Well-known essayist and Cuban historian Rafael Rojas presents a collection of his best work, one which focuses on - and offers alternatives to - the central myths that have organized Cuban culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Rojas explores the most important themes of Cuban intellectual history, including the legacy of Jose Marti, the cultural effect of the war in 1898, the construction of a national canon of Cuban literature, the works of classical intellectuals of the republican period, the literary magazine Origenes, the ideological impact of the Cuban Revolution, and the...

Two motifs of an angel of history, one European and one Mexican, provide a theoretical framework for this book. The first is Walter Benjamin's interpretation of the Klee painting angelus novus, a figure that gazes upon the ruins of the past, powerless to repair the broken pieces as it keels into the future. Although Benjamin envisions history as catastrophe piled upon catastrophe, he also sees in this angel the possibility for redemption in divine destruction. Mexico City's key monument, the Angel of Independence, also embodies redemption and destruction through history, marking moments of...

Remembering Maternal Bodies is a collection of essays about the writings of several Latina and Latin American women writers who remember their mothers, and/or challenge our commonly held beliefs about motherhood and maternity, in an effort to stop depression and melancholy. It suggests that the widespread violent depression and sometimes suicidal melancholy that haunts our culture and society is the result of a terrible fantasy about the way we become ourselves. This fantasy has a matricide at its core, and this matricide will continue to have its depressing effect on us as long as it remains...

This book examines Latin America's history of engagement with cosmopolitanisms as a manner of asserting a genealogy that links cultural critique in Latin America and the United States. Cosmopolitanism is crucial to any discussion of Latin America, and Latin Americanism as a discipline. Reinaldo Arenas and Diamela Eltit become nodal points to discuss a wide range of issues that include the pedagogical dimensions of the DVD commentary track, the challenges of the Internet to canonization, and links between ethical practices of Benetton and the U.S. academy. These authors, whose rejection of the...

Ciphers of History is a collection of seven classic essays written by the eminent Latin Americanist Enrico Mario Santi, compiled here in a single volume for the first time. Santi covers a broad range of topics in Latin American poetry, narrative, film, and intellectual history, with one brief excursion into Peninsular subject-matter: the Spanish Generation of 98's response to Spain's loss of Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The collection is defined by a bracing critique of dominant trends in current critical practice, and advocacy of an alternative methodology focused on the...

Cubans today are at home in diasporas that stretch from Miami to Mexico City to Moscow. Back on the island, watching as fellow Cubans leave, the impact of departure upon departure can be wrenching. How do Cubans confront their condition as an uprooted people? The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World offers a stunning chorus of responses, gathering some of the most daring Cuban writers, artists, and thinkers to address the haunting effect of globalization on their own lives.

This collection examines Cuban cultural production during the Special Period of the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Contributors address the cultural forms; and the associated ethics and practices of labour, leisure, and bureaucratic organization that arose in the transformation of the socialist cultural infrastructure.

This book examines women's writings in relation to language, power, sexuality, and race in contemporary Cuba, analyzing the creation of alternative matria frameworks that enunciate a feminist/feminine perspective of the nationalist discourse. Camara-Betancourt discusses four Cuban writers: Ofelia Rodriguez Acosta, Lydia Cabrera, Maria Elena Cruz Varela, and Zoe Valdes.

Respected film critic Gonzalo Aguilar offers a lucid and sophisticated analysis of Argentine films of the last decade. This is the most complete and up-to-date work in English to examine the 'new Argentine cinema' phenomenon. Aguilar looks at highly relevant films, including those by Lucrecia Martel and Sergio Rejtman.

While Latin American literary tradition frequently has been read with attention to monstrosity or the calibanesque, as overarching metaphors of collective identity or otherness, the specific roles and potential agency of disabled people as such rarely have been addressed in the context of this literature. Carnal Inscriptions explores manifestations of physical disability in Spanish American narrative fiction and performance, from Jose Marti's late nineteenth century cronicas, to Mario Bellatin's twenty-first century novels, from the performances of Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco to the...