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This anthology "decolonizes" the voices of Latin Americans who travel abroad and engage in cultural critiques of their homelands in counterpoint to foreigners' better known accounts of Latin America. The 17 contributions by North and South American academics examine--including entertaining first person accounts--the themes of constructing nations/a national identity post- independence, touring modernity, taking sides, and the art of living and working abroad. References include suggested films (e.g. Carmen Miranda: Bananas is My Business, 1994) as well as readings. Lacks an index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
For many foreign observers, Brazil still conjures up a collage of exotic images, ranging from the camp antics of Carmen Miranda to the bronzed girl (or boy) from Ipanema moving sensually over the white sands of Rio's beaches. Among these tropical fantasies is that of the uninhibited and licentious Brazilian homosexual, who expresses uncontrolled sexuality during wild Carnival festivities and is welcomed by a society that accepts fluid sexual identity. However, in Beyond Carnival, the first sweeping cultural history of male homosexuality in Brazil, James Green shatters these exotic myths and replaces them with a complex picture of the social obstacles that confront Brazilian homosexuals. Rang...
The Age of Revolution has traditionally been understood as an era of secularization, giving the transition from monarchy to independent republics through democratic movements a genealogy that assumes hostility to Catholicism. By centering the story on Spanish and Latin American actors, Pamela Voekel argues that at the heart of this nineteenth-century transformation in Spanish America was a transatlantic Catholic civil war. Voekel demonstrates Reform Catholicism's significance to the thought and action of the rebel literati who led decolonization efforts in Mexico and Central America, showing how each side of this religious divide operated from within a self-conscious intercontinental network of like-minded Catholics. For its central protagonists, the era's crisis of sovereignty provided a political stage for a religious struggle. Drawing on ecclesiastical archives, pamphlets, sermons, and tracts, For God and Liberty reveals how the violent struggles of decolonization and the period before and after Independence are more legible in light of the fault lines within the Church.
Populism is on the rise in Europe and the Americas. Scholars increasingly understand populist forces in terms of their ideas or discourse, one that envisions a cosmic struggle between the will of the common people and a conspiring elite. In this volume, we advance populism scholarship by proposing a causal theory and methodological guidelines – a research program – based on this ideational approach. This program argues that populism exists as a set of widespread attitudes among ordinary citizens, and that these attitudes lie dormant until activated by weak democratic governance and policy failure. It offers methodological guidelines for scholars seeking to measure populist ideas and test their effects. And, to ground the program empirically, it tests this theory at multiple levels of analysis using original data on populist discourse across European and US party systems; case studies of populist forces in Europe, Latin America, and the US; survey data from Europe and Latin America; and experiments in Chile, the US, and the UK. The result is a truly systematic, comparative approach that helps answer questions about the causes and effects of populism.
A new and necessary examination of how nineteenth-century Cuban white elites viewed the natural world, material culture, and political power as intertwined In the decades before the Cuban wars of independence, white elites exploited the island’s natural history and culture to redefine racial identity and reassert authority. These practices occurred in the face of challenges to their political power from Cubans of mixed race and as Cuba’s dependence on sugar led to ecological and economic precarity. Lee Sessions uses close visual analysis to investigate how white elites wielded power by manipulating material culture, placing in conversation for the first time the natural history museums, botanical gardens, and thousands of paintings, drawings, and prints produced in and about Cuba from 1820 to 1860. This important and novel book explores how groups used material culture to imagine their own future at a moment when racial and political dynamics were changing rapidly, while facing an ecological disaster of unimaginable scale.
"The one source that sets reference collections on Latin American studies apart from all other geographic areas of the world.... The Handbook has provided scholars interested in Latin America with a bibliographical source of a quality unavailable to scholars in most other branches of area studies." —Latin American Research Review Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year b...
The book examines the social life of non-Europeans in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and describes the political outgrowths of their migration to France. It argues that this migration was crucial for decolonization and the rise of a Third World consciousness after World War II.
Middle Eastern immigration to Mexico is one of the intriguing, untold stories in the history of both regions. In So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico, Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp presents the fascinating findings of her extensive fieldwork in Mexico as well as in Lebanon and Syria, which included comprehensive data collection from more than 8,000 original immigration cards as well as studies of decades of legal publications and the collection of historiographies from descendents of Middle Eastern immigrants living in Mexico today. Adding an important chapter to studies of the Arab diaspora, Alfaro-Velcamp's study shows that political instability in both Mexico and the Middle East kept many from ...
Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa uses observations of American travelers to southern Africa to ask: why is Africa so important to Americans? These travel stories show how encounters with Africans lead to a problematic desire to save Africa. Kathryn Mathers argues that this is then seen as a way to resolve the tensions between aspirations for a globally responsible America and the current reality of its geopolitical role. This book draws fascinating new conclusions about the connections and disconnections on which contemporary American identity is formed.