"Transatlantic Topographies studies the representation of American space during the initial confrontation between Europeans and Amerindians and during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Starting from topographical descriptions of land, islands, highlands, and jungles, Ileana Rodriguez shows how existing systems of knowledge broke down with the discovery of the Americas and had to be reinvented through the interpretation of signs, the accumulation of evidence, material exchange, and, finally, through the learning, teaching, and "kidnapping" of language. Proceeding from the...

After introducing the concept of tierra (land) as cultural as well as natural geography, Rodriguez (Spanish literatures and cultures, Ohio State U.) traces cross-cultural misunderstandings of the representation of American space that have had dire consequences historically. She examines the Carribean Islands as paradise, their transition to a hell

How ironic, the author thought on learning of the Sandinista's electoral defeat, that at its death the Revolutionary State left Woman, Violeta Chamorro, located at the center. The election signaled the end of one transition and the beginning of another, with Woman somewhere on the border between the neo-liberal and marxist projects. It is such transitions that Ileana Rodriguez takes up here, unraveling their weave of gender, ethnicity, and nation as it is revealed in literature written by women.
In "House/Garden/Nation" the narratives of five Centro-Caribbean writers illustrate these times...

Sharing a postrevolutionary sympathy with the struggles of the poor, the contributors to this first comprehensive collection of writing on subalternity in Latin America work to actively link politics, culture, and literature. Emerging from a decade of work and debates generated by a collective known as the Latin American Studies Group, the volume privileges the category of the subaltern over that of class, as contributors focus on the possibilities of investigating history from below.
In addition to an overview by Ranajit Guha, essay topics include nineteenth-century hygiene in Latin...

This History explores Latin American women's literature from ancient indigenous cultures to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

This book presents original research of violence against women in both achieved and failed states (i.e.