Twentieth-century Latin American Research Articles

Putting a Collective Finger on the Pulse: The New Cadre of Latin American Women Writers

Putting a Collective Finger on the PulseThe New Cadre of Latin American Women Writers Veronica Esposito (bio) Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and other Latin American women writers are responding to themes that particularly speak to a younger, female audience—bodily autonomy, redefinition of gender, the internet's mediation of identity, and brushes with the existential—in common ways, embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims. OVER THE PAST DECADE or so, a new cadre of female Latin American writers has emerged in English translation. Although each is distinctive in her own right, these writers share enough overlapping themes, approaches, and styles that we might refer to it as a "school," if not a "movement." On their common ground are the misogynistic violence that pervades the lives of Latin American women; bodily autonomy, especially around access to abortion; the ongoing definition and redefinition of gender; internet culture and how it mediates identity and personhood; and brushes with the existential. These writers have responded to such themes in common ways; most notably, by embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims. Their literature speaks particularly to a younger, female audience, and these authors seem to have a collective finger on the pulse of their readers' lives. Although I cannot pretend to have an exhaustive list of the writers in this group, I can name off the ones that currently stand out to me in English translation. In no particular order, they include Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, Fernanda Melchor, Liliana Colanzi, Cristina Rivera Garza, Valeria Luiselli, Nona Fernández, and Lina Meruane. Certainly there are more currently at work in Spanish as well as others emerging in English translation. A good example of the prototypical novel of this group of writers is Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda's 2018 novel Mandíbula, published in 2022 as Jawbone in Sarah Booker's translation. It tells the story of a schoolteacher for an elite preparatory school for upper-class girls who goes mad, kidnapping one of her students and subjecting her to experiences of body horror. On one level, the book captures many of the central concerns of Latin American writers like Ojeda—body autonomy, the socialization of girls within Latin American society, mental and physical horrors perpetrated against women of the continent—yet it also communicates on levels that are detached from a Latin American context, as it speaks in languages comprehensible to young women throughout the developed world. Specifically, Ojeda speaks in the language of true crime podcasts, streaming serials, creepypastas, and the world of therapy. Regarding some of her literary influences, Ojeda told me: "I have a thing for true crime documentaries. I don't like to like them because they really hurt me, but I keep going to them. And creepypastas, of course. Not all of them, but some are so very powerful." One of the striking things about Jawbone is how it comes across as something along the lines of a true crime podcast or a creepypasta—did you ever hear the one about the teacher who went mad and tortured her own student? It converses with the media resonating with young women across the globe, giving it a currency that transcends its Ecuadoran context. Yet even as Jawbone feels very of the moment, it also connects up with deep-rooted aspects of the Latin American tradition. For instance, the book includes chapters that read as though they are transcripts from one of the main character's therapy sessions, the speakers only denoted by a Q or an A, and the questions asked by Q not included in the transcript. This tracks back to the powerful psychoanalytical writing that was a core aspect of twentieth-century Latin American literature, [End Page 18] reminiscent of Manuel Puig, in particular. In addition, the suggestion that the controversial Catholic organization Opus Dei is involved in the school weaves in a political aspect, staying true to the propensity for Latin American authors to let politics infuse their narratives in subtle and unexpected ways. It also brings to mind canonical Latin American writers like...

Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in Twentieth-Century Peru and Latin America

Recent global political trends are inevitably spurring reappraisals of classic twentieth-century Latin American “populist” politics and politicians—such as Peru's Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895–1979) and his Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) party. Long shrouded by partisan polemics, the enigmas of clandestine politics and exile, and a cultivated “cult of personality,” Haya is approached by Iñigo García-Bryce as a multiple historical personality in this well-conceived and clearly written political-intellectual biography. Instead of modern Peru's essentialized “hero” or “betrayer,” Haya assumes over time various shape-shifting personalities: the student revolutionary leader, the Marxist and transnational propagandist of the Mexican Revolution, the Peruvian party builder and compromiser politician, and the elder statesman, among other labels (p. 2).After a lucid brief introduction, the book is organized into five topical chapters, which at times circle around the same chronology of Haya's long career. Chapter 1 explores the internationalist origins and ramifications of the party from Haya's youth in the early twentieth century through the 1970s. Chapter 2 examines the long and twisting hate-love relationship between APRA as an initially insurrectionist force and the Peruvian military, which is finally resolved in the late 1960s when Juan Velasco Alvarado's regime embraces many of APRA's long-sought developmentalist reforms. Chapter 3 traces the shifting relationship of APRA with imperialism—that is, the United States—from Haya's fascinating critique of foreign capital as the “first stage of capitalism” in Latin America to their often veiled mutual embrace as anticommunist partners in the post-1940 era (p. 14). Chapter 4 traces the impact of Haya's organizational strategies and prowess on the political fortunes of APRA and its devolution into a Haya-centered “cult of personality.” Chapter 5, as elaborated below, brings gender politics into the equation, uncovering the roles of female activists in the party and their abandonment by the 1940s.There are three standout innovations here. First, this is the first book to comprehensively delve into APRA as a transnational political force and intellectual network, at least in its early decades, the 1920s and 1930s, before the party turned inward to focus on political power in Peru (forced exiles aside). García-Bryce links the early dynamism of APRA to inspiration from the ideology of the Mexican Revolution as an original multiclass Latin American political model—if begging the question of which of the many Mexican revolutionary movements or phases Haya was enamored with. Haya also attracted over the decades the solidarity and friendship of scores of well-known European and US intellectuals, if at times his connections were willfully exaggerated. One gets the sense, not fully articulated here, that APRA's compromising conservatism after the 1930s paralleled the turn of Joseph Stalin (Haya's Comintern nemesis) to a statist one-country model when forced to abandon initial Soviet dreams of global revolution.Second, the book takes a stab at approaching the still-sensitive issue of Haya's sexual politics, as a deeply closeted gay man in the socially conservative machista milieu of Peruvian society. A political metaphor is established in chapter 4: that Haya's concealed sexuality colored his increasingly puritanical party discipline and the concealment politics of APRA party cells generally. But these linkages are never clearly developed. The book is more successful in dealing with gender politics generally in chapter 5, which strongly builds from oral histories and testimonials of women long active in the Aprista ranks or leadership, such as Magda Portal. However, the powerful contributions to party building by women activists and supporters were betrayed by Haya and other male party elites, who by the late 1940s downplayed their initial equalitarian ethos and prosuffrage politics, allowing women's suffrage in Peru to be co-opted by conservative elites in the following decade. So, while the story is now well illustrated from a gendered perspective, the master narrative is clearly familiar: a once revolutionary party progressively shedding its leftist cred in the pursuit of centrist power, particularly as Peruvian politics as a whole shifted leftward by the turbulent 1960s.At times, I wish that this book had ventured beyond Haya's intellectual personae into connecting with the party's deeper social history (which has attracted much research into its long-standing regional and class bases) or, alternatively, APRA's allure in the realm of cultural and aesthetic politics, the latter topics creatively pursued by recent historians in the populist or utopian cultures of Peronism in Argentina and Cardenismo in Mexico. Haya's ideas could not have been the only factor in deep-seated APRA allegiances. Written before the horrific demise of Haya's political heir Alan García in 2019 and the party's electoral collapse, the book may overstate APRA's ideological durability. As a stand-alone twentieth-century-style intellectual biography, however, this book is unmatched.

Workers before the Court: Conflicts and Labor Justice in the Context of the 1964 Coup d'Etat in Brazil

Workers before the Court: Conflicts and Labor Justice in the Context of the 1964 Coup d'Etat in Brazil

Anti-populist coups d’état in the twenty-first century: reasons, dynamics and consequences

There is a burgeoning literature on how to deal with populism in advanced liberal democracies, which puts a strong emphasis on legalist and pluralist methods. There is also a new and expanding literature that looks at the consequences of coups d’état for democracies by employing large-N data sets. These two recent literatures, however, do not speak to one another, based on the underlying assumption that coups against populists were a distinctly twentieth-century Latin American phenomenon. Yet the cases of Venezuela in 2002, Thailand in 2006 and Turkey in 2016 show that anti-populist coups have also occurred in the twenty-first century. Focussing on these cases, the article enquires about the extent to which military coups succeed against populists. The main finding is that although anti-populist coups may initially take over the government, populism survives in the long run. Thus, anti-populist coups fail in their own terms and they do not succeed in eradicating populism. In fact, in the aftermath of a coup, populism gains further legitimacy against what it calls repressive elites, while possibilities for democratisation are further eroded. This is because populists tap into existing socio-cultural divides and politically mobilise the hitherto underrepresented sectors in their societies that endure military interventions.

Four Thinkers in the Twentieth Century Genealogy of Mexicanidad: Justo Sierra, Samuel Ramos, José Vasconcelos, and Octavio Paz

The twentieth-century development of Mexicanidad underwent a series of treatments that changed how selfhood in Mexico was problematized and understood. Octavio Paz’s claim that Mexicanidad faced historical and philosophical obstacles in its development, such as the problem of solitude, allowed him to go beyond the accounts of Mexicanidad provided by Justo Sierra, José Vasconcelos, and Samuel Ramos. Paz’s account of Mexicanidad sought an explicit connection between the Mexican experience of solitude and the universal human experience of solitude. This paper demonstrates how Paz’s revised account addresses these and other problems in twentieth-century Latin American quests for national identity.

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.

América Latina no século XX: revoluções, muralismos, imperialismo e dependência

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar os elementos basilares para entender a arte mural mexicana, passada e presente, como parte integrante do pensamento crítico latino-americano e caribenho do século XX e os impactos de seus ensinamentos para os sujeitos políticos de diversas áreas ao longo da luta de classes do século XXI. O faz a partir de uma revisão histórico-crítica bibliográfica tanto do muralismo como da Teoria Marxista da Dependência (TMD). Coloca em diálogo dois conhecimentos: a arte política engajada do muralismo mexicano e a práxis militante revolucionária da TMD. Entende o debate da arte política muralista oriundo da escola mexicana como uma fecunda referência de marxismo latino-americano, a partir da centralidade que deu à história das resistências e revoluções como contrapontos à história hegemônica tanto na invasão colonial como em todo período seguinte. Toma como pergunta norteadora: o que o muralismo mexicano tem a nos ensinar no século XXI?

Fuel for Conspiracy: Suspected Imperialist Plots and the Chaco War

Conspiracy discourse interprets the world as the object of sinister machinations, rife with opaque plots and covert actors. With this frame, the war between Bolivia and Paraguay over the Northern Chaco region (1932–1935) emerges as a paradigmatic conflict that many in the Americas interpreted as resulting from the conspiracy manoeuvres of foreign oil interests to grab land supposedly rich in oil. At the heart of such interpretation, projected by those critical of the fratricidal war, were partial and extrapolated facts, which sidelined the weight of long-term disputes between these South American countries traumatised by previous international wars resulting in humiliating defeats and territorial losses, and thus prone to welcome warfare to bolster national pride and overcome the memory of past debacles. The article reconstructs the transnational diffusion of the conspiracy narrative that tilted political and intellectual imagination towards attributing the war to imperialist economic interests, downplaying the political agency of those involved. Analysis suggests that such transnational reception highlights a broader trend in the twentieth-century Latin American conspiracy discourse, stemming from the theorization of geopolitical marginality and the belief that political decision-making was shaped by the plots of hegemonic powers.

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...

In Search of the Sacred Book: Religion and the Contemporary Latin American Novel by Aníbal González

Reviewed by: In Search of the Sacred Book: Religion and the Contemporary Latin American Novel by Aníbal González Rebecca Janzen González, Aníbal. In Search of the Sacred Book: Religion and the Contemporary Latin American Novel. U of Pittsburgh P, 2018. 244 pp. In Search of the Sacred Book is a significant contribution to the fields of Latin American literature, religious studies, and the dialogue between the two by one of the most important Latin American literary critics. This work takes the question of religion seriously; it is an essential part of life in Latin America that has largely been ignored by critics in the fields of literary and cultural studies. The historical connection between religion and education, which gave way to religion and nationalism, is the background for the work. Indeed, In Search of the Sacred Book’s central claim is that “religion and nationalism come together in a series of key works of the Latin American novel in which the nation becomes the transcendent ‘secular sacred’ of which the novel becomes the holy vessel, its sacred scripture” (27). In some ways, González’s work reads the ciudad letrada as a spiritual space. The introduction establishes that this monograph will discuss notions of the sacred and the novel. He surveys Western literature, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, to establish a history of literary works that deal with religious topics. He also engages with theological approaches to sacred books (such as the Torah and Quran), and illustrates the similarities between the two genres. González then moves to Latin America, contextualizing the argument for novels as nationalist documents—and highlighting the ways that several of these works engage with religious or spiritual topics, in spite of the fact that the liberal independence movements of the nineteenth century were highly critical of the Catholic Church. In Search of the Sacred Book focuses on narratives that appropriate “ideas and motifs associated with religion and theology in an attempt to link them organically in theory and practice to the discourse of the novel, and, in turn, to the discourse about the nation” (27). It examines several important genres of the novel and reinterprets canonical texts by writers such as Federico Gamboa, Juan Rulfo, and Gabriel García Márquez. In this process, González demonstrates that the novel is a way to interpret the sacred and serve the nation. Each chapter connects a genre and time period to the overall argument. The first examines naturalist novels from the turn of the twentieth century by Federico Gamboa and Manuel Zeno Gandía. He argues that these novels—usually thought of as being influenced by scientific discourse—present religious elements, such as prophetic rhetoric or other religious elements, as a spiritual survival guide to navigate massive social changes of the time period. The subsequent chapter focuses entirely on the work of Borges as a theologian and compares his fictional work to his other writing with religious or philosophical commentary. This chapter, as well as chapter three, give tantalizing glimpses into the relationship between twentieth-century Latin American fiction and the European and Latin American literary traditions since the sixteenth century. A greater emphasis on this in the introduction argument would have strengthened González’s claims. The subsequent chapter, in addition to contextualizing the work of writers Rulfo, María Luisa Bombal and Alejo Carpentier, demonstrates the way that González examines works from each region of Latin America, effectively supporting [End Page 1054] his claim that his analysis is about the connection between novels and nationalism throughout the region. This chapter contends that the novels were an attempt to imagine a second creation, where “a new novel and a new nation . . . will rise from the ruins and relics of a prior and vanished order” (118). The Boom novels, which González examines in chapter four, deal with some of this effort to imagine a new nation. It builds on the established understanding that these novels’ form reflects changes of the 1960s and 1970s. González builds on this existing idea to return to his argument, showing how their form—such as their fragmentation—in fact, mimics sacred works. In...

Crónicas travestis: El periodismo transgresor de Alfonsina Storni, Clarice Lispector y María Moreno by Mariela Méndez

Reviewed by: Crónicas travestis: El periodismo transgresor de Alfonsina Storni, Clarice Lispector y María Moreno by Mariela Méndez Ashley Brock Méndez, Mariela. Crónicas travestis: El periodismo transgresor de Alfonsina Storni, Clarice Lispector y María Moreno. Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2017. 312 pp. Crónicas travestis traces a novel genealogy between the journalism of Alfonsina Storni (Argentina, 1892-1938), Clarice Lispector (Brazil, 1920-77), and María Moreno (Argentina, 1947-), focusing on the subversive engagement of all three writers with the conventions of the women's column and drawing connections between this body of work and Moreno's post-dictatorship journals alfonsina and El Teje. Méndez argues that, by introducing the genre-bending fluidity of the crónica, writing under multiple (sometimes gender-crossing) pseudonyms, and subtly parodying the prescriptions of the rigidly normative genre of the columna femenina, Storni, Lispector, and Moreno each destabilize gender binaries while laying bare the constructedness of gendered identity. In this way, Méndez reads these key figures in twentieth-century Latin American proto-feminist and feminist journalism as anticipating theories of gender performativity (Judith Butler), cross-dressing (Marjorie Garber), and queer temporality (J. Jack Halberstam). Méndez is not the first to associate these trailblazing women writers with a subversively feminist political project; she acknowledges a debt, for example, to the work of Gwen Kirkpatrick and Francine Masiello. The originality of Méndez's study lies in its engagement with contemporary queer theory as well as in its comparative nature. The connection between the two Argentine writers is well-established [End Page 415] (Moreno invokes Storni in calling the feminist journal she launches in 1983 alfonsina), but as Méndez points out, Storni's journalism receives far less critical attention than does her poetry. Clarice Lispector's journalism has been similarly overshadowed by her renowned fiction. Moreover, reading the Brazilian author alongside her Spanish American counterparts remains a rare comparative move. It is one that proves fruitful for Méndez, whose study not only moves between Argentine and Brazil but also unites several distinct historical moments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Méndez's analysis encompasses Storni's columns "Feminidades" and "Bocetos Femeninos" (in La Nota and La Nación, respectively, 1919-21), Lispector's columns "Correio Feminino-Feira de Utilidades" and "Só para Mulheres" (in Correio da Manhã and Diário da Noite, respectively, 1959-61), and Moreno's columns "La Mujer" and "Señores" (in Tiempo Argentino, 1982-86), as well as Moreno's writing in the journals alfonsina (1983-84) and El Teje (2006-10). Diligently attending to the historical and cultural specificities that make the context in which each author worked distinct, Méndez identifies compelling commonalities between them. She points, for example, to how all three writers entered the public space of journalism at times when the prevailing ideology (often linked to the state) sought to usher women back into domestic roles and regulate their bodies. This reactionary ideology rears its head not only in moments associated with conservative politics, such as during the last dictatorship in Argentina, but also in moments of rapid modernization and progressivism, such as the 1920s in Argentina, the late 1950s in Brazil, and Argentina's return to democracy in the 1980s. Crónicas travestis unfolds over four chapters, the first two building the case for comparison among the women's columns authored by the three writers in question and the last two analyzing Moreno's post-dictatorship journals as the most overt expression of a radical gender politics that has its roots in these earlier columns. The first chapter focuses on the difficulties and discomforts each author faced as a woman occupying public space and the common response of creating a multiplicity of public personas (some of them male) behind which to hide and between which to move. Méndez argues that, for these writers, the mask becomes a political praxis that troubles the possibility of fixing identity and questions notions of authority and authorship (97). Chapter two analyzes how Storni and Lispector queer the genre of the women's column through rhetorical cross-dressing, by which Méndez means not only writing in a...

McOndo y la literatura mundial: ¿realidad o parodia?

The anthology of short stories McOndo presents itself as an antagonist of magic realism. Through a deceptive complete opposition to this genre, McOndo aimed to close an intellectual and cultural cycle in twentieth century Latin American Literature. However, the controversy generated at the time of its publishing had a limited historical influence. This situation allows, after more than 20 years of its first edition, a more measured analysis of the real critical ambitions of the anthology. To elaborate this study, World Literature′s theory is applied to propose an interpretation of McOndo as a parodic discourse that attempts to eradicate a reductionist vision of Latin America as magical, superstitious or primitive, and replace it with a new reductionist vision that emphasizes urban life in the city, expressions of popular culture and the globalization process that has “transformed” the region.

Vectors of Exchange: Translation Praxis in Cuadernos de Marcha and Revista Casa de las Américas

Historically, translation has been at the core of intellectual projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. This article investigates the translation praxis of two influential twentieth-century Latin American and Caribbean cultural journals whose influence reached beyond their own national borders: the Uruguayan Cuadernos de Marcha and the Cuban Revista Casa de las Américas. This paper examines the translation practices of these periodicals focusing on the material selected for translation. Looking at the discursive compositions that are constructed through translation, it discusses the vectors of intellectual exchange as they can be traced via translation, the way in which these periodicals create images of the Americas as a territory, and the extent to which these images either conform to or challenge the historical discursive practices that contribute to shaping existing regional imaginaries.

Alejandra Pizarnik and the Poetics of Radical Incarnation

Generally appreciated as one of the most original and creative voices in twentieth-century Latin American poetry, Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina, 1936–1972) has not been regarded as a religious poet. Yet despite her explicit disavowal of all forms of religious commitment, Pizarnik’s work is nonetheless animated by fundamentally theological concerns. This article examines in detail the theological motif of “incarnation” in Pizarnik’s verse. It argues that, despite her avowed secularism, Pizarnik frames her own poetic project in explicitly incarnational language and that this theologically inflected vision underwrites her conception of poetic meaning-making.

Las antropologías segundas en América Latina: interpelaciones y recuperaciones

This article contributes to the understanding of the characteristics and potential of Latin American “Anthropologies of the South”. First, it addresses the meaning of the term “second anthropologies”; it then differentiates them from anthropologies in the South and anthropologies of the South. Next, the article discusses certain current transformations of human civilization in general and of the university system specifically, being both the contexts where anthropological knowledge is generated. Finally, the article addresses a critical revision of significant achievements of twentieth century Latin American social and human sciences.

The ajiaco in Cuba and beyond

The ajiaco in Cuba and beyond

Relics and Erotics: Cuban Art after the Revolution

Relics and Erotics:Cuban Art after the Revolution Abigail McEwen Rolando Pérez. Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2012. 318 pp. Rachel Weiss. To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. 322 pp. Tropes of both the “Baroque” and the “utopian” have long persisted in readings of twentieth-century Latin American art and literature. Two new books, Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts by Rolando Pérez and To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art by Rachel Weiss, draw upon these interpretive metaphors in considering aspects of Cuban visual culture in the decades following the Revolution. Their subjects are separated by time and space: Sarduy left Cuba in 1960, remaining in exile for the duration of his life, and Weiss’s narrative unfolds almost exclusively in Havana during the 1980s and 1990s. Yet their exegeses of opposing impulses—toward the imperfect (likely from the Portuguese barroco, or “rough pearl”), on the one hand, and on the other toward the impossible ideal—speak analogously to the historical conditions that have shaped the past half-century of Cuban arts and letters. These books contribute to a body of scholarship around contemporary Cuban art that has swelled in recent years, sparked by reconsiderations of post-Revolutionary culture at large and, with respect to the visual arts, seemingly insatiable market interest. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera’s recent book, Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora (2011), describes the connective tissue between Weiss and Pérez’s contributions, chronicling the amorphous landscape of Cuban art in exile. Lynette M.F. Bosch, in Cuban-American Art in Miami: Exile, Identity and the Neo-Baroque (2004), focused on a very specific Cuban community (her Neo-Baroque does not engage Sarduy’s). Luis Camnitzer (New Art of Cuba [rev. ed., 2003]) and Holly Block (Art Cuba: The New Generation [2001]) provided authoritative, early accounts of the “New Cuban Art,” defining the movement in generational and historical terms and relating key documentary and encyclopedic information. A holistic history of contemporary Cuban art, one attempting to [End Page 109] relate work by artists who stayed on the island and those who left, remains to be written. Despite the proliferation of these targeted histories and of monographic studies, Cuba and the Caribbean tend to be dissociated from surveys of contemporary Latin American art. Differences in postwar developments need not preclude conceptual homologies, however, and hemispheric constructions of the Baroque and the utopian may yet prove instructive in this regard. Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor thoughtfully engaged the leitmotif of the Baroque in their exhibition, Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2000), although they referenced Cuba at only a theoretical level. By and large, scholars in literary fields have taken the lead in considering these aesthetic questions in relation to hemispheric topoi. Recently published books by Lois Parkinson Zamora (The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction [2006]) and Monika Kaup (Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film [2012]) are particularly notable; Rafael Rojas (Las repúblicas de aire: utopía y desencanto en la revolución de Hispanoamérica [2009]) and Antoni Kapcia (Cuba: Island of Dreams [2000]), among others, have critically explored utopian discourse. The recuperation of Sarduy as a bridge figure between literature and aesthetics may serve not only to better illuminate his own work, as Pérez’s book begins to do, but also to more fully integrate the Cuban philosophical tradition within the fields of Latin American art history and criticism. Read together, these books by Pérez and Weiss offer new meditations on the conjunction between Baroque and utopian praxis in post-Revolutionary Cuban visual culture. They manifest two discrete approaches to the field—academic monograph; eyewitness historical survey—and yet each seeks in a basic way to excavate an ideational provenance for creative work across Cuba’s cultural field. Before further consideration of common interests, each book is here discussed separately and within the scope of its given intentions. Reimagining the Neobaroque Body A...

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

A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War

A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War