÃ-a Márquez, Diana Bellessi, Luisa Futoransky, Rosario Ferré, Junot DÃ-az, Cristina GarcÃ-a, Rolando Hinojosa-Smidi, Nélida Piñón, Ariel Dorfman, Cristina Peri Rossi, Tomás Eloy MartÃ-nez, and Ricardo Piglia. The selections range from formal essays that attend to theoretical concerns to informal, idiosyncratic monologues. On the whole, these authors express profound appreciation for the translator's craft. Some highlights include the pairing of Borges's essay "The Homeric Versions," in which rhe author affirms the value of reading translations through a sophisticated critique of the notion of the "definitive text," with Cortázar s characteristically ludic musings on accidents of translation. Also of interest are the discussions with contemporary authors. Bicultural writers Junot Diaz, Cristina GarcÃ-a, Ariel Dorfman, Rosario Ferré and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith address the difficulties inherent in translating the hybrid language of their texts into "standard" Spanish. In Part III, Israel Reyes's case study of the Spanish translation of Garcia's novel The Agüero Sisters examines these issues in detail, as Reyes explores the gaps in the translation of this interlingual text. Several contributors discuss the implications of gender difference for translation. Citing the historical exclusion of women from cultural life, Diana Bellessi advocates a woman-centered ttanslation practice. Others, such as Cristina Peri Rossi and Nélida Piñón, imagine a hybrid gender sensibility constructed through language. Francine Masiello's suggestive critical essay (in Part III) on women writers' use of translation as a metaphor for alterity serves as a complement and counterpoinr to these authors' views. One shortcoming of this section is that the editors do not explain the selection criteria by which the authors were chosen, which raises inevitable questions about inclusion/exclusion. Nor do the editors discuss their own participation in the translation of interviews, which seems a curious omission. The contributors to Part II include Margaret Sayers Peden, Gregory Rabassa, Suzanne Jill Levine, James Hoggard, Eliot Weinberger, and John Felstiner. The selections are uniformly wellwritten and make fascinating reading. Levine's essay on translating G. Cabrera Infante conveys a sense of the creative dynamic at work in the best literary partnerships, as do James Hoggard's reflections on the intersections between translation, creative wriring, and literary scholarship. The essays by Sayers Peden and Weinberger are particularly fine; both are marked by a balance of insight, erudition , and humor and a refreshing lack of pretense . John Felstiner's discussion of conflicting approaches to the translation of verse draws on various English renderings of Neruda's poetry. The essays in Part III cover a wide range of topics. Several contributors consider the complex interplay of political, economic, and literary factors that have conditioned the translation of Latin American literature. Maarten Steenmeijer's comparative analysis of publishing trends suggests that Latin American literature was embraced earlier in Europe than in the U.S. Maria Eugenia Mudrovcic examines the role of the Center for InterAmerican Relations in the formation of the Latin American literary canon in the Cold War era. Steven F. White proposes that more attention be paid to the politics of translation when teaching Latin American literarure to U.S. students. Gerald Martin problematizes the translation of culture through an analysis of the English versions of tides of Garcia Márquez's work. 302 Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Orher studies focus on Latin American writers ' textual engagements with cultural translation. Edmundo Paz-Soldán explores the...

Although glaciated basins are usually associated with nonproductive, poorly sorted strata, hydrocarbons occur in several late Paleozoic glaciated basins of central and southern South America. In Bolivia, the Chaco-Tarija basin has commercial production from more than 30 fields in glacially influenced submarine channel systems (Palmar, Santa Cruz, and Bermejo fields) that accounts for about 60% of current national reserves. Correlative deposits in Argentina host the Campo Duran and Madrejones oil fields. In Brazil, the Parana basin has significant but as yet subcommercial gas shows in thick marine turbidite sandstones of the glacially influenced Itarare Group. The Chaco-Parana basin of Argentina is one of the largest onshore targets for exploration in South America, but it is virtually untested. Glacially influenced foreland basins of Argentina (Tepuel and Paganzo-Maliman) contain complex glacigenic stratigraphies of interbedded tillites and poorly prospective sandstones. In contrast, the glacially influenced marine infills of intracratonic basins in Brazil (Parana), Bolivia, and Argentina (Chaco-Tarija and Chaco-Parana) contain thick sequences of pebbly mudstones and regionally extensive reservoir quality sandstones. The key to the occurrence of good reservoirs and associated trapping mechanisms in these intracratonic basins is the interplay of sediment supply, regional tectonics, and relative sea level changes. Glacial scouring of extensive cratons by ice sheets resulted in the delivery of huge volumes of glaciofluvial sand to deltas. Structural control of drainage patterns on the craton by basement lineaments resulted in persistent sediment sources and depocenters. Frequent earthquake activity along reactivated basement lineaments resulted in downslope mass flow of deltaic sediments and the deposition of thick, amalgamated sand turbidites (reservoirs). Pebbly mudstone seals most likely record higher relative sea levels, resulting from basin subsidence, and deposition from suspended sediment plumes and icebergs. Source rocks are provided by Devonian and Permian shales. This model may be applicable to other parts of Gondwana that contain thick, prospective sandstones in glacially influenced intracratonic basins.

Reviewed by: Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen Benjamin Fraser Antebi, Susan, and Beth E. Jörgensen, eds. Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies. Albany: SUNY P, 2016. Pp. 290. ISBN 978-1-43845-967-7. EDITORIAL POLICY: Hispania publishes reviews of selected books and electronic media in the following categories: Pan-Hispanic/Luso-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Studies; Linguistics, Language, and Media; and Fiction and Film. Publishers and authors should submit their materials for possible selection to the Book/Media Review Editor, Domnita Dumitrescu, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90032. Submitted materials will not be returned to publishers or authors, even if they are not selected for review. Members of the AATSP who wish to be considered as reviewers should upload their information at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hispan and send their CV to the Book/Media Review Editor at ddumitrescu@aatsp.org. Hispania will not accept unsolicited reviews and does not publish journal numbers, book notices, or reviews of works more than two years old. Due to the number of works that correspond to Hispania’s broad scope, not all requests to review specific items can be granted. We especially encourage, however, requests to review film and other media resources. An invitation to review does not guarantee publication. All reviews are evaluated by anonymous readers and publication decisions are based upon their comments and the discretion of the editors. A volume quite aware of its unique positioning, Libre Acceso is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American disability studies. The importance of this positioning cannot be understated. The collection succeeds by staging an “encounter between two complex and vigorously debated disciplines: Latin American literary, film and cultural studies, and disability studies” (9). Wonderfully, it performs a “decolonization of disability studies” that is quite necessary (19) and opens “an interdisciplinary and transregional dialogue on disability studies” (20). The division of the edited volume into four sections suggests a thematic coherence that, in all honesty, is at odds with the true originality of the individual chapters, each of which might otherwise stand alone in any number of top-tier journal publications. But then again, if these essays were scattered throughout the disciplinary landscape of the wider field of Hispanic studies—where disability studies perspectives still do not receive the attention they deserve—readers would be unlikely to find them. Libre Acceso is a powerful call to Hispanist scholars to explore disability studies themes, but given its publication in English, it is simultaneously a call to disability studies scholars to see that the ‘global turn’ called for by the likes of Stuart Murray and Clare Barker—among others—is well underway. The contributions that bookend the volume illustrate its unique position at the intersection of two fields. The first chapter after the introduction, “Blind Spot: Notes on Reading Blindness” is written by Lina Meruane, an acclaimed Chilean novelist who here self-reflexively considers her own approach to writing. The epilogue titled “#YoSoy” is written by Robert McRuer, a renowned disability studies scholar rooted in an English department who here revisits the book’s contents in light of an expanding Latin American and ultimately global perspective on disability. The chapters in-between take on cultural production from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, but do so dialoguing with what often seems to be required reading for disability studies scholars: not only McRuer, but also Michel Bérubé, David Bolt, Thomas Couser, Lennard Davis, Nirmala Erevelles, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rod Michalko, David T. Mitchell, Michael Oliver, Jasbir Puar, Ato Quayson, Carrie Sandahl, Tom Shakespeare, [End Page 137] Tobin Siebers, Sharon L. Snyder, Tanya Titchkosky and more. The contributions deftly navigate this disciplinary combination in their own way, incorporating the work of well-known and lesser-known names (Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriela Brimmer, Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez, Roberto Bolaño, João Guimarães Rosa, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio José Ponte, Miriam Alves, Mario Bellatin and Carmen Boullosa), and also a selection of recent...