These essays bring home the most challenging observations of postmodernism-multiple identities, the fragility of meaning, the risks of communication. Sommer asserts that many people normally live-that is, think, feel, create, reason, persuade, laugh-in more than one language. She claims that traditional scholarship (aesthetics; language and philosophy; psychoanalysis, and politics) cannot see or hear more than one language at a time. The goal of these essays is to create a new field: bilingual arts & aesthetics which examine the aesthetic product produced by bilingual diasporic communities....

Since the 1980s there has been considerable interest in Mexico and its art, as one can see from the sheer number of exhibitions, catalogues, and articles devoted to the subject. Despite this interest, there are few books devoted to contemporary Mexican art. New Tendencies in Mexican Art is the first book-length study devoted to a generation of Mexican artists who have had enormous international success. It focuses on several 'tendencies' Gallo has identified as prominent themes in the work of these artists including orientalism, perversion, and a fascination with urban culture.

This volume sets out current debates about Puerto Rico. The title simultaneously refers to the results of a non-binding 1998 plebiscite held in San Juan to determine Puerto Rico's political status, the ambiguities that have historically characterized its political agency, and the complexities of its ethnic, national, and cultural identifications.

This collection presents a comparative study of the impact of slavery on the literary and cultural imagination of the Americas, and also on the impact of writing on slavery on the social legacies of slavery's history. The chapters examine the relationship of slavery and master/slave relations to nationalist projects throughout the Americas - the ways in which a history of slavery and its abolition has shaped a nation's identity and race relations within that nation. The scope of the study is unprecedented - the book ties together the entire 'Black Atlantic', including the French and Spanish...

A compelling account of the making of the Mexican tourism industry, and the role it played in shaping Mexican nationalism and foreign policy during the first half of the twentieth century.

'Before it becomes a political, social, or even linguistic issue, bilingualism is a private affair, intimate theater'. So writes Firmat in this ground-breaking study of the interweaving of life and languages in a group of bilingual Spanish, Spanish-American and Latino writers. Unravelling the 'tongue ties' of such diverse figures as the American philosopher George Santayana, the emigre Spanish poet Pedro Salinas, Spanish American novelists Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Maria Luisa Bombal, and Latino memoirists Richard Rodriguez and Sandra Cisneros, Firmat argues that their careers are shaped...