Century Latin Research Articles

History, Mythology, and 20th Century Latin American Fiction

The history of the Americas from the colonial period is marked by a large influx of persons from Europe and Africa. Fiction in 20th Century Latin America is marked by ties to the Chronicles and the history of human melding in the Americas, with a natural flow of social and religious syncretism that shapes the unique literary aesthetics of its literatures as may be witnessed in representative authors of genuine merit from different regions of Latin America.

Togipurium o togipura?Sondaggi lessicali tra Oriente e Occidente

This paper focuses on the term togipur[- - -], partially preserved in a second century Latin certificate on papyrus coming from Egypt. The word appears at the beginning of the text, where it alludes to the documentary typology, and refers to a declaration in which a Iulianus states that his son has assumed the toga pura. So far the term was thought to be unparalleled in the Latin lexicon as a whole and was interpreted by the editors of the papyrus as a neologism of the scribe or, conversely, as a common substantive otherwise unattested. However, some Latin and bilingual lexica of medieval tradition gloss a similar substantive, togipurium, with the interpretamentum toga pura. The present paper has three aims. First, it lists the occurrences of togipurium and, when possible, examines the relation between them; secondly, it considers the meaning(s) of the term togipurium; and thirdly, it proposes a new restoration for the substantive partially preserved in the papyrus.

El archivo de fin de siglo XIX en la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea

Late 20th and early 21st century Latin American literature rereads and problematizes late 19th-century Latin American Modernism. This article examines some of these genealogies in order to analyze the significance of this literary dialogue in our present time.

Lauda Sion, Salvatorem Sequence and its Polish Translations in the Source Songbooks

Research on the sequence Lauda Sion, Salvatorem dedicated to the Corpus Christi ceremony, allowed us to find and analyze over a dozen translations into Polish of this 13th century Latin pattern. It consists of 12 pairs of stanzas, with their parity – according to the poetics of the sequence – is emphasized by the conformity of a sound of the final verses of each pair of the stanza and the remaining verses are connected by adjoining rhymes, usually feminine, accurate, with aab + ccb scheme. We know most translators by name: Stanisław Grochowski, Jan Białobocki, Stanisław Serafin Jagodyński, Father Ignacy Hołowiński, Father Tadeusz Karyłowski, Jadwiga Gamska-Łempicka, Leopold Staff, several translations are anonymous. All Polish translations agree with the original on the content. However, differences appear in the form, structure of the poetic sequence, number of stanzas and in metrics. The common knowledge of the sequence Lauda Sion, Salvatorem, was probably the fruit of the great Eucharistic devotion in Poland, which was marked already in the 13th century, when the Church introduced the feast of Corpus Christi and lasted for the next centuries, up to the 20th century.

La transition latino-romane : problèmes de la reconstruction

SummaryProto-Romance linguistic transformations are partially hidden by the archaic style that char- acterizes Late Latin documents. However, these texts (e. g. chronicles) permit insights into the changes undergone by the oral language, because authors and scribes can reproduce unconsciously their own speech habits, already different from Classical standard. In our presentation, this curious duality is shown by the example of noun declension, which is undermined, but not yet completely eliminated, in 7th century Latin. A comparison is made between the so-called Fredegarius, a Merovingian chronicle, and an early French poem, the Eulalia Sequence, which manifests the last stage of the declension, just before its disappearance. The morphological change has its counterpart in the restructuration of the sentence: the neighbourhood of subject and verb becomes usual in the surface structure, and certain limitations are im- posed upon the freedom of word order. Thus, the reconstruction process we propose has two aspects: it is necessary to describe the diastratic variation at different moments of the history of Late Latin, and, on the other hand, the results need to be compared with the Early Romance linguistic systems. In this manner, reconstruction can show the coexistence of tradition and innovation in the language, a necessary condition of its normal functioning.

El feminicidio como el otro tipo de homicidio doloso basado en género en América Latina

<p>A partir de los años noventa del siglo XX, la región latinoamericana experimenta una oleada interminable de los crímenes dirigidos contra las mujeres. Una de las representaciones más emblemáticas de esta “epidemia” de violencia constituyen los feminicidios. Se estima que en América Latina cada día mueren aproximadamente doce mujeres por causa de su género. Según las estadísticas criminales, el país con una tasa más alta de feminicidios sigue siendo México. Aunque las autoridades mexicanas, después de la sentencia de Campo Algodonero de 16 de noviembre de 2009, fueron obligadas de implementar unas políticas públicas orientadas a erradicar todas las formas de violencia contra las mujeres, el número de feminicidios, nutrido por la impunidad, el narcotráfico y la corrupción, no para de crecer. En el presente trabajo se intentará explicar varios conceptos, tanto jurídicos como sociológicos, que se esconden bajo el término de feminicidio. Una atención muy especial será prestada al modo de hablar sobre las víctimas y los victimarios de este crimen en los medios de comunicación.</p>

History of technology in nineteenth and twentieth century Latin America

AbstractThis essay focuses on recent trends in the history of technology in nineteenth and twentieth century Latin America. It emphasizes the English‐language historiography, especially economic, social, cultural, and political approaches. The essay argues that historians, using sociocultural and political discourses that often stress local and national innovations, inequities, and political wrangling, need to work in greater dialog with economic historians and science and technology scholars in order to create much needed synthesis works for the field.

Text alignment in early printed books combining deep learning and dynamic programming

We describe a technique for transcript alignment in early printed books by using deep models in combination with dynamic programming algorithms. Two object detection models, based on Faster R-CNN, are trained to locate words. We first train an initial model to recognize generic words and hyphens by using information about the number of words in text lines. Using the model prediction on pages with a line-by-line ground-truth annotation is available, we train a second model able to detect landmark words. The alignment is then based on the identification of landmark words in pages where we only know the text corresponding to zones in the page. The proposed technique is evaluated on a publicly available digitization of the Gutenberg Bible while the transcription is based on the Vulgata, a late 4th century Latin translation of the Bible.

Art and Our Surrounds: Emergent and Residual Languages

This essay undertakes a review of recent books by T.J. Demos ( Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016) and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017)) and Jens Andermann ( Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (Lands Entranced: Art and Nature after Landscape, 2018)). Demos and Andermann participate in the paradigm shift taking place under the name of eco-criticism, forging connections between the debates around environmental crisis and the fields in which they have written and published previously - art criticism and visual culture and Latin American literary and cultural studies, respectively. Both authors take on the challenge of thinking through the perceptual and conceptual habits that have dominated a relationship to our environment under capitalist modernity (such as the concept of landscape) and how artistic practices might be said to rework those habits. While Demos maps recent efforts to engage ecological concerns and “decolonize nature” across the globe, Andermann looks back to the twentieth century Latin American archive, constructing a local genealogy that harbors an ecological and political thinking that anticipates what is now lived as global crisis; their projects intersect in contemporary Latin American activist art that has gained enough attention to figure as part of a global circuit. The review considers the overlapping points as well as the striking disjuncture in both projects in relation to the different knowledge formations, archives and languages from which each author speaks.

Circulation et portée de l’apocryphe Interrogatio Iohannis

The apocryphal Latin text Interrogatio Iohannis was the “ catechism” of the Cathars of Concorezzo. This written work is particularly well contextualised. It is preserved in two Medieval manuscripts, attached to the end of a xiith century Latin New Testament (Viennese manuscript) and being part of a collection intended for the Inquisitors (Dôle manuscript). Several antiheretical Italian treatises provide information on the Cathar bishop Nazaire, who possessed this secret written treatise imported from Bulgaria towards the end of the xiith century. Finally, the evidence of Anna Comnena (Alexiade) and the treatise against the heretics of Euthymius Zigabenos allows one to recognise the close relationship between the myths of the Interrogatio and those of the Bogomils of Byzantium from the beginning of the XIIth century.

Three waves of the systemic crisis in Latin America

At the turn of the second and third decades of the XXI century Latin America was swept by waves of a systemic crisis; once again, Latin American countries entered a zone of increased turbulence. A characteristic feature of the current stage of crisis shocks was a test of the strength of all existential structures of the region’s mode of life (already experiencing bad times) with the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus epidemic, which put a number of Latin American countries on the brink of survival, arose in the context of a worsening economic condition, close to the collapse of the social situation, political instability, and emphasized the existing and emerging “pain points” in the countries of the region. Thus, in Latin America a closely intertwined triune space of systemic failure has formed: an economic collapse, an aggravation of the socio-political situation and problem areas in the field of healthcare. The article describes these three components of the systemic crisis: it analyzes the economic collapse of modern Latin American populism, draws a social landscape against which mass protests in 2019 developed and, finally, the reasons for the region getting into the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic are revealed, despite the maximum geographical distance of Latin America from the focus of the onset of coronavirus.

Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva: Autobiography, Exile, Violence

Abstract Considered “the great witch of Brazilian literature”, acclaimed as the best woman-writer of Jewish origin and the perfect example of an exquisite reconfiguration of European modernist ideas, Clarice Lispector is a fascinating author. This is obvious since her first novel Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart, 1943), a book that was awarded several literary prizes in Brazil, even if afterwards the text would be often ignored within the critical studies dedicated to Lispector. Compared to Borges and Kafka and even to the narrative strategies used by Virginia Woolf (apparently influenced by James Joyce’s stream of consciousness, even if Lispector underlined that she had not read Joyce’s creation much later) her book entitled Agua viva (1973) represents a perfect example of a very special kind of aesthetic experiment, underlying the importance of art (painting or literature) in its protagonist’s life. Without being precisely an autobiography, this book is obviously influenced by the author’s life and work, also expressing Lispector’s ideas on two important issues of 20th century Latin American literature: exile and violence.

In Search of the Sacred Book: Religion and the Contemporary Latin American Novel. By Aníbal González. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 244 pages.

This study on religion and the contemporary Latin American novel traces the presence of the sacred starting with Federico Gamboa's Santa (1903) and ending with Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes (1998), placing the narratives discussed within the vast panorama of Western literature and thought. The author acknowledges that the relationship between religion and the novel may seem paradoxical "given the markedly secular nature of prose fiction in Western culture" (3). Yet, elements such as magic, the supernatural, wizards, among others, "bring it closer to the sacred" (4). The book also includes new readings of works by Borges, Bombal, Carpentier, Rulfo, Cortázar, Lezama Lima, García Márquez, Poniatowska, and Fernando Vallejo. Scholar Aníbal González offers a superb contextualization of 20th century Latin American literature within the tradition of Western literature and thought. His study is a must read for critics of Latin American literature and culture.

In Search of the Sacred Book: Religion and the Contemporary Latin American Novel. By Aníbal González. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 244 pages.

This study on religion and the contemporary Latin American novel traces the presence of the sacred starting with Federico Gamboa's Santa (1903) and ending with Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes (1998), placing the narratives discussed within the vast panorama of Western literature and thought. The author acknowledges that the relationship between religion and the novel may seem paradoxical "given the markedly secular nature of prose fiction in Western culture" (3). Yet, elements such as magic, the supernatural, wizards, among others, "bring it closer to the sacred" (4). The book also includes new readings of works by Borges, Bombal, Carpentier, Rulfo, Cortázar, Lezama Lima, García Márquez, Poniatowska, and Fernando Vallejo. Scholar Aníbal González offers a superb contextualization of 20th century Latin American literature within the tradition of Western literature and thought. His study is a must read for critics of Latin American literature and culture.

A Subcontinent in Enduring Ties with an Enclosed Ocean (c. 1000–1500 C.E.)

The waning influence of a Eurocentric paradigm paves the way for a close look at the maritime situation of the Indian subcontinent in the Indian Ocean during the first half of the second millennium C.E. Situated at the centre of the Indian Ocean, the two sea-boards of the subcontinent, along with Sri Lanka, appear in a wide variety of sources—literary (including letters of Jewish merchants), epigraphic, archaeological (including shipwreck archaeology)—as sites of vibrant commerce and cultural transactions across the sea. Nomenclatures and the historical geography of the Indian Ocean also form parts of the discussion. This essay pays particular attention to the exchange in daily necessity commodities, including plant products. A survey of ports dotting both the coasts of the subcontinent suggests the dynamic character of premier ports, shaped by their relation with subsidiary ports and their respective hinterlands and forelands. The paper highlights the role of seafaring groups, especially the ship-owners, active in and beyond South Asia. The available evidence irrefutably demonstrates that Indic people did take to sea during pre-modern times, thereby driving home the inefficacy of the taboos on seafaring in Sanskrit normative texts. To what extent the Indian Ocean experienced political contestations has been discussed in the light of a 14th century Latin Crusade tract. The advent of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean in 1498 did not signal the Age of Discoveries in the Indian Ocean in the light of seafaring in this maritime zone during 1000–1500 CE phase.

An Index of Latin American Populism

This paper studies the effectof commodity prices and economic crisis on the 21st century Latin American left-leaning populism. Our results shows that higher economic prices are correlated with more populism conditional on countries already being under a populist regime. We do not have conclusive statistical evidence of the effect of economic crisis on populist regimes.

Existencial Poetics in the 19th Century Latin America

Typically, the origin story of Existentialism has depicted Latin America’s contributions as subsequent and tributary to its European counterpart. Nevertheless, a select few critics have approached this history in Hispanic America from a chronologically inclusive perspective, by calling attention to an Existential Poetics in modernismo. This article expands the borders of Existential Poetics to fashion a Latin American literary imaginary. Given the work already done on Rubén Darío and José Martí, both of whom have been studied independently, my analysis will be collective, favoring philopoetic works by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Julián del Casal, José Asunción Silva, and João Cruz e Sousa. The purpose of examining Hispanic-American poets in conjunction with a Brazilian is to accentuate the Pan-American quality of this Existentialism avant la lettre. As I will discuss, all these poems deal with a crisis of irrelevance and overtly question being in the world, classic motifs of Existentialism. Together, these poems allow for the synchronized inclusion of Latin American voices to the universal history of Existentialism, an approached not explicitly carried out by most philosophical and literary historiographers.

La Oratio in matritensi gymnasio, ad cathedram Litteraturae latinae obtinendam (1848). Alfredo Adolfo Camús relee a Marco Antonio Mureto y a Nicolás Funcio

En 1848, Alfredo Adolfo Camús, quien llegará a ser el profesor más importante para la enseñanza de la Literatura clásica en la España del XIX, oposita a la cátedra que va a desempeñar durante decenios en la Universidad Central de Madrid. Nuestro objetivo en este trabajo es el estudio de su ejercicio de oposición, la Oratio ad cathedram Litteraturae latinae obtinendam, redactado en latín y conservado en el Archivo General de la Administración del Estado. Nuestro principal hallazgo ha sido el establecimiento de las dos fuentes literarias que lo alimentan: el exordio se basa en la reescritura de un discurso del humanista Marco Antonio Mureto (De laudibus litterarum) y el desarrollo del tema, la vida y obra de Silio Itálico, reutiliza la prosa de un erudito del siglo XVIII: Nicolás Funcio (De imminenti Latinae linguae senectute). En suma, hemos logrado valorar el significado histórico de esta Oratio de Camús a la hora de observar cómo en ella se conjuga la oratoria latina del siglo XVI, fruto del cultivo de la perfección del latín, con la erudición literaria del XVIII, que aún se refería a la literatura latina en términos de Latinae litterae o Historia Latinae linguae.

Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910) by Vanesa Miseres

Reviewed by: Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910) by Vanesa Miseres Natalie Love Miseres, Vanesa. Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910). Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2017. 240 pp. ISBN: 978-14-6963-580-4. Mujeres en tránsito provides an innovative, multifaceted study of the travel narratives of four female writers who ventured to South America from Europe, travelled within their home territory of South America, or departed from the region to explore Europe and the United States during the transitory period of nation formation in nineteenth century Latin America. These writers include the French Peruvian Flora Tristan, the Argentines Juana Manuela Gorriti and Eduarda Mansilla, and the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner. According to Miseres, while these authors of dissimilar backgrounds write under different models and travel to diverse places for distinct motives, what connects them is their "imaginario transnacional" that allows them to challenge predominate notions of national identity in turn of the century Latin America (14). Rather than defining the nation as a homogenous entity with clearly established cultural, geographical and political borders, Miseres shows how these female travellers writing from the margins develop a more complex vision of a nation composed of heterogeneous identities and fluid boundaries that permit contact with diverse regions, histories and voices. By describing these women as "in transit," Miseres does not simply refer to the displacement of these authors from one geographical place to another, but the way in which their travels place them in a continual movement between two or more cultures, leading them to negotiate identity on a personal, national and international level. In her discussion of Tristan's Peregrinaciones de una paria, Miseres describes how the author's voyage to Peru from her birth country of France to claim her paternal inheritance leads the author to envision herself as a "paria," an individual with an ambiguous national identity who lacks a full sense of belonging to one particular nation or another. According to Miseres, Tristan simultaneously identifies with and distances herself from her French and Peruvian nationalities as a strategy to expose the political inefficiencies of the Peruvian Republic, while highlighting opportunities for female agency. Upon clinging to her "yo europeo" Tristan establishes her authority as an outsider who sees behind the corruptness of Peru's educational, military and religious institutions (39). However, by reclaiming her South American origins, Tristan appeals to readers from the country and crafts a fictional bond with Peruvian women who share her transitory sense of identity and use it as a mechanism to subvert patriarchal control. By analyzing Gorriti's discourse on traveling within the South American homeland, Miseres displays how the author destabilizes dominant political ideologies of nineteenth century Argentina, while uncovering histories and voices marginalized by national projects that looked to unify the population under a homogenous identity. In her speech to El Club Literario de Lima, Gorriti utilizes the topic of traveling through "la tierra natal" to reject the hegemonic notion of the "Grand Tour," a trip made by the aristocratic youth to educate themselves in the high society of Europe (87). In the author's voyage to her home of Salta after a long exile in La tierra natal, [End Page 158] Gorriti challenges "the official history" of Argentina by evoking the country's colonial past, indigenous roots and political tensions between the Unitarians and Federalists (101). Finally, in Peregrinaciones de una alma triste, Gorriti reverses discriminatory classifications of gender, class and race established by the dominant sector through the liberating local travels of the female protagonist. Eduarda Mansilla travels from France to the United States with her diplomatic husband, placing her in a cultural, linguistic and political triangulation between Argentina, Europe and the United States. Miseres highlights Mansilla's transnational vision in Recuerdos de viaje by showing how the author authoritatively judges various aspects of United States society from a trained ideal of beauty and a series of "escenas de traducción," both of which are products of her elite Argentine status and knowledges acquired during her travels through Europe (137). From her European/South American perspective...

Geographies of Cuban Abstraction

Geographies of Cuban Abstraction Paloma Duong Abstraction, Twentieth Century Latin American Art, Cuban Abstract Art, Modernism in Visual Arts Abigail Mcewen. Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba. Yale UP, 2016, 272 pp. Dana Miller, editor. Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight. Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, 232 pp. The connection between Revolutionary Horizons and Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight can be said to be orthogonal—orthogonality being a core compositional principle of post-war abstraction. Both stories begin in Havana and come to age in the long 1950s. They are accounts of divergent geographies of Cuban abstraction in the visual arts but with multiple and concurrent tangential points of contact. McEwen's Revolutionary Horizons chronicles the pursuit of abstraction in the Cuban visual arts at a time of deep political unrest and ideologically charged aesthetic choices. Under the care of curator Dana Miller, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight accompanies the eponymous exhibit at the Whitney Museum for American Art with a collection of four texts and 82 color plates, profiling the lifelong oeuvre of the Cuban-born, New York-based abstract artist Carmen Herrera. The most comprehensive retrospective of Herrera's work to date, this is only the latest in an increasingly long list of events and materials—including a documentary—celebrating the rediscovery of her art. Revolutionary Horizons features the leading figures and debates underpinning the social history of abstraction in the Cuban visual arts of the 1950s. It argues that "while the politics of abstraction may appear superficially coincidental, in other words a mere product of historical circumstance, . . . they were in fact deeply imbricated within a historicist national discourse—cubanía—that provided both an idealist order and the grassroots impetus for action" (3). McEwen traces cubanía to an inaugural, more militant form of cultural nationalism obversely shaped by active resistance to US economic and military imperialism. In McEwen's exegesis, this cubanista temperament would be nurtured and transformed in the 1940s and 1950s by subsequent polemical engagements with notions like cosmopolitanism, gangsterism, consumerism, and Americanism. [End Page 219] This period witnesses the emergence of a second philosophical variant of cubanía, associated as a matter of course to Cuban writer José Lezama Lima and to the intellectual group around the journal Orígenes. This origenista view of culture—the pursuit of a quasi-mystical, transformative aesthetic grounded in teleological ontologies of the national—also runs through the Cuban abstractos profiled in the book, argues the author, albeit conceptually and ideologically adapted to these visual artists' more politically active endeavors. By historicizing cubanía, McEwen lays the groundwork for an interpretation of the situated politics of abstraction and outlines a comparative framework for the political engagement of three distinct generations of cultural vanguard. And though the author relies on Antoni Kapcia's descriptive terms of generational cultural nationalisms, her juxtaposition of these categories with the ideological clout of abstraction is a welcome correction to the otherwise reductive tendencies of Kapcia's taxonomies. These claims are advanced mainly through the story of Los Once, a group of painters and sculptors who emerged in the visual arts scene of Havana in the early 1950s. In this sense, McEwen's pioneer in-depth study of Los Once offers at least two paths for the reader to follow. One of these is the story of how Los Once combined the aesthetics of abstraction with a nationalist ethos and mobilized abstraction as a rebellious practice against the 1952 military coup and the seven-year-long dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista installed in its wake. McEwen's simultaneous contextualization and historicizing of Los Once's discourse of abstraction also tells a second story, ciphered in the understudied cultural activity of the Cuban state under Batista's rule. This frame of reference, in turn, will explain many of the factors surrounding the fate of Cuban abstraction after the 1959 revolution that unseated Batista. By bringing into relief the labor of art schools, exhibition venues, salons, critical fora, and innovative journals and magazines of the period, McEwen's archival diligence adds a largely unexplored layer of complexity to a cultural landscape in the throes of large-scale modernization projects. With this double-barrel approach...