Editor’s welcome, PORTAL, Vol. 5, No. 1, January 2008 (original) (raw)

The first issue of PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies for 2008 is a special issue with the title “Hyperworld(s): Language, Culture, and History in the Latin American world(s),” guest edited by Jeff Browitt and Paul Allatson (University of Technology Sydney). The issue—comprising related essays and cultural works—evolved from the 2006 biennial conference of the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia, “Hyperworld: language, culture, history,” held at UTS in September 2006. The issue, like the conference before it, explores the place of Latin America in what the editors call “hyperworld(s).” The term connotes acceleration and hyperactivity on social, economic and financial levels, the intensified commodification of most aspects of human life, the time-space compression of communication and much cultural production, the re-ordering of social relations themselves over-determined by technology wedded to capitalist market values, and, as a r...