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According to Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant, the twentieth century has been dominated in the Caribbean by a passion for the remembrance of colonial history. But while Glissant identifies this passion for memory in the thematizing of nature in Caribbean modernist life, scholar Guillermina De Ferrari claims it is the vulnerability of the human body that has become the trope to which Caribbean postmodernist authors largely appeal in their efforts to revise the discourse that has shaped postcolonial societies. In Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction, De Ferrari offers a comparative study of novels from across the Caribbean, arguing that vulnerability (symb...
Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the globalization of Cuban culture, along with the bankruptcy of the state, partly modified the terms of intellectual engagement. However, no significant change took place at the political level. In Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba, De Ferrari looks into the extraordinary survival of the Revolution by focusing on the personal, political and aesthetic social pacts that determined the configuration of the socialist state. Through close critical readings of a representative set of contemporary Cuban novels and works of visual art, this book argues that ethics and gender, rather than ideology, account for the intellectuals’ fidelity to the Revolution. Community and Culture does three things: it demonstrates that masculine sociality is the key to understanding the longevity of Cuba’s socialist regime; it examines the sociology of cultural administration of intellectual labor in Cuba; and it maps the emergent ethical and aesthetic paradigms that allow Cuban intellectuals to envision alternative forms of community and civil society.
From today’s vantage point it can be denied that the confidence in the abilities of globalism, mobility, and cosmopolitanism to illuminate cultural signification processes of our time has been severely shaken. In the face of this crisis, a key concept of this globalizing optimism as World Literature has been for the past twenty years necessarily is in the need of a comprehensive revision. World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality: Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise offers a wide range of contributions approaching the blind spots of the globally oriented Humanities for phenomena that in one way or another have gone beyond the discourses, aesthetics, and political positions of liberal cosmopolitanism and neoliberal globalization. Departing basically (but not exclusively) from different examples of Latin American literatures and cultures in globalized contexts, this volume provides innovative insights into critical readings of World Literature and its related conceptualizations. A timely book that embraces highly innovative perspectives, it will be a mustread for all scholars involved in the field of the global dimensions of literature.
Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reorientation that has refocused entire fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and its sister terms such as globe, planet, and earth. The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what “world” means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study. The contributors raise questions such as: What happens when “world” is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific inquiry? How exactly does “worlding” bear on the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the theory or theoretical model that allows “world” to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge domain? With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.
Shortlisted for the AATSEEL 2022 Award for Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume (AATSEEL is The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) Theory in the "Post" Era brings together the work and perspectives of a group of Romanian theorists who discuss the morphings of contemporary theory in what the editors call the “post” era. Since the Cold War's end and especially in the third millennium, theorists have been exploring the aftermath - and sometimes just the “after” - of whole paradigms, the crisis or “passing” of anthropocentrism, the twilight of an entire ontological and cultural “condition,” as well as the corresponding rise of an antagoni...
What ever happened to the legend of El Dorado, the tale of the mythical city of gold lost in the Amazon jungle? Charlotte Rogers argues that El Dorado has not been forgotten and still inspires the reckless pursuit of illusory wealth. The search for gold in South America during the colonial period inaugurated the "promise of El Dorado"—the belief that wealth and happiness can be found in the tropical forests of the Americas. That assumption has endured over the course of centuries, still evident in the various modes of natural resource extraction, such as oil drilling and mining, that characterize the region today. Mourning El Dorado looks at how fiction from the American tropics written si...
The essays in Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture contribute pioneering and revelatory insights into the phenomenon of invisibility, forging new and multi-disciplinary approaches at the intersection of aesthetics, technology, representation and politics. Importantly, they acknowledge the complex interaction between invisibility and its opposite, visibility, arguing that the one cannot be fully grasped without the other. Considering these entanglements across different media forms, the chapters reveal that the invisible affects many cultural domains, from digital communication and operative images to the activism of social movements, as well as to identity, race, gender and class issues. Whether the subject is comic books, photographic provocations, biometric and brainwave sensing technologies, letters, or a cinematic diary, the analyses in this book engage critically and theoretically with the topic of invisibility and thus represent the first scholarly study to identify its importance for the field of visual culture.
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.
Featuring twenty-five key essays from the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (Traves/sia), this book surveys the most influential themes and concepts, as well as scouring some of the polemics and controversies, which have marked the field over the last quarter of a century since the Journal's foundation in 1992. Emerging at a moment of crisis of revolutionary narratives, and at the onset of neoliberal economics and emergent narcopolitics, the cultural studies impetus in Latin America was part of an attempted intellectual reconstruction of the (centre-) left in terms of civil society, and the articulation of social movements and agencies, thinking beyond the verticalist constructions ...
Francophone Literature as World Literature examines French-language works from a range of global traditions and shows how these literary practices draw individuals, communities, and their cultures and idioms into a planetary web of tension and cross-fertilization. The Francophone corpus under scrutiny here comes about in the evolving, markedly relational context provided by these processes and their developments during and after the French empire. The 15 chapters of this collection delve into key aspects, moments, and sites of the literature flourishing throughout the francosphere after World War II and especially since the 1980s, from the French Hexagon to the Caribbean and India, and from Québec to the Maghreb and Romania. Understood and practiced as World Literature, Francophone literature claims--with particular force in the wake of the littérature-monde debate--its place in a more democratic world republic of letters, where writers, critics, publishers, and audiences are no longer beholden to traditional centers of cultural authority.