Latin American Cultural Studies Research Articles

Entrevista a Walter Mignolo e Catherine E. Walsh

Catherine E. Walsh (1964) had her initial experiences as an activist at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), influencing her academic interests in pedagogy, decoloniality, and feminism. After completing her Ph.D. in Education in 1984, she worked at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and Boston until the mid-1990s when she permanently relocated to Ecuador. Among her many activist contributions, she stands out for her work alongside Paulo Freire and the critical pedagogy network in the 1990s, bilingual education and consulting projects for indigenous communities in Ecuador, and the establishment of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino, jointly with Afro-Ecuadorian community leader and intellectual Juan García Salazar in 2002, with whom she co-authored To Think Sowing/To Sow Thinking with Grandfather Zenon (2017). Notable among her various works are the edited volumes Decolonial Pedagogies (2013), On Decoloniality (in collaboration with Walter Mignolo, 2018), and her latest work, Rising Up, Living Up. Re-Existances, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks (2023, Duke University Press). She recently retired as a professor and director of the Ph.D. program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (Quito, Ecuador). Walter Mignolo (1941) specialized in Semiotics and Literary Theory and has made extensive contributions to the fields of modernity and coloniality. His work prominently explores the concepts of decoloniality, global colonialism, geopolitics of knowledge, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is a central figure in the Latin American decolonial thought school, with a profound impact on global academic discourse. The author of several books translated into other languages, notable among them, in addition to On Decoloniality, co-authored with Walsh, are The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (1996), winner of the Katherine Singer Kovaks Award, The Idea of Latin America (2006), winner of the Frantz Fanon Award, and his most recent work, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021). He has been working at Duke University since 1993, where he holds the distinguished title of «William H. Wannamaker» as a professor of Literature and Romance Studies. The works developed by Walsh and Mignolo are an extension of the concept of coloniality initiated by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, whom they consider disciples.

On (missing) links between German, Latin American, and French Mediatization Research: Reflections on Diverse Research Milieus and Their Traditions

Mediatization research is no European invention, being also rooted in Latin American Cultural Studies and semiotics. Building on an analytical scheme on how to analyze the history of a study field in communication research in terms of its corpus of ideas and its social corpus, this article discusses the transnational (dis-)connections in the field of mediatization research regarding a) the Latin American and French roots of this research field and b) by trying to answer why they are still so unknown, at least in German communication studies. Still today, E. Verón, Martín-Barbero, A. Mattelart, and others are more or less unknown authors in German communication studies.

From media to mediations: unexpected readings

This essay critically reviews Jesús Martín-Barbero's 1987 book, “De los medios a las mediaciones”, and its influence on Latin American cultural studies after its first decade of publication. Highlighting the work's seminal contributions, it also underscores its participation in the emergence of dialogues and interdisciplinary studies on mass and popular culture. The essay acknowledges Martín-Barbero's distinctive intellectual practices, which set him apart from other traditions in communication studies: his ability to redefine—or localize—a rebellious, yet fruitful relationship with European critical theory, the potential in the reappropriation of ideas, and the mindful transformation of his oeuvre attuned to audience reception and engagement.

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

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

Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas by Thomas Genova

Reviewed by: Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas by Thomas Genova Felipe Martínez-Pinzón Keywords International Education, Nation Formation, Republicanism, Motherhood, Gender, Race, Thomas Genova, Felipe Martínez-Pinzón genova, thomas. Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. U of Virginia P, 2021, 342 pp. Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas offers a refreshing approach to Latin American literary and cultural studies, specifically 19th-century studies, through rigorous transnational [End Page 323] archival work and a literary review of three national literatures placed in dialogue, friction and mutual influence: the United States, Cuba and Argentina. As part of a recent trend in hemispheric studies of our 19th-century literatures, alongside important names and titles in Hemispheric Studies such as Ronald Brigg's The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education in Lima Women's Circuit, 1876–1910 (2017) and Rodrigo Lazo's Writing Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (2005), Thomas Genova offers a nuanced analysis of a critical trope—or at least one that reveals itself as critical thanks to his book—to the construction of the American republics as "Bourgeois Republics": the racialized figure of the republican mother as teacher, and the teacher as mother. Spanning the mid-19th century all the way to the postwar Spanish–Cuban–American war of 1898, Genova traces this trope in a fascinating array of canonical and noncanonical literary texts, as well as in legal writings, poetry, private correspondence, political essays, travelogues and memoirs. His book offers new readings of classics such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Viajes: Europa, Africa, América (1849), Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés (1882), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), in dialogue with other, lesser known texts that reveal the outstanding level of hemispheric cultural porosity among foundational novels, travelogues and memoirs. In conversation with scholarship that reads nationalism and regionalism as a reaction and at the same time a product of imperialism, Genova invites us, among other original interventions, to read Eduarda Mansilla's Lucía Miranda as an old creole Hispanophile's reaction to the Americanization of the national-civilizatory discourse mobilized by Sarmiento's readings of Cooper. The book also offers nuanced readings of Mary Mann's recently recovered Juanita (1887) and Martín Morúa Delgado's (1891) Sofía as different, yet dialoguing, interventions about what model of cultural reproduction (or miscarriage) is better suited for racially diverse republics such as Cuba. Genova's central argument is that education—as a republican duty assigned to women—traversed the debates about how to civilize and incorporate into the fledgling republic a vastly diverse panorama of racialized peoples. The consequences of focusing on the crossings of education, gender and race with a hemispheric scope are manifold and inspiring. First, in line with other scholars, this crossing entails seeing Latin America as a "deeper South" that partakes of northern North American stereotypes of the US South. Secondly, and stemming from this, Genova invites us to see the cultural (and sometimes familial) [End Page 324] connections between, say, the Cuban plantation elite and the US southern gentry. Thirdly, the book places emphasis on novelists writing foundational fictions at the end of the 19th century not only as writers but as readers of this particular genre, and as such, conscious of the narrative opportunities and shortcomings of this pedagogical literary corpus. Thanks to it, Cirilo Villaverde is uncovered as a reader not only of the mid-19th-century Latin American and US canon (Marmol's Amalia, Blest Gana's Martín Rivas or even Delaney's Blake?), and Cuban (Morúa Delgado) and non-Cuban writers (Mary Mann) are seen as readers that rewrite Cecilia Valdés (for Morúa Delgado this has been the typical read), but in doing so, center other ways of conceiving of gender, race and education in the island's turn-of-the-century literature. Imperial Educación is divided into two parts composed of three chapters each. Chapters one, two and three dwell on Argentina–US relations after Rosa's exile, while chapters...

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes

Reviewed by: Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes Micah Mckay Fornoff, Carolyn and Gisela Heffes, eds. Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. State U of New York Press, 2021. xiii + 361 pp. ISBN 978-1-4384-8404-4. What can the consummately human medium of film—movies are, of course, made by and for human beings—tell us about the needs, perspectives, and realities of nonhuman beings? And what can film do to interrogate its own seemingly inherent anthropocentrism? These are two of the fundamental questions addressed in Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes's edited volume Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema, the first book to bring to bear the preoccupations of ecocriticism, new materialism, and posthumanism on the study of Latin American film and an essential contribution to the burgeoning field of environmentally-minded Latin American cultural studies. To name just one other recent example, Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant's edited volume Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (2020) shares with Pushing Past the Human the desire to show how Latin American cultural texts can help us see beyond the notion of the human in order to better understand our place in the larger web of life. But, as Fornoff and Heffes put it in the introduction to their volume, this emerging critical enterprise highlights the fact that the epistemological move "beyond the human" does not mean leaving the human or human concerns behind; rather, it "warn[s] against losing sight of the human altogether" and "dramatiz[es] the inextricability of planetary care and social justice" (12). The productive tension between human and nonhuman concerns, social justice and planetary care, is one of the elements that gives Pushing Past the Human a sense of coherence and a sense of urgency in the context of ongoing and ever-accelerating environmental crises that are exacting heavy ecological and social tolls. Pushing Past the Human gathers together fifteen essays (including the introduction) written by scholars whose institutional homes are largely found in universities in the Unites States and Europe. Fornoff and Heffes's introduction makes a clear and concise argument for cinema's unique ability to allow viewers to consider the world beyond anthropocentric perspectives through technological innovations and filmmaking techniques that disrupt human timescales and represent ecological relationships that are difficult for the human sensorium to fully grasp. What is more, Fornoff and Heffes make a compelling case for the ability of Latin American cinema in particular to intervene in the theoretical and political debates of ecocriticism and posthumanism due to the region's history of colonialism, its experience of extractive capitalism, and the various modes of decolonial, and posthumanist thought that those experiences have given rise to (they engage, for instance, with Macarena Gómez-Barris's notion of "submerged perspectives" and Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's distillation of Indigenous people's experiences of the end of the world). In addition to providing a solid theoretical grounding for the volume, the introduction offers useful information about the development of ecocinema in Latin America and the wide array of film festivals that showcase it. The volume's other fourteen essays are divided into three thematic sections that address questions of cinematic genre, the staging of human/nonhuman difference, and [End Page 162] indigeneity. The first of these, "Genre Beyond the Human," features essays on the road movie, disaster films, documentary, and slow cinema. By paying close attention to the conventions of each of these genres (and the ways the films each author studies push against those conventions), these chapters offer valuable insights on, for example, the damages wrought by extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon (Patrícia Vieira) and the way cinematic depictions of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake are paradigmatic examples of Anthropocene cultural texts because they stage the interaction between deep time and human history in a way that complicates clear distinctions between "natural" and "human-made" catastrophes (Fornoff). The five chapters in "Encountering Difference," the volume's second section, engage with portrayals of animals raised for slaughter, the vibrant materiality of objects in film animation, lush rural landscapes...

Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America ed. by Jennifer Gómez Menjívar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacón

Reviewed by: Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America ed. by Jennifer Gómez Menjívar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacón Amalia I. Cordova (bio) Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America edited by Jennifer Gómez Menjívar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacón University of Arizona Press, 2019 INDIGENOUS INTERFACES: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America is a welcome contribution to the growing field of Indigenous media and cultural studies, bringing identity and technology into dialogue. Comprising ten essays, the volume addresses ways in which Indigenous communities of these regions are engaging with new technologies and presents historical and conceptual frameworks to parse this phenomenon, offering case studies on specific modes of cultural production. Social media, gaming, film, and more traditional forms such as music and weaving drive home the importance of technology for Indigenous diasporic, transnational, and linguistic communities. The volume is organized in three parts, opening with a foreword by distinguished Guatemalan novelist and critic Arturo Arias, who also cowrote the screenplay for the film El Norte (1985). The foreword walks the reader through the purposeful, historical dissociation of Mesoamerican Indigenous societies and science, arguing for Indigenous competency—and actual supremacy—in the sciences at the time of contact. Colonial legacies, which have led to pervasive stereotypes regarding the Indigenous peoples of the region, haunt the volume, whose contributors are mainly scholars of Latin American languages and literature. Three essays are written by four Indigenous-identifying scholars (all women), reflecting the collaborative, intercultural approach of several essays as well. While the volume takes on media practices from Central America, the lesser-studied region in Latin American studies, and includes five chapters on case studies in Mexico, the notion of an Indigenous transnational diaspora is central to various essays, where communities interact with their family and peers in the United States or elsewhere through media technologies. The volume's introduction, "No Static: Re-indigenizing Technology," recalls the groundbreaking moment of the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and leans on the concept of "New Media Nation," coined by author Valerie Alia in [End Page 198] her book The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication (2010), and on the idea of network sovereignty, as proposed by Marisa Elena Duarte in Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country (2017). Both posit a transnational phenomenon grounded in processes of self-determination. Issues of Indigenous communities' dispossession and uneven access to new technologies, the tensions around who controls the media, and the use of the internet as a marketplace are addressed in the introduction. Yet some effort is spent on discussing the supposed perception of incompatibility of indigeneity and technology. This is a debate that has taken place energetically in decades of writing on Indigenous media and feels a bit dated. It is unfortunate that Latin American cultural studies have not engaged more deeply with the now substantial body of work on Indigenous media, which stretches back three decades in Latin America. This speaks more to the fractured landscape of academic work across the Americas and across Western disciplines. The notion of network, however, is expanded upon and rounded out with the assertion that "Indigenous peoples interact with new media as a means to ensure network building/maintenance and cultural preservation" (12). A discussion on a media ecology of the Indigenous Americas (referred to here as Abiayala) is insinuated but never quite materializes, but the book in itself offers a textured, case-by-case compilation of experiences from across some regions that have not been featured in the Indigenous media literature. The editors do position the book with regard to the deeper questions of Indigenous autonomy and the political uses of technology, stating that "cyberpractices and, specifically, the use of new media in Indigenous communities support the goals of autonomy and sovereignty . . . [and] are fundamental for any engagement with twenty-first century Indigenous thought" (16). Part 1, "Problematizing Technology," consists of three excellent essays that function well together and destabilize Western notions of technology and the textual through case studies involving weaving, embroidery (huipiles and molas as text and language) and language preservation. The untranslatability of key...

Submerged Strata and the Condition of Knowledge in Latin America

The objective of this essay is to map the growing number of works that focus on the environmental humanities and to review two important contributions to the ongoing debates that are defining the direction of Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies. In 2019, Héctor Hoyos published Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey published Allegories of the Anthropocene. While the scope of these two works varies in terms of the regional and/or national geographies they cover, as well as the authors and artists they analyse, both books attempt to contest the nature/culture binary – along with other Modern dichotomies – from very different (perhaps even opposite) positions and angles: while Hoyos calls for a de-allegorisation (namely, a “literalisation”) of several important Latin American works, DeLoughrey, on the other hand, invites us to reconsider allegory as a way of symbolising the “perceived disjunction between humans and the planet, between our ‘species’ and a dynamic external ‘nature’”.

“Notes and Letters”: Music of the City in Flight / Trans-Migratory Poetry. By Antonio Monte Casablanca. Translated by Crystal Neill, with Amanda Minks and Lila Ellen Gray.

In this essay I draw from memory studies and Latin American cultural studies to reflect on Notas y Letras (Notes and Letters), a collaboration by the Nicaraguan band Nemi Pipali and the poet Adolfo Beteta. I analyze these artistic expressions, music and poetry, at their place of convergence—the city of Managua—making audible some of the mechanisms that combine symbolic universes in Nicaraguan culture. This transdisciplinary reading allows me to propose that 1) music becomes a social marker of performative memory, transmitted by sounds present in hybrid Latin American cities, and 2) the migrant subject is displaced and divided between the center and the periphery. Citation: Monte Casablanca, Antonio. “Notes and Letters”: Music of the City in Flight / Trans-Migratory Poetry. Translated by Crystal Neill, with Amanda Minks and Lila Ellen Gray. Ethnomusicology Translations no. 11. Bloomington, IN: Society for Ethnomusicology, 2021. Originally published in Spanish as “‘Notas y Letras’: Música de la ciudad en fuga / Poesía transmigratoria.” Revista de Historia (Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica) 33/34 (2015): 108-129.

Innovative Interpretations: Three Recent Studies by Latin American Women Scholars

This article offers a survey of recent work by women scholars in the field of Latin American Studies. Focusing on the writings of Emily Hind, Ana Forcinito, and Sophia Beal, it identifies dominant threads in their research into masculinity and canon formation in Mexico, women filmmakers in Argentina, poetics of memory in Uruguay, and gender and urban spatiality in Brazil. Set within a larger context of the history of Gender Studies within the discipline, this piece provides a vision of pioneering developments in contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies.

Navegar entre silêncios

Resenha de Cánepa Koch, Gisela e Ingrid Kummels, orgs. 2018. Fotografía en América Latina: imágenes e identidades a través del tiempo y el espacio. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.&#x0D; Fotografia en América Latina (2018), livro editado por Gisela Cánepa Koch e Ingrid Kummels, reúne uma série de artigos sobre diferentes coleções fotográficas produzidas em contextos latino-americanos e as relações implicadas na produção de cada uma delas. O livro oferece uma visão panorâmica das proximidades e lacunas entre diferentes períodos históricos, diferentes perspectivas fornecidas pelos antropólogos e seus colaboradores de pesquisa ao longo do tempo e diferentes tradições dos estudos culturais e antropológicos da América Latina.

Políticas de solidariedade em acampamentos de fãs em shows de música pop

Resumo Debate-se como os acampamentos de fãs em espetáculos de música pop internacionais que passam pelo Brasil são emblemáticos para se perceber a colonialidade (QUIJANO, 2010) e a reiteração performática de gestos em torno do fascínio pelo estrangeiro na cultura juvenil brasileira. Postula-se, a partir do debate sobre as Teorias da Performance e dos Estudos Culturais Latino-americanos, que os acampamentos encenam disputas, mas também solidariedade nas relações de vulnerabilidade e aliança (BUTLER, 2018) entre fãs de cultura pop no Brasil. A partir de três acampamentos de fãs ocorridos entre os anos de 2013 e 2017, debate-se que o “naturalizado” afeto brasileiro aponta para zonas tensivas da performance de ser fã: o sacrifício e a espera como apontamentos para o merecimento de estar perto da artista; as fabulações sobre o estrangeiro e as dimensões da cultura global no cotidiano e o fascínio pela imagem de poder atrelado a construções de cidadanias parciais de gênero e raça no campo da cultura.

The Possibility of the Unicorn in Borges and Kafka

The relationship between Jorge Luis Borges and deconstruction has been much investigated, yet rarely has this research addressed the fact that both projects share the conviction that neither language nor text exist. Obviously, neither discourse denies that language and text are there. Yet they are not, here, presences: they are not objects before a subject, hence beings, not even imaginary beings. Departing from a close reading of Jacques Derrida’s insistence that “language does not exist, no one has ever encountered it,” this article scrutinizes the way in which this “non-existence” opens a path for a rethinking of history, literary history, Latin American aesthetics, and Latin American cultural studies. Also offered are novel interpretations of Borges’s “Funes, His Memory,” “Kafka and His Precursors,” and The Book of Imaginary Beings.

Queer Battle Fatigue, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imposter Inside Me

Research Article| April 01 2020 Queer Battle Fatigue, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imposter Inside Me Melissa M. González Melissa M. González Melissa M. González is associate professor of Hispanic studies, core faculty in Latin American studies, and chair of gender and sexuality studies at Davidson College. Her research spans trans and queer studies of twentieth-century and contemporary Latin American and US Latinx literature and culture and has been published in American Quarterly, Critique, Latin American Cultural Studies, and TSQ. In 2019–20, she will be pursuing an MA in computational media at Duke University as a Mellon New Directions Fellow. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2020) 26 (2): 236–238. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8141802 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Melissa M. González; Queer Battle Fatigue, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imposter Inside Me. GLQ 1 April 2020; 26 (2): 236–238. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8141802 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: ARTICLE You do not currently have access to this content.

Contributors

Contributors

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.

Towards a Marxist Theory of Mediation: Contributions from Ibero-America to the Study of Digital Communication

This paper presents and articulates for the first time the concept of mediation as theorised by three key scholars of the Ibero-American space, namely Manuel Martín-Serrano, Luis Martín-Santos, and Jesús Martín-Barbero. This article shows that their understandings of mediation are valuable for the study of digital communication, particularly for identifying criteria that facilitate the sublation of communicative capitalism into communicative socialism. The three scholars have placed the concept of mediation at the centre of their intellectual production with the aim of breaking with mechanical Marxism, but provide differing conceptualisations and have scarcely engaged in a dialogue of knowledges. This article will articulate the complementarity of Martín-Serrano’s Marxist socio-historical analysis of communication, Martín-Barbero’s Latin American cultural studies, and Martín-Santos’s phenomenological theorisation of mediation as the key concept of Marxist epistemology.

Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse

Reviewed by: Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse Kate Jenckes KEYWORDS Brazil, Argentina, Literature, Avant-Garde, Post-Structuralist Theory, Haroldo de Campos, Oswald de Andrade, Décio Pignatari, David Viñas, Clarice Lispector, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, John Beverley, Alberto Moreiras adam joseph shellhorse. Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina. U of Pittsburgh P, 2017, 264 pp. Adam Joseph Shellhorse’s Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina constitutes a bold and timely intervention in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies. In fact, one of the book’s greatest strengths is its insistence on the importance of thinking about the nature and history of the academic field as an important component of intellectual inquiry, which has become increasingly uncommon given the dispersed, specialized, and generally conflict-avoidant nature of the field today. Shellhorse resuscitates, in a post-memory sort of way, some of the central arguments from the 1990s, when the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies was ablaze with contention concerning the nature and limits of aesthetic representation and its relationship to a thinking of the political. His title seems to echo that of one of the more polemical books of that era, John Beverley’s polemical Against Literature (1993), and indeed, Beverley is cited as an important influence. However, Shellhorse’s approach differs starkly from Beverley’s, and veers more toward the post-structurally informed work of Beverley’s sometimes rivals, Alberto Moreiras, Brett Levinson, Gareth Williams, and Jon Beasley-Murray, who are also cited as critical references for the project. Shellhorse takes as his starting point a concern shared by all of those just named, although it comes in the form of a quotation by Beverley: their work seeks “a way of thinking about literature that is extraliterary, or . . . ‘against literature’” (qtd. in Shellhorse 5). “Literature” here is understood variously as “an exalted form of individual expression and ‘high’ culture,” as a universalizing affirmation of regional identity, and as a regime of representation complicit with hegemonic structures of power (4). Rather than exiting or opposing literature as Beverley did, Shellhorse defines anti-literature from within the literary itself, rethinking writing as an unprogrammatic and multimedial assemblage of forces capable of disrupting hegemonic forms of discourse. His approach is informed by various strains of philosophy, [End Page 136] primarily Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of minor literature and immanence, affect, and corporeality, but also includes Jacques Rancie`re’s notion of a dissensual disruption of established distributions of sensibility, Jacques Derrida’s notion of textuality, and Alain Badiou’s understanding of the poetic event. Shellhorse’s exploration of anti-literary forces within literature leads him to consider the nature of modernism, the avant-garde, and the neo-Baroque in Latin America, and his approach to (anti)literature instills new life into this subject. He argues that the predominant mode of the avant-garde, which sought to break with the past only in order to found a new sense of identity that is both regionally specific and universally recognizable, is fundamentally “literary” in the traditional sense, even as it challenges established norms of literature. What he calls anti-literature, which could also be called anti-avant-garde or avant-garde, involves a radicalization of poetic language that resists any such hierarchy, identitarian discourse, or foundational aesthetic autonomy, affirming instead the potential for writing to reconfigure non-dominating relations with the fundamentally heterogeneous and dynamic elements of reality. Shellhorse stresses the political dimension of such an alternate mode of writing, which eschews political representation per se for an active attention to the limits, excesses, and exclusions of representation, including what he calls the feminine and the subaltern. The case studies of anti-literature are taken from the center and margins of the twentieth-century literary canon, constituting what could be called the prehistory of post-literature. They wind between the conventions of modernism, on the one hand, and the demands of political commitment, on the other, reflecting elements of both but determining relations to politics and aesthetics that are...

Para una teoría del arte en Historia y estilo, de Jorge Mañach by Yaneidys Arencibia Coloma

Reviewed by: Para una teoría del arte en Historia y estilo, de Jorge Mañach by Yaneidys Arencibia Coloma Christina García Arencibia Coloma, Yaneidys. Para una teoría del arte en Historia y estilo, de Jorge Mañach. A Contracorriente, 2018. 110 pp. Yaneidys Arencibia Coloma's engagement with Jorge Mañach's early-to-mid-twentieth century essays will be of particular interest to Latin American Cultural Studies scholars and intellectual historians of Cuba's Republican era. While Jorge Mañach is already regarded as one of Cuba's most important thinkers, Arencibia Coloma effectively makes the case for considering his essays as models of multidisciplinary praxis and formulating theory from the contextual specificity of the region. For those committed to thinking Latin American culture and history from a situated vantage point, through its vernacular tropes and, thereby, bypassing hegemonic European paradigms, Mañach's essays, as shown by Arencibia Coloma, merit attention beyond a Cuban literary canon. Specifically, Arencibia Coloma's intervention in the scholarship on Mañach is to consider a collection of four essays published in a volume titled Historia y estilo from 1944, as contributing to the discipline of Art Historical theory. Whereas Arnold Hauser is credited for being the first to argue for a sociological approach to art in 1951, Jorge Mañach had articulated an interdependence between art and society seven years prior. Again, for Latin American Cultural Studies scholars who privilege the authority of autochthonous intellectuals, Mañach's sociological art theories articulated through the literary genre of the essay not only provide an alternative to US and European criticism, but also demonstrate that Cultural Studies methods in Latin America predated those of Britain and the US. In her introduction, Arencibia Coloma explains that, while scholars have attended to the individual essays compiled in Historia y estilo, alongside other works of Mañach devoted to particular cultural manifestations, the 1944 volume as a whole has not been carefully studied. Consequently, previous readers have missed Mañach's singular contribution to art historical theory. From the island's colonial past to his present, Mañach traces artistic trends in tandem with the island's geography, institutions, forms of government, minor and major political events, and, especially, to stages in the nation-building project. What he formulates is a processional evolution of styles as both constituted and constitutive of historical circumstance. Arencibia Coloma later notes that, for contemporary readers, such a relationship between art and its sociopolitical context is taken as a given. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, Eurocentric discourses and periodizations dominated; these discourses tended to focus on form, as having its own internal raison d'être and linear chronology, or iconography, privileging correlations with texts such as [End Page 293] the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology. Ultimately, Mañach succeeds in understanding the trajectory of Cuban art styles in relation to its academies and immediate historical climate, that is, as a process and not a phenomenon. Practicing an Electivist philosophy, Mañach was not tethered to any one ideology and selected concepts from a variety of thinkers and discourses. In this respect, together with his multidisciplinarity, Arencibia Coloma argues that Mañach further escapes Eurocentric models and their presumed inherent theorems. Significantly, Mañach drew from the historiography of the Longue Durée, Emile Durkheim's notions of societal integration and collective consciousness, Herbert Spencer's evolutionism and aggregates, and Oswald Spengler's notion of cultures as discrete organisms with souls. While positivist historians focused on the facticity of documents, the dates of battles and the names of generals, the Longue Durée historiographers set their sights on much longer, wholistic processes. As Arencibia Coloma explains, in Mañach's dense cultural essays the binary between politics and aesthetics collapses and a single literary work is considered a more efficacious synthesis of the era's zeitgeist than a heap of government documents. Drawing from Durkheim, Spencer, and Spengler (among others), Mañach elaborates various stages in the evolution of the nation, like the maturation of a larger subjectivity, imbued with a consciousness. For Mañach, what he describes as initially an amorphous aggregate eventually becomes a...

An overview of Caribbean and Latin-American cultural heritage studies

This review analyzes, through three recently published books that talk about cultural heritage in Latin America, how the Cultural Heritage Studies have allowed us to understand the current situation in the region characterized by the growing tendency to promote declarations of heritage as part of a plan for the use of culture as a resource for sustainable development. Likewise, those books analyze how responses from local communities are generated to hegemonic definitions of heritage, which indicates that cultural heritage in Latin America is not something given but something in constant construction and dispute.