Journal of Latin American Studies (original) (raw)
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Delaware Review of Latin American Studies
2016
This paper examines Bakhtin’s concept of authoritarian discourse in Gabriel García Márquez’s 1962 novel La mala hora and Ruy Guerra’s 2005 film adaptation of the work, O Veneno da Madrugada. The hostile environment, depicted by García Márquez and Guerra, is the perfect setting to apply Bakhtin’s ideas about authoritarian discourse. In his essay, “Discourse and the Novel”, Bakhtin explains that “there is a struggle constantly being waged to overcome the official line with its tendency to distance itself from the zone of contact, a struggle against various kinds and degrees of authority” (345). In this paper, I will examine the ways in which the characters in the novel and film struggle against the figures of authority in the town: the mayor (the authority figure) and Father Ángel (the priest). Bakhtin affirms that in cases of authoritarian discourse, one must completely accept or reject it. I argue that through the rather grim depiction of Ángel and the church building coupled with t...
History of Latin American Culture - Introduction
Routledge History of Latin American Culture, 2018
While editing this book and translating many of its chapters, I was reminded of the radical difference between how Latin Americans and U.S. Latinxs 1 have traditionally viewed race, and in many regards, culture. Fortunately, that difference is beginning to erode. The United States has become a temporary and permanent destination for Latin Ameri-cans. Ideas, trends, expressions, and knowledge travel back and forth at a dizzying pace. It has also been at the crossroads of a changing identity among Latin Americans and a source of inspiration for new ways of viewing race. In the United States there is more cultural intersection and understanding between mestizos and American Indian groups. In fact, because of the debilitating effects of anti-immigrant racism in the United States, it becomes clear to us that we are, in fact, Black or indigenous, or more simply put, not white. There is no more pretense of fitting into a racial category when you are clearly rejected. This has facilitated the process of decolonization during the Chicano/a Movement by proclaiming the outright acceptance of our indigenous selves. The Chicano/a Movement partly came about as a defense mechanism: somos ni de aqui ni de alla. We were rejected for being too gringo and not gringo enough. Instead of suffering the effects of rejection because of our skin color, and therefore being traumatized, we rejected shame. We made peace with the idea of not being white. Culturally, we invested in our indigenous ancestry. And as César E. Chávez reminded the world: " Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. " 2 Chicanismo represented a cultural shift; it lifted a demoralized people out of the dregs; it healed our trauma and made us confident enough to pursue our dreams. It also created a path for future generations of migrantes to follow. It is with this combative passion of change that I position the concept of Latin Ameri-can culture and chose the essays included in this volume. There are many perspectives on culture and many opinions on what it should or should not represent. Culture in Latin America, and among the Latinx population in the United States, has often been produced out of struggle. In many ways, this is a book that explores how colonialism has affected culture. The quest for identity and autonomy, the defiance of borders and homogeneity, the fight for equal rights and the rise of social movements, and the evolution of feminism and sexuality may seem politically driven but they have also contributed profoundly to culture in Latin America and among Latinxs in the United States. Even if we speak of the great works of art and literature in Latin America, they are often inspired by conflict. However, in this increasingly globalized world, Latinxs are learning from one another. We have more shared experiences now and it is possible for Latinxs from all parts of the Americas to sit down and map out commonalities, analyze differences, and reveal to one
New Approaches to Latin American Studies preview.pdf
New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power offers researchers and students from different theoretical fields an essential, turn-organized overview of the radical transformation of epistemological and methodological assumptions in Latin American Studies from the end of the 1980s to the present. Sixteen chapters written by experts in their respective fields help explain the various ways in which to think about these shifts. Questions posited include: Why are turns so crucial? How did they alter the shape or direction of the field? What new questions, objects, or problems did they contribute? What were or are their limitations? What did they displace or prevent us from considering? Among the turns included are: memory, transnational, popular culture, decolonial, feminism, affect, indigenous studies, transatlantic, ethical, post/hegemony, deconstruction, cultural policy, subalternism, gender and sexuality, performance, and cultural studies.
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies
Photographic Assembly in Post-Dictatorial Argentina and Uruguay, 2022
In two works of photographic assemblage, portraits of those disappeared under the last Argentine and Uruguayan dictatorships appeared on the walls of Montevideo and Buenos Aires. In 1984 Buenos Aires, the collective C.A.Pa.Ta.Co. produced afiches participativos in the months following the country's return to democracy. For this project, the public was invited to colour in black-and-white photocopied portraits installed around the Plaza de Mayo. In 2008, Juan Angel Urruzola installed enormous portraits of the disappeared throughout the streets of Montevideo in a visual campaign that coincided with a referendum on the Law of Expiry in Uruguay. Both projects represent acts of political and artistic assembling shaped by precariousness, a condition of simultaneous endurance and fragility. This article contributes to contemporary debates surrounding the constitution of public space, community, and communication in post-dictatorial Southern Cone with a focus on the encounter between the image and an emergent public. Bringing together Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of assemblage, Judith Butler's reflections on political assembly, and Claire Bishop's discussion of antagonism in participatory art, I argue that a precarious quality of assembly enables collective creation, dissent, and exchange within the space of the photographic assemblage.
Martín de Porres (-) was the illegitimate son of a Spanish father and a former African slave mother who had been born in Panama. In he was canonised as a saint and today is widely revered as the patron saint of racial equality and social justice. How did this socially and racially marginalised individual come to achieve such widespread recognition? In this book Celia Cussen argues that his mulatto heritage and humble background, rather than being an obstacle to his sainthood, were central to his attraction. This book is not a faith-driven biography dedicated to extol the virtues of Porres, but rather it attempts to place a history of his life and his subsequent path to sainthood in the context of changes to social values and beliefs, not only in Peru but worldwide.
Journal of Latin American Studies, 2016
sacrifice on the one hand and to the violent repression of the '(female) enemy within' (Chapter , p. ) on the other. The contradiction between the discourse of envisaged socio-political rationalisation and the reality of bloody killings becomes apparent in the testimonies of both killers and survivors. Disguised behind the thin veil of technological and military prowess, on the ground, rape, torture and ethnic massacres were perpetrated mostly using archaic methods: '[i]n Argentina, where the preferred instrument of torture was the cattle prod that had been used for decades, it was not the methods of torture that were innovative but […] the disappearance of bodies […]' (p. ). As discussed in Chapter , '[t]he involuntary memories of the disappeared, through the mechanical reproduction of photography, becomes deliberate memory' (p. ). The generic status of 'victim' is, therefore, refuted by Franco as in the cases, for instance, of survivors of massacres and executions (Chapter ) or in that of prisoners-turned-collaborators (Chapter ). Following Diamela Eltit's questioning of Primo Levi's statement that 'no one can witness death' (p. ), Franco looks at the complex experience of pain and survival though a compassionate discussion of individual testimonies and literary narratives. Such a vast array of sources from different periods and countries, including testimonios, human rights reports, interviews, novels, film and visual arts, is analysed within a framework that merges psychoanalytic theory with literary and cultural analysis. In a relentless and outspoken dissection of cruelty as most often perpetrated in the name of the modern state, Franco seems to want to go beyond Jonathan Littell's assertion that in the face of inhumanity 'there is only humanity and more humanity' by disclosing the connections between cultural narratives, social and ethnic inequality, and modernist political projects. The dehumanisation of the (female and indigenous) Other covered by the technological façade of neoliberal and post-neoliberal individualism reach an apocalyptic climax in the final chapter, where the rape and murder of thousands of women in Ciudad Juárez is seen as the ultimate scenario of deeply-ingrained cultural values feeding social neglect and exploitative industry. This is a brave and necessary endeavour to answer many troubling questions, and above all the role of violence in the formation of identities and subjectivities. Yet, despite the honest and chilling bluntness of her narrative, Franco is all too aware of the distant freedom of the reader who learns of these events from the safety of another place (Afterword). How, and whether at all, the scholar can approach this question leaves little hope for bridging the distressing gap between intellectual knowledge and socio-political reality.