Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human

Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human PDF

Author: Lucy Bollington

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2020-03-18

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1683401778

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This volume explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and examine the ways humans and nonhumans shape one another. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman. Contributors identify posthumanist themes across a range of different materials, including an anecdote about a plague of rabbits in Historia de las Indias by Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas, photography depicting desert landscapes at the site of Brazil’s War of Canudos, and digital and installation art portraying victims of state-sponsored and drug violence in Colombia and Mexico. The essays illuminate how these cultural texts broach the limits between life and death, human and animal, technology and the body, and people and the environment. They also show that these works use the category of the human to address issues related to race, gender, inequality, necropolitics, human rights, and the role of the environment. Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human demonstrates that by focusing on the boundary between the human and nonhuman, writers, artists, and scholars can open up new dimensions to debates about identity and difference, the local and the global, and colonialism and power. Contributors: Natalia Aguilar Vásquez | Emily Baker | Lucy Bollington | Liliana Chávez Díaz | Carlos Fonseca | Niall H.D. Geraghty | Edward King | Rebecca Kosick | Nicole Delia Legnani | Paul Merchant | Joanna Page | Joey Whitfield

Liberalism at Its Limits

Liberalism at Its Limits PDF

Author: Ileana Rodríguez

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2010-06-15

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0822973537

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In Liberalism at Its Limits, Ileana Rodriguez considers several Latin American nations that govern under the name of liberalism yet display a shocking range of nondemocratic features. In her political, cultural, and philosophical analysis, she examines these environments in which liberalism seems to have reached its limits, as the universalizing project gives way to rampant nonstate violence, gross inequality, and neocolonialism. Focusing on Guatemala, Colombia, and Mexico, Rodriguez shows how standard liberal models fail to account for new forms of violence and exploitation, which in fact follow from specific clashes between liberal ideology and local practice. Looking at these tensions within the ostensibly well-ordered state, Rodriguez exposes how the misunderstanding and misuse of liberal principles are behind realities of political turmoil, and questions whether liberalism is in fact an ideology sufficient to empower populations and transition nation-states into democratic roles in the global order. In this way, Liberalism at Its Limits offers a critical examination of the forced fitting of liberal models to Latin American nations and reasserts cross-cultural communication as crucial to grasping the true link between varying systems of value and politics.

Perspectives on Las Américas

Perspectives on Las Américas PDF

Author: Mathew C. Gutmann

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0470752068

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Perspectives on Las Américas: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation charts new territory by demonstrating the limits of neatly demarcating the regions of ‘Latin America’ and the ‘United States’. This landmark volume presents key readings that collectively examine the historical, cultural, economic, and political integration of Latina/os across the Americas, thereby challenging the barriers between Latina/o Studies and Latin American/Caribbean Studies. Brings together key readings that collectively examine the historical, cultural, economic, and political integration of Latina/os across the Americas. Charts new territory by demonstrating the limits of neatly demarcating the regions of 'Latin America' and the 'United States'. Challenges the barriers between Latina/o Studies and Latin American/Caribbean Studies as approached by anthropologists, historians, and other scholars. Offers instructors, students, and interested readers both the theoretical tools and case studies necessary to rethink transnational realities and identities.

Science Fusion in Contemporary Mexican Literature

Science Fusion in Contemporary Mexican Literature PDF

Author: Brian T. Chandler

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1684485215

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Science Fusion draws on new materialist theory to analyze the relationship between science and literature in contemporary works of fiction, poetry, and theater from Mexico. In this deft new study, Brian Chandler examines how a range of contemporary Mexican writers “fuse” science and literature in their work to rethink what it means to be human in an age of climate change, mass extinctions, interpersonal violence, femicide, and social injustice. The authors under consideration here—including Alberto Blanco, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Sabina Berman, Maricela Guerrero, and Elisa Díaz Castelo—challenge traditional divisions that separate human from nonhuman, subject from object, culture from nature. Using science and literature to engage topics in biopolitics, historiography, metaphysics, ethics, and ecological crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, works of science fusion offer fresh perspectives to address present-day sociocultural and environmental issues.

After Human Rights

After Human Rights PDF

Author: Fernando J. Rosenberg

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2017-03-30

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0822981432

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Fernando J. Rosenberg explores Latin American artistic production concerned with the possibility of justice after the establishment, rise, and ebb of the human rights narrative around the turn of the last century. Prior to this, key literary and artistic projects articulated Latin American modernity by attempting to address and supplement the state's inability to embody and enact justice. Rosenberg argues that since the topics of emancipation, identity, and revolution no longer define social concerns, Latin American artistic production is now situated at a point where the logic and conditions of marketization intersect with the notion of rights through which subjects define themselves politically. Rosenberg grounds his study in discussions of literature, film, and visual art (novels of political re-foundations, fictions of truth and reconciliation, visual arts based on cases of disappearance, films about police violence, artistic collaborations with police forces, and judicial documentaries.) In doing so, he provides a highly original examination of the paradoxical demands on current artistic works to produce both capital value and foster human dignity.

The Latin American Short Story at Its Limits

The Latin American Short Story at Its Limits PDF

Author: Lucy Bell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780367601751

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The Latin American short story has often been viewed in terms of its relation to orality, tradition and myth. But this desire to celebrate the difference of Latin American culture unwittingly contributes to its exoneration, failing to do justice to its richness, complexity and contemporaneity. By re-reading and re-viewing the short stories of Juan Rulfo. Julio Cortázar and Augusto Monterroso, Bell reveals the hybridity of this genre. It is at once roofed in traditional narrative and fragmented by modern experience; its residual qualities are revived through emergent tonus. Crucially, its oral and mythical characteristics are compounded with the formal traits of modern, emerging media: photography, cinema, telephony, journalism, and cartoon art. Lucy Bell is a Lecturer in Spanish and Translation Studies at the University of Surrey. Book jacket.

Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics

Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics PDF

Author: Jens Andermann

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-09-04

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 3110775964

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The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue with areas including critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large. By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary.

The Limits of Identity

The Limits of Identity PDF

Author: Charles Hatfield

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2015-11-15

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 147730729X

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The Limits of Identity is a polemical critique of the repudiation of universalism and the theoretical commitment to identity and difference embedded in Latin American literary and cultural studies. Through original readings of foundational Latin American thinkers (such as José Martí and José Enrique Rodó) and contemporary theorists (such as John Beverley and Doris Sommer), Charles Hatfield reveals and challenges the anti-universalism that informs seemingly disparate theoretical projects. The Limits of Identity offers a critical reexamination of widely held conceptions of culture, ideology, interpretation, and history. The repudiation of universalism, Hatfield argues, creates a set of problems that are both theoretical and political. Even though the recognition of identity and difference is normally thought to be a form of resistance, The Limits of Identity claims that, in fact, the opposite is true.

Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture

Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture PDF

Author: Micah McKay

Publisher:

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781683404057

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This book looks at the role of waste in Latin American cultural texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Micah McKay considers how writers and filmmakers engage with the theme and argues that garbage illuminates key limits related to the region's experience with contemporary capitalism.