Espejo De Research Articles

Practical Cosmography in Early Modern Iberia: Alonso de Chaves and his Espejo de Navegantes

Ancient cosmography had to adapt to new historical circumstances during the early modern period in Europe, leading to a proliferation of roles and even a sort of identity crisis. This entailed the revival of cosmography as a new and modern science, which, however, was neither unitary nor homogeneous. Cosmography was not associated with a single epistemic community, a certain scholarly profile or a specific corpus of literature, but with different groups and practitioners who produced diverse kinds of documents. Numerous practices emerged, and knowledge circulated in several forms. The article explores so-called practical cosmography in the Iberian world from the early sixteenth century. This will be illustrated not by the classical works of the period (Faleiro, Medina, Cortés, Oliveira) but by the lesser-known figure of the Pilot Major Alonso de Chaves and his nautical encyclopaedia Quatri partitu en cosmographia pratica (c. 1530). Chaves’ responsibilities as cosmographer of the Casa de la Contratación in Seville, the subjects and structure of his treatise, the intended audience and the style and language used show that there were substantial differences between the cosmography practised in Seville and Central European cosmography. The characteristics of this cosmography will be interpreted from the perspective of artisanal epistemology.

La “demanda” del baciyelmo

The capture of the baciyelmo in chapter 21 of the first part of Don Quijote is an interpretive challenge. The assault on the barber follows, in principle, the parameters that one would expect from the practices regarding the spoils of war contemporary to Cervantes in which the troops benefited economically from the capture of the enemy’s properties. However, the rejection of the barber’s mount does not correspond to the behavior that one would expect from a knight motivated by material gain. This essay contemplates this problem with reference to the Espejo de caballerías-the Castilian rendition of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato-the closest literary reference to Mambrino’s helmet in the hidalgo’s library. This essay proposes that this text contains the necessary elements for a coherent interpretation of the distribution of the barber’s belongings: the literary convention of la demanda and the allegation of extreme necessity.

ORÍGENES DE UNA ETIOLOGIA CUBANA EN ESPEJO DE PACIENCIA (1608) DE SILVESTRE DE BALBOA VEREDAS

This work examines the construction of an etiology or fable of origins by Silvestre de Balboa in Espejo de paciencia (1608). From the use of classical mythology, Balboa assigns a new symbolic value to Cuban nature that allows us to see the landscape based on an insular autochthonous feeling, marking the difference with the European landscape.

Letras de justadores y categorías del amor poético en la Tercera parte del espejo de príncipes y cavalleros

En este artículo están reunidas y analizadas todas las letras de justadores que Marcos Martínez incorporó a su libro de caballerías Tercera parte del espejo de príncipes y cavalleros (1588). Se han clasificado en diez categorías que definen el amor poético y cortesano. El estudio de estos poemas se hace en el contexto argumental de la obra, pues se identifica para cada uno de ellos tres niveles de significado: un nivel narrativo o argumental, un nivel plástico-alegórico, que se refiere a la descripción de las armas y la divisa de los caballeros que las portan, y un nivel poético donde la letra misma completa el sentido que se desea expresar respecto a los sentimientos de los personajes o de la situación narrada en el episodio. Además del análisis, se ofrece un catálogo de las letras.

El espejo de Atenea, un acercamiento a la metáfora de la visión en María Zambrano

Behind the curious gaze, fear will always occupy a place to re-ignite the desiring flame, as fire that does not feed on fire, but on wind; thereby, in the hall of astonishment and love, the ones that seem opposite run the universal machinery and rekindle each thing that can be called Nature. As another weaver, Mariana Bernárdez recreates this plot based on two important discursive lines by María Zambrano: Athena’s unveiled gaze before Medusa’s in Medusa y El espejo de Atenea. It is by this way that she manages to confront ourselves with an almost petrifying idea of what implies to peek into the knowledge window and face the fractality drawn by a mirror in front of another: incomprehensible due to its infinite and divine virtue, being the root of universe.

Rewritings, Sequels, and Cycles in Sixteenth-Century Castilian Romances of Chivalry: ‘Aquella inacabable aventura’ by Daniel Gutiérrez Trápaga

 Reviews cities and will no doubt be of value to scholars of the Eternal City within both urban and Italian studies. U  C D P Rewritings, Sequels, and Cycles in Sixteenth-Century Castilian Romances of Chivalry: ‘Aquella inacabable aventura’. By D G T. Woodbridge: Tamesis. .  pp. £. ISBN –––– In this timely monograph on the oen mentioned, but far less studied, libros de caballerías of sixteenth-century Spain, Daniel Gutiérrez Trápaga carries out an admirable examination of two of the major cycles of printed Castilian romances of chivalry: the initial development of the Amadís series (namely, the opening six books in the cycle) and the first three texts in the Espejo de príncipes y caballeros line. If we consider the immense success of books of chivalry in the Peninsula, especially in the first half of the s—the author states at the outset some of the astonishing publication statistics, which reveal the existence of  distinct titles between  and , of which fully  are extant, in more than  editions in Castilian alone—we can appreciate the necessity of restricting his exploration of the genre and its exploitation of cyclicality, sequels, and intertexuality, but this should not lead us to underestimate the still sizeable corpus which Gutiérrez Trápaga has chosen to analyse and which he handles with considerable dexterity. e subtitle of this study, ‘aquella inacabable aventura’, is taken from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in whose first chapter the eponymous protagonist delights in the open-endedness of Jerónimo Fernández’s Belianís de Grecia (III–IV) (), and the promise of continued and continuous adventuring it brought with it. Taking this as a spur, Gutiérrez Trápaga amply demonstrates, over the course of three long chapters, the assumptions surrounding ‘unfinishedness’ in the Castilian chivalric tradition, the varying techniques employed in such continuations, and the responsibilities that the authors working in a given cycle—of which there were at least sixteen, encompassing forty-nine romances—felt towards their subject matter and their forebears. Such intertextual practices were, Gutiérrez Trápaga affirms, ‘a defining element in the poetics of a genre that prioritised narrative amplitude over closure and the creation of cycles over individual works’, and ‘the intertextual traits of the libros de caballerías linked these works with medieval romance and yet allowed the genre to change and innovate with respect to them’ (p. ). It is with the medieval inheritance that the body of the monograph begins; little of the ground that the author has necessarily to cover here is new, from the French origins of Castilian literature of chivalry to the significance of the Libro del caballero Zifar, which, at the turn of the fourteenth century, heralded ‘the creation of a Castilian romance tradition outside the three conventional Matters of French chivalric romance, albeit strongly influenced by Arthurian narrative models’ (p. ), but, as well as furnishing vital background to the researches presented later in the monograph, Gutiérrez Trápaga in this first chapter introduces and defines with clarity the key terms which will inform his subsequent analysis of the Amadís and Espejo MLR, .,   de príncipes texts, from the classical notions of imitatio, enarratio, and compilatio, to the Genettian ideas of the hypotext and hypertext, and Zumthor’s mouvance, which Gutiérrez Trápaga adopts to frame the highly deliberate and multifaceted rewritings which each of the works subsequently discussed will perform. Aer concluding Chapter  with a solid examination of Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo’s foundational Amadís de Gaula (c. ), and the same author’s continuation in the Sergas de Esplandián (before ), Gutiérrez Trápaga provides in the second chapter an illuminating account of the two branches of the cycle that Montalvo had consciously inaugurated. e two writers who constitute the ‘heterodox’ current of the Amadís sequels, Ruy Páez de Ribera () and Juan Díaz (), strove to introduce greater verisimilitude into Montalvo’s cycle and to promote a more explicitly Christian didacticism, but, in commercial terms, they foundered, whereas the more successful, ‘orthodox’ continuations by Feliciano de Silva heightened the adventures of Amadís’s successors and enhanced the...

La creación del mundo by Luis Vélez de Guevara

MLR, .,   de príncipes texts, from the classical notions of imitatio, enarratio, and compilatio, to the Genettian ideas of the hypotext and hypertext, and Zumthor’s mouvance, which Gutiérrez Trápaga adopts to frame the highly deliberate and multifaceted rewritings which each of the works subsequently discussed will perform. Aer concluding Chapter  with a solid examination of Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo’s foundational Amadís de Gaula (c. ), and the same author’s continuation in the Sergas de Esplandián (before ), Gutiérrez Trápaga provides in the second chapter an illuminating account of the two branches of the cycle that Montalvo had consciously inaugurated. e two writers who constitute the ‘heterodox’ current of the Amadís sequels, Ruy Páez de Ribera () and Juan Díaz (), strove to introduce greater verisimilitude into Montalvo’s cycle and to promote a more explicitly Christian didacticism, but, in commercial terms, they foundered, whereas the more successful, ‘orthodox’ continuations by Feliciano de Silva heightened the adventures of Amadís’s successors and enhanced the entertainment function of the original works. If the books of the Amadís cycle were among the strongest examples of the genre in the first half of the sixteenth century, the three printed works of the Espejo de príncipes y caballeros tradition, by Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra (), Pedro de la Sierra Infanzón (), and Marcos Martínez (), occupy a similar status in the latter part of the century, with the last of these in fact remaining in print until , and it is to these that Gutiérrez Trápaga turns in his final chapter. As in the previous sections of the monograph, the author is able to range across these lengthy romances without stretching his analysis too thinly, and, as well as establishing how these works relate to each other and their genre, he brings out those qualities which, for all the brickbats that were hurled at the libros de caballerías by authorities as illustrious as Joan Lluís Vives, made this type of book evidently so attractive to the reading public. U  E J D B La creación del mundo. By L V  G. Ed. by W R. M and C. G P. Intro. by J T. (Ediciones críticas, ) Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. .  pp. $.. ISBN ––– –. e list of works by Luis Vélez de Guevara edited by William R. Manson and C. George Peale continues to grow in size and scope. La creación del mundo, a comedia ‘a lo divino’, first made available in print in , now reappears in a new critical edition with an in-depth Introduction by Jonathan acker. is edition brings the play to a deservedly wider readership and, presented with its production history, may engender future performances. acker makes the case that this Old Testament play could plausibly have been conceived for the Corpus Christi celebrations in  in Badajoz, where a range of commissions transcended generic expectations for the auto sacramental. Comparing Vélez’s play to Lope de Vega’s similarly themed La creación del mundo y primera culpa de hombre, acker carefully disregards the possibility of mutual influence (p. ). Peale and acker debate  Reviews the possibility that Vélez’s La creación del mundo was the basis for a comedia de repente (partially improvised play) in the court of Felipe IV c. . As opposed to a mere dramatization of Genesis, Vélez brings his creative nous and experience as a theatre-maker to embody the visual and verbal features of the narrative. In the trove of elucidations featured in the endnotes, Peale is able to draw on his cumulative experience of working with so many of Vélez’s dramatic works. Readers are fortunate that Juan de la Cuesta has continued to publish these editions, with three others having already appeared in the same year. As the title suggests, La creación del mundo commences as Dios Padre relates the creation of the world in conversation with Adán. Geared up for the war to capture the human soul, ‘[l]os más demonios que pudieren salir’ (p. ) fight with comediaworthy motivation (and arrayed with detailed costuming described...

Elementos léxicos y botánicos de la cornucopia tropical en "Espejo de paciencia" de Silvestre de Balboa

This article examines the lexical and botanical elements of the catalog of plants, flowers and vegetables of Espejo de paciencia by Silvestre de Balboa. The description of the flora follows a model tradition that seeks to renew the description of the ideal landscape from the genre of classical bucolic eclogue, transformed by the Renaissance eclogue. Among the most significant changes appear the use of indigenous lexicons and cumulative descriptions, which by their reiteration, seek to insist on the abundance and richness of Cuban nature.

La innovación tecnológica, un espejo de los años 60. Las huellas del IETcc se leyeron en la chilena Técnica y Creación

This text emerges as one of the results of a research, dedicated to the Chilean and Argentine architectural journals published during the second half of the 20th century. In this wide range, Técnica y Creación , published between August 1960 and December 1967 from the Instituto de Edificación Experimental ( IEE), at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Chile. His analysis is made from the academic and social circumstances promoted by the University of Chile before the 1960s and from the importance that prefabrication and technological inn ovation in Chile then acquired. A careful reading of the pages of Técnica y Creación allows us to suppose that both this edition and the spirit expressed by the Institute that promoted it and its Director arose as a consequence of a contemporary Spanish pair, the Instituto Eduardo Torroja de la Construcción y el Cemento (IETcc) and its journal Informes de la Construcción .

Vicente Mojica y la vigilia de la poesía. Contra la consumación de un olvido historiográfico

Vicente Mojica was born in 1923 and died in 1989. He is one of the most important poets in Alicante. Mojica published near thirty tittles about poetry, theatre, narrative or essay. In the next lines, we are going to speak about Mojica´s poetry. He met with intellectuals of the first years of the Spanish post-war period. We can name some books of Vicente Mojica, for example, Espejo de la consumacion, Al pie de la esperanza o Libro de las tribulaciones.

Baquianos Still Life. The "Espejo de Paciencia" and the Doramas's Forest

The offering of tropical food and flowers by pagan deities, toward the end of the First Canto of Espejo de paciencia (1608), is undoubtedly the most talked episode of Silvestre de Balboa’s (1563-c.1647) epic poem. We assume the most recent reviews (Firbas, Gonzalez Echevarria, Marrero-Fente), advocating an alternative to the idea of a Cuban primitive , dominant in the comments about this poem, since its discovery in 1836, and during most of the twentieth century (Pichardo, Vitier, Lezama). And we propose an analysis of the issue of indigenous nature from two dimensions: against the background of the interests of the colonial society on the one hand; and as a poetic system that has the marks of digression and periphera, on the other one. For the first dimension, we rely on the work of historian Garcia del Pino; for the second, in the structure of the myth of Doramas Forest, of Cairasco (1538-1610), because of its relevance in literary and Balboa training for his native still life settings.

‘EL GALÁN QUÁL HA DE SER’: THE RENOVATION OF SONGBOOK POETRY IN THE XVITH CENTURY: THE <i>ESPEJO DE GENTILEZA</i> BY HURTADO DE TOLEDO

In this article, I offer a comparative analysis between Comendador Ludueña’s “Doctrinal de gentileza” (published in the Cancionero general, 1514) and the Espejo de gentileza, which Luis Hurtado de Toledo printed in 1557, based on the “Doctrinal de gentileza.” It is an intriguing example of the ways in which songbook poetry from the fifteenth century is read, reinterpreted, and rewritten in the sixteenth-century, a period of continuous poetical innovations. Apart from this analysis, I formulate a series of reflections on poetical plagiarism (hurto) at the time.

The Boundaries of Fiction: Metalepsis in Marcos Martínez's Espejo de príncipes y caballeros (III) (1587) and its Precedents in Castilian Romances of Chivalry

The Boundaries of Fiction: Metalepsis in Marcos Martínez's Espejo de príncipes y caballeros (III) (1587) and its Precedents in Castilian Romances of Chivalry

The Boundaries of Fiction: Metalepsis in Marcos Martínez's <em>Espejo de príncipes y caballeros (III)</em> (1587) and its Precedents in Castilian Romances of Chivalry

The Boundaries of Fiction: Metalepsis in Marcos Martínez's <em>Espejo de príncipes y caballeros (III)</em> (1587) and its Precedents in Castilian Romances of Chivalry

Memory, Displacement, and Reintegration in Alberto Fuguet's "Santiago"

Memory, Displacement, and Reintegration in Alberto Fuguet's "Santiago" Jeremy L. Cass Alberto Fuguet's characters struggle. Many face loneliness, boredom, and drug addiction; many find themselves in dysfunctional relationships or families; most express a palpable disenchantment with life in Santiago. Such experiences harmonize with the approaches that Fuguet and co-editor Sergio Gómez outline in the prologues to Cuentos con Walkman (1993) and the landmark McOndo (1996).1 Like the stories compiled in those anthologies, Fuguet's fiction challenges the epic weight of preexisting trends in the Spanish-American narrative in its depiction of private and individual realities ("Presentación" 13), in its playful approach to form, and in its recognition that identity formation and negotiation are intensely personal yet subject to what Humberto Medina calls "la cultural industrial" – for Fuguet, film, rock and pop music, and, in the critic's words, "el discurso juvenil" (262). Fuguet and Gómez use the spirited introductory essays in both collections to cast a vision for breaking from established Latin American narrative convention, which for the purposes of their argument they reduce to magical realism and the overreaching influence of García Márquez, whom they irreverently christen "San Gabriel" ("Presentación" 14).2 The shift in focus has amounted to, according to Rebbecca Pittenger, a "renewed dedication to realism" which scrutinizes "the overlooked aspects of everyday life" in which depictions of "a rural, untouched, and miraculous reality, which once seemed so timeless, [represent] little more than a relic of the continent's literary and imaginary past" (n. pag.). It is therefore no surprise that Fuguet and Gómez emphasize that the pieces appearing in McOndo "No son frescos sociales ni sagas colectivas" ("Presentación" 13). Fuguet and Gómez clarify in the introduction to Cuentos con Walkman that "[El presente proyecto no] pretende ser el gran espejo de Chile ni abarcar todo un espectro social o moral" ("Urgentes" 10); "Lo que aquí se cuenta son historias vitales sobre vidas levemente [End Page 173] aburridas" ("Urgentes" 10). They advocate literary pursuit that resists sweeping national narratives and instead privileges the everyday and the individual, a point they drive home through the vitales-levemente aburridas juxtaposition. The personal stories of mildly boring characters, they contend, are just as noteworthy as those of the master narratives that brought international prominence to Latin American fiction. Fuguet's early fiction, naturally, espouses what Jason Summers has called "the more individualistic voices of the McOndo generation" (72). Summers adds that the push for individualism goes hand in hand with what he characterizes as a "dark" outlook and a tendency towards "extreme" social criticism (72). Recent projects set aside much of the darker outlook and embrace instead a more sentimental approach. Fuguet's second collection of short stories, Cortos (2004), draws from the same thematic well and embraces the plurality of form so typical of his work. In addition to standard third- and first-person narratives that rely heavily on fast-paced dialogues, Cortos interpolates film scripts, magazine articles, interviews, photographs, and even classified ads. Catalina Forttes-Zalaquett goes so far to allege that such diversity of form should challenge the cuento designation: "podrían ser proto-guiones, diarios de viaje, crónicas, entrevista[s], o capítulos de novela" ("Cortos" 139). Film emerges as both a thematic and stylistic touchstone in Cortos, not only because the stories are structured like visual montages, as the title suggests, but also because they read like film-narrative hybrids that blur the lines between the two genres (Medina 263). Despite the struggling characters depicted through such varying textual media, Cortos possesses an unmistakable happy-ending feel and as such stands in stark contrast to Fuguet's early fiction, case in point Mala onda (1991), his first novel, and Sobredosis (1991), his inaugural collection of short stories, both of which paint a grim picture of Chilean youth culture during the Pinochet regime and likewise align with the "dark" and "extreme" tendencies observed by Summers (72). On the contrary, in Cortos we find stories with clean and even hopeful resolutions in which characters overcome their circumstances, restore their relationships, and appear poised to move forward.3 One particular short story in...

El idealismo político de Martín Carvallo de Villas Boas

Martín Carvallo de Villas Boas is a Portuguese author who, as Bartolomé Felipe and Pedro Barbosa Homem, writes in Spanish a treatise on Reason of State during the Union between the Portuguese and the Spanish crown. His work Espejo de príncipes (Mirror of princes) is one of the most extraordinary pieces of this genre which, for different reasons, has been neglected by scholars. In this article, I will examine one of the key doctrines of this treatise: the virtues he recommends the prince to have. By doing so, I will show if Carvallo de Villas Boas is closer to a realistic or idealistic understanding of politics.

G. B. Vico's Global Reception: Europe, Latin America, and Asia

G. B. Vico's Global Reception:Europe, Latin America, and Asia Gustavo Costa Fabrizio Lomonaco, Il metodo degli studi del nostro tempo, ed. Giambattista Vico, Quaderni di Logos, 4 (Napoli: ScriptaWeb, 2010). Pp. 277. €32.00. Jéssica Sánchez Espillaque, Ernesto Grassi y la filosofía del humanismo, Presentación por Emilio Hidalgo-Serna. Biblioteca Viquiana (Sevilla: Fénix Editora, 2010). Pp. 224. €12.48. José M. Sevilla, El espejo de la época: Capítulos sobre G. Vico en la cultura hispánica (1737–2005), Presentación de Giuseppe Cacciatore, Prólogo de Antonio Heredia Soriano. Pensamiento latino, 1 (Napoli: La Città del Sole, 2007). Pp. 676. €32.00. David Armando, Federico Masini, Manuela Sanna, eds., Vico e l'Oriente: Cina, Giappone, Corea, Convegno internazionale, Napoli, 10–12 Novembre 2005. Collana Marco Polo 750 anni (Roma: Tiellemedia, 2008). Pp. 357. €45.00. Vico's global reception was recorded in the venerable but now largely obsolete Bibliografia vichiana (1947–48), initiated by Benedetto Croce and enriched by Fausto Nicolini. It is an ambitious manual, intended as a user-friendly guide to Vichian studies, published all over the world, and, at the same time, as an homage to Crocean philosophy. In the meantime the interest in Vico continued to grow, while Croce's reputation dimmed. More recent studies are listed in bibliographies compiled by specialists such as Andrea Battistini, Silvia Caianiello, Maurizio Martirano, David Armando, and Monica Riccio. Today nobody would contemplate the possibility of bringing up to date the Bibliografia, a splendid shipwreck that no longer floats. Therefore we must be content with a few snapshots of Vico's reputation in various continents without trying to offer a complete picture. In recent years, Vico's textual studies have undergone a sea change thanks to the joint efforts of various scholars, promoted by the Neapolitan section of the Istituto per la Storia del Pensiero Filosofico e Scientifico Moderno, under the aegis of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Currently the New Science is viewed as a work in progress, which reached its apex with the second edition (1730), considered more reliable than the third (1744), twice translated into English (see Molly Black Verene, "Works on Giambattista Vico in English from 1884 through 2009," New Vico Studies 27 [2009]: 187). In 2004 Fabrizio Lomonaco, Fulvio Tessitore, and Manuela Sanna contributed to this new trend of Vichian studies an excellent facsimile reproduction of a copy, with autograph corrections and marginalia, of the second edition of the New Science. Among other things, Lomonaco is the author of a collection of impressively researched essays on Neapolitan culture (A partire da Giambattista Vico: Filosofia, diritto e letteratura nella Napoli del secondo Settecento [Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010]). Now Lomonaco has published a facsimile edition of the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, an academic speech given by Vico in 1708 and published in 1709 (On the Study Methods of Our Time, according to Elio Gianturco's translation, reprinted by Cornell University Press in 1990, with a preface by Donald Phillip Verene). The original Latin text is accompanied by a facing Italian translation by M. Di Benedetto. [End Page 538] In the substantial introductory essay, Lomonaco notes that the translation of the Latin term ratio into metodo or "method" (singular, not plural, as in Gianturco's version) is not indifferent inasmuch as it alludes to the modern thought of Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes, which constitutes the backbone of Vico's speech. Lomonaco rightly interprets Il metodo degli studi as a premodern treatise on the method of studies rather than a traditional ratio studiorum, or "plan of studies," in syntony with Jesuit educational theory. It is undeniable that the antidogmatic approach of Il metodo degli studi is at odds with the tenets of the Council of Trent, still in full force during Vico's time, when the Papal Court, Italy's great bulwark of religious and political conservation, was anxiously monitoring any sign of rebellion against the status quo (see Patrizia Delpiano, "Illuminismo," in Dizionario storico dell'Inquisizione, ed. Adriano Prosperi, Vincenzo Lavenia, and John Tedeschi [Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010], II, 761–4). According to Lomonaco, Il metodo degli studi reflects a stage of Vichian thought, characterized...

Lecturas neobarrocas del Espejo de paciencia y reconceptualizaciones de la nación: José Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier y Severo Sarduy

This article examines the successive reinterpretations of one of Cuba’s foundational texts, namely the Espejo de paciencia (“Model of Patience”, 1608) by Silvestre de Balboa, as a baroque poem. The revalorization of the baroque by twentieth-century Cuban authors and critics has been explained as a consequence of the erasure of indigenous cultures and the subsequent imposition of a metropolitan culture. In this sense, the baroque is supposed to be paradigmatic for “roots thinking” about nation-building and culture. The readings of Balboa’s poem by neo-baroque writers such as Jose Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier and Severo Sarduy, however, put forward a transhistorical vision of the baroque and Cubanhood as an eternal and immutable phenomenon or, alternatively, a reading that privileges the technique of the collage, which involves a more active intervention in the historical process. The present essay seeks to systematize these neo-baroque readings of the Espejo in relation to a more “rhizomous” theory of cultural identity.

Using Social Power to Balance Soft Power: Venezuela's Foreign Policy

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has achieved what no other Latin American leader has since the end of the Cold War: bringing security concerns in the Western Hemisphere back to U.S. foreign policy. Might Venezuela provoke a war against neighboring Colombia, spread weapons among insurgents abroad, disrupt oil sales to the United States, provide financial support to Hezbollah, al Qaeda or other fundamentalist movements, offer safe havens for drug dealers, invite Russia to open a military base on its territory, or even acquire nuclear weapons? 1 These security concerns did not exist less than a decade ago, but today they occupy the attention of U.S. officials. Attention to these conventional security issues, however, carries the risk of ignoring what thus far has been Venezuela's most effective foreign policy tool in challenging the United States: the use of generous handouts abroad, peppered with a pro-poor, distribution-prone discourse. While the U.S. debate revolves around ''hard power'' and ''soft power,'' 2 this other form can be called ''social power diplomacy.'' Similar to hard power and soft power, social power diplomacy allows the projecting nation to attract allies but through different means. With social power diplomacy, other nations are not necessarily cajoled into bowing to the economic or military might of the projecting nation, as is the case in the realm of traditional hard power politics. Also, nations are not necessarily attracted to the magnetic appeal of the projecting nation's ideology and values, as is the case with the realm of soft power politics. Instead, social power diplomacy attracts allies because it provides governments with far more latitude in domestic spending than is the case

DRIVING WITH LA MOVIDA: THE ROCK ‘N’ ROAD AESTHETICS OF LOQUILLO'S ROCK IBÉRICO1

La movida, considered the cultural landmark of the Spanish transition to democracy by many, continues to generate much (academic) debate about its very existence and definition whilst also garnerin...