Subjunctive Aesthetics

Subjunctive Aesthetics PDF

Author: Carolyn Fornoff

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2024-02-15

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0826506194

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During the twenty-first century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. Subjunctive Aesthetics studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico's present and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative forms of territoriality (ways of being in relation to the environment) through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation. Whereas ecocritical studies have often focused on art's evidentiary role—its ability to visualize and prove the urgency of environmental damage—author Carolyn Fornoff argues that what unites the artists under consideration is their use of more hypothetical, uncertain representational modes, or "subjunctive aesthetics." In English, the subjunctive is a grammatical mode that articulates the imagined, desired, and possible. In the Spanish language, it is even more widely used to express doubts, denials, value judgments, and emotions. Each chapter of Subjunctive Aesthetics takes up one of these modalities to examine how Mexican artists, writers, and filmmakers activate approaches to the planet not just as it is, but as it could be or should be.

Mexican Literature as World Literature

Mexican Literature as World Literature PDF

Author: Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1501374796

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Mexican Literature as World Literature is a landmark collection that, for the first time, studies the major interventions of Mexican literature of all genres in world literary circuits from the 16th century forward. This collection features a range of essays in dialogue with major theorists and critics of the concept of world literature. Authors show how the arrival of Spanish conquerors and priests, the work of enlightenment naturalists, the rise of Mexican academies, the culture of the Mexican Revolution, and Mexican neoliberalism have played major roles in the formation of world literary structures. The book features major scholars in Mexican literary studies engaging in the ways in which modernism, counterculture, and extinction have been essential to Mexico's world literary pursuit, as well as studies of the work of some of Mexico's most important authors: Sor Juana, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, and Juan Rulfo, among others. These essays expand and enrich the understanding of Mexican literature as world literature, showing the many significant ways in which Mexico has been a center for world literary circuits.

The Mexican Transpacific

The Mexican Transpacific PDF

Author: Ignacio López-Calvo

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0826504957

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The Mexican Transpacific considers the influence of a Japanese ethnic background or lack thereof in the cultural production of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican authors, performers, and visual artists. Despite Japanese Mexicans’ unquestionable influence on Mexico’s history and culture and the historical studies recently published on this Nikkei community, the study of its cultural production and therefore its self-definition has been, for the most part, overlooked. This book, a continuation of author Ignacio López-Calvo’s previous research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry, focuses mostly on literature, theater, and visual arts produced by Japanese immigrants in Mexico and their descendants, rather than on the Japanese community as a mere object of study. With this interdisciplinary project, López-Calvo aims to bring to the fore this silenced community’s voice and agency to historicize its own experience.

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms PDF

Author: Guillermina De Ferrari

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-08-19

Total Pages: 694

ISBN-13: 0429602677

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The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms brings together a team of expert contributors in this critical and innovative volume. Highlighting key trends within the discipline, as well as cutting-edge viewpoints that revise and redefine traditional debates and approaches, readers will come away with an understanding of the complexity of twenty-first-century Latin American cultural production and with a renovated and eminently contemporary understanding of twentieth-century literature and culture. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and academics in the fields of Latin American literature, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

Rewriting the Orient

Rewriting the Orient PDF

Author: Yunfei Bai

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2024-03-15

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1469681862

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In this ambitious volume, Yunfei Bai delves into the creative adaptations of classical Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan literary texts by four renowned nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors in France and Argentina: Theophile Gautier, Stephane Mallarme, Victor Segalen, and Jorge Luis Borges. Without any knowledge of the source languages, the authors crafted their own French and Spanish retellings based on received translations of these Asian works. Rewriting the Orient not only explores the so far untapped translation-rewriting continuum to trace the pivotal role of Orientalism in the formation of a singular corpus of world literature that goes beyond the Anglophone canon, but also sheds light on a wide range of innovative discursive strategies that readily challenge traditional notions of cultural appropriation.

Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho

Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho PDF

Author: Koichi Hagimoto

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2023-07-15

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0826505716

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In the early twentieth century, historical imaginings of Japan contributed to the Argentine vision of “transpacific modernity." Intellectuals such as Eduardo Wilde and Manuel Domecq García celebrated Japanese customs and traditions as important values that can be integrated into Argentine society. But a new generation of Nikkei or Japanese Argentines is rewriting this conventional narrative in the twenty-first century. Nikkei writers such as Maximiliano Matayoshi and Alejandra Kamiya are challenging the earlier, unapologetic view of Japan based on their own immigrant experiences. Compared to the experience of political persecution against Japanese immigrants in Brazil and Peru, the Japanese in Argentina generally lived under a more agreeable sociopolitical climate. In order to understand the "positive" perception of Japan in Argentine history and literature, Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho turns to the current debate on race in Argentina, particularly as it relates to the discourse of whiteness. One of the central arguments is that Argentina's century-old interest in Japan represents a disguised method of (re)claiming its white, Western identity. Through close readings of diverse genres (travel writing, essay, novel, short story, and film) Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho yields a multi-layered analysis in order to underline the role Japan has played in both defining and defying Argentine modernity from the twentieth century to the present.

Disoriented Disciplines

Disoriented Disciplines PDF

Author: Rosario Hubert

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2023-12-15

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0810146576

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An urgent call to think on the edges, surfaces, and turns of the literary artifact when it crosses cultural boundaries In the absence of specialized programs of study, abstract discussions of China in Latin America took shape in contingent critical infrastructures built at the crossroads of the literary market, cultural diplomacy, and commerce. As Rosario Hubert reveals, modernism flourishes comparatively, in contexts where cultural criticism is a creative and cosmopolitan practice. Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature understands translation as a material act of transfer, decentering the authority of the text and connecting seemingly untranslatable cultural traditions. In this book, chinoiserie, “coolie” testimonies, Maoist prints, visual poetry, and Cold War memoirs compose a massive archive of primary sources that cannot be read or deciphered with the conventional tools of literary criticism. As Hubert demonstrates, even canonical Latin American authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Haroldo de Campos, write about China from the edges of philology, mediating the concrete as well as the sensorial. Advocating for indiscipline as a core method of comparative literary studies, Disoriented Disciplines challenges us to interrogate the traditional contours of the archives and approaches that define the geopolitics of knowledge.

Feeling the Gaze

Feeling the Gaze PDF

Author: Gail Bulman

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2022-08-25

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1469667444

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Feeling the Gaze explores the visual elements in eight contemporary Argentine and Chilean theater performances. Gail A. Bulman shows how staged images can awaken spectators' emotions to activate their intellect, provoking nuanced and deep contemplation of social, historical, and political themes. Ranging from simple props, costumes, body movements and spatial constructions to integrated media and digital images, the aesthetic components in these pieces engage to forge multifaceted storytelling, stimulate the public's relation to memory, and create affective bonds that help build individual and collective social consciousness. Recent innovations in Southern Cone theatre aesthetics have been shifting traditional performance/spectator relationships and animating ideological discussions. The various works presented here give readers a holistic understanding of the emerging prominence of visuality and affect as a vehicle for political advocacy in Latin American theatre and performance. The book asks us to consider the formation of new spectator-performance bonds as authors, directors, and theatre groups increasingly turn toward alternative settings for their work. Lingering visual memories of the performances, together with the feelings that the performative experience stirs up, provide spectators with an enduring focal point through which to reflect on and judge what is "beyond" the performed scenes. Staged live in the Southern Cone and internationally since 2014, these plays demonstrate the transgressive power of the visual to make spectators see, feel, and potentially act against injustices and violence. This study offers comprehensive critical discussions of Teatro Banda's O'Higgins: un hombre en pedazos; Teatro Nino Proletario's Fulgor; Mario, Luiggi y sus fantasmas's Manual de carrona; Agustin Leon Pruzzo's En la sombra de la cupula; Teatro la Maria's Los millonarios; Claudio Tolcachir's Proximo; Sergio Blanco's Tebas Land; and Lola Arias's Doble de Riesgo.

Interpretaciones

Interpretaciones PDF

Author: Rudyard J. Alcocer

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2023-02-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1469676672

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Interpretaciones: Experimental Criticism and the Metrics of Latin American Literature examines readers' reactions to short texts during crucial moments of the reading experience. These readers are students at universities in the US and several Spanish-speaking countries. Far from reducing the reading experience to a series of numbers, the data-driven approaches in the study instead underline the startling complexity and elusiveness of seemingly basic literary processes and concepts, including those pertaining to authorship, titles, conclusions, and so on. Simultaneously, Interpretaciones suggests alternative methodologies for gaining new and unexpected knowledge about literary texts themselves, whether from Latin America or elsewhere. Interpretaciones is an ambitious, interdisciplinary project geared toward those interested in literary theory, Latin American and Caribbean literature, and the nexus between literature and science.

Chineseness in Chile

Chineseness in Chile PDF

Author: Maria Montt Strabucchi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 3030839664

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This book explores the role of Chineseness or lo chino in the production of Chilean national identity. It does so by discussing the many voices, images, and intentions of diverse actors who contribute to stereotyping or problematizing Chineseness in Chile. The authors argue that in general, representing and perceiving China or Chineseness as the Other is part of a broader cultural and political strategy for various stakeholders to articulate Chile as either a Western country or one that is becoming-Western. The authors trace the evolution of the symbolic role that China and Chineseness play in defining racial, gendered, and class aspects of Chilean national social imaginary. In doing so, they challenge a common idea that Chineseness is a stable signifier and the simplistic perception of the ethnic Chinese as the unassimilable foreigner within the nation. In response, the authors call for a postmigrant approach to understanding identities and Chilean society beyond stubborn Orient-Occident and us-them dichotomies.