Early Twentieth Century Latin American Research Articles

Structuring Boundaries: Inner Kingdoms and Global Empires in Early-Twentieth Century Latin American and Japanese Literatures

Structuring Boundaries: Inner Kingdoms and Global Empires in Early-Twentieth Century Latin American and Japanese Literatures

Corporeality in Early Twentieth-century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations by Bruce Dean Willis (review)

Reviewed by: Corporeality in Early Twentieth-century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations by Bruce Dean Willis Benjamin Fraser Willis, Bruce Dean. Corporeality in Early Twentieth-century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. 234. ISBN 978-11-3726-879-2. The purpose of Bruce Dean Willis’s most recent book is “to construct a comparative anatomy of body articulations among Latin American works” (1) from the 1920s and 1930s. Following naturally from his previous Aesthetics of Equilibrium: The Vanguard Poetics of Vicente Huidobro and Mario de Andrade (2011), Willis once again draws equally from authors from both Spanish America (Miguel Ángel Asturias, Óscar Cerruto, Oliverio Girondo, Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Icaza, and Teresa de la Parra) and Brazil (Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Patrícia Galvão, and Solano Trindade). The result is certainly an ambitious work that is just as expansive as it is analytical and writerly. [End Page 169] The word “writerly” is an apt descriptor for Corporeality in Early Twentieth-century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations, a critical work that also asserts the power and value of the writer’s style and craft. Willis’s unique literary vision and his clever use of language together carry the reader through what would seem to be so many disparate elements in the hands of another. In effect, this approach implicitly acknowledges why literature has the power to compel us so. The truth, Willis would have us realize, is that literary criticism need not be dry and sterile but may instead embody a style, a language of its own. Language itself is crucial to the content and form of Corporeality—as can be seen in the book’s subtitle, Body Articulations. “The verb to articulate,” writes Willis, “can mean both to connect and to cohere; articulations can be cohesions as well as connections” (2; original emphasis). This is the doubled insight that is persistently expressed throughout the book. Bodies together comprise a social language, and moreover, there can be no language without bodies. Appropriate attention is paid both to the literary text as itself an embodied act of linguistic expression and also to the textual representation of language(s), dialects, speech in general, and bodies/body parts, specifically. This premise allows for a number of striking phrasings that are not unrelated to Willis’s analytical goals, such as in the section of chapter 1 titled “Bed, Bath and the Great Beyond: Remodeling Desire with Manuel Bandeira” (53–66) or the conclusion’s “The Cannibal at Work: What’s on the Menu at Churrascaria Oswald” (166–76). But the author is also attentive to the way bodily concerns manifest themselves in more common language (e.g., metaphorical expressions such as ‘the body politic’ in chapter 3 [129–64] and the synecdoche involved in the equivalency between [spoken] language itself and the tongue in chapter 2 [81–127]). Throughout, attention placed on “verbal wizardry” of Huidobro (33), the “musicality” of the poetic language of Bandeira (53), or the “literarily affirmed Afro-Brazilian body” of Trinidade (68) builds toward asserting the value of criticism as itself also a creative act. Although Corporeality deals both with a wide selection of texts and an equally impressive range of themes pertaining to the intersection of language and the body—desire in Bandeira’s poetry, gender in Asturias’s Leyendas de Guatemala, class and politics in Galvão’s Parque Industrial, and Cerruto’s Aluvión de fuego, indigenous collectivities in Icaza’s Huasipungo, and race and ethnicity in Trinidade’s poetic corpus, centered around the Poemas Negros—the strength of the work lies in the way these themes intersect and overlap with each other. Less engaged readers or those preferring discussion of a single theme, for example, may find the transitions between such varied themes and topics to be unsettling. There is a clear preference for heterogeneity over monolithic truths, but of course here the medium is the message. Willis’s purposely eclectic approach does justice to the “connections and cohesions” suggested by the work’s subtitle, suggesting that the body and language cannot be studied as research specialties of their own in isolation from other topics. What most stood...

Corporeality in early twentieth-century Latin American literature: body articulations

Corporeality in early twentieth-century Latin American literature: body articulations

Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race And Hemispheric Citizenship in the United States. DAVID LUIS-BROWN: Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008

David-Luis Brown's meticulously researched Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race And Hemispheric Citizenship in the United States contributes much to the nascent but growing field of transnational and hemispheric studies. In this project, the author has produced an astute and imaginative analysis of interrelated, radical early twentieth-century Latin American and North American authors, texts, and movements. The book's scope and focus are ambitious and inventive. Indeed, the author posits crucial, substantive questions, employing a comparative interdisciplinary methodology with far-reaching implications. In doing so, his study advances and contributes to the continuing transformation of American Studies.

So That All Shall Know / Para que todos lo sepan

So That All Shall Know / Para que todos lo sepan

Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents

Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents. Robert M. Levine. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989. xi + 217 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. $72.50 (cloth). ISBN 0–8223–0883–5.

The Trained Eye: Photographs and Historical Context

Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver by PAUL YEE. Seattle, Wash. and Vancouver, Can.: University of Washington Press and Douglas & McIntyre, 1988; photographs, illustrations, notes, further reading, index; clothbound, $35.00. Philadelphia Stories: A Photographic History, 1920-1960 by FREDRIC M. MILLER, MORRIS J. VOGEL, and ALLEN F. DAVIS. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988; xiv + 320 pp., photographs, sources, index; clothbound, $29.95. The Photography of Paul Briol: A Centennial Tribute, edited by DOTTIE L. LEWIS. Cincinnati, Ohio: Cincinnati Historical Society, 1989; 96. pp., photographs, biographical chronology, subject index to the photographs in the collection; paperbound, $12.95. F. J. Haynes: Photographer, edited by the STAFF OF THE MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY. Helena, Mont.: Montana Historical Society, 1981; 192 pp., photographs; clothbound, $29.95. Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents by ROBERT M. LEVINE. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989; xii + 218 pp., photographs, notes, glossary, sources, bibliography, index; clothbound, $72.50. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories by JOHN TAGG. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988; xii + 242 pp., photographs, references, bibliography, index; paperbound, $14.95.

Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents. By Robert M. Levine. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989. Pp. xi, 216. Photographs. Notes. Glossary. Sources of the Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $72.50.)

Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents. By Robert M. Levine. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989. Pp. xi, 216. Photographs. Notes. Glossary. Sources of the Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $72.50.) - Volume 48 Issue 4

Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents:Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents.

Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents:Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents.

Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents, by Robert M. Levine

<i>Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents,</i> by Robert M. Levine

Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Photographs as Documents.

Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Photographs as Documents.

Robert M. Levine, Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. xi + 216, $72.50.

Robert M. Levine, Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. xi + 216, $72.50. - Volume 22 Issue 3

Images of history: nineteenth and early twentieth century Latin American photographs as documents

This work updates and enhances Howard Scarrow's Canada Votes (1962) with complete election data from the constituency level through the province, region, and nation for more than a half-century of Canadian political life since the benchmark election of 1935. Frank Feigert adds a description of the circumstances of all the elections since, and he gives background descriptions of the electoral systems in each province and territory. The result is a compendium of data and analysis that can be found nowhere else and which will be an invaluable sourcebook for students of Canadian political behavior.

Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents.

This work updates and enhances Howard Scarrow's Canada Votes (1962) with complete election data from the constituency level through the province, region, and nation for more than a half-century of Canadian political life since the benchmark election of 1935. Frank Feigert adds a description of the circumstances of all the elections since, and he gives background descriptions of the electoral systems in each province and territory. The result is a compendium of data and analysis that can be found nowhere else and which will be an invaluable sourcebook for students of Canadian political behavior.