Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, is still heavily mythologized among Dominicans to this day. God and Trujillo, the first book-length study of works about the Dominican dictator, seeks to explain how some of those myths were created by analyzing novels and testimonials about Trujillo from Dominican writers to canonical Latin American authors, including Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Trujillo's quasi-mythological figure created a compelling corpus of literary works. Ignacio Lopez-Calvo's study offers a vigorous...

More than 150 years ago, the first Chinese contract laborers ("coolies") arrived in Cuba to work the colonial plantations. Eventually, over 150,000 Chinese immigrated to the island, and their presence has had a profound effect on all aspects of Cuban cultural production, from food to books to painting. Ignacio Lopez-Calvo's interpretations often go against the grain of earlier research, refusing to conceive of Cuban identity either in terms of a bipolar black/white opposition or an idyllic and harmonious process of miscegenation. He also counters traditional representations of chinos...

In The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru, Ignacio Lopez-Calvo rises above the political emergence of the Fujimori phenomenon and uses politics and literature to provide one of the first comprehensive looks at how the Japanese assimilated and inserted themselves into Peruvian culture. Through contemporary writers testimonies, essays, fiction, and poetry, Lopez-Calvo constructs an account of the cultural formation of Japanese migrant communities. With deftly sensitive interviews and comments, he portrays the difficulties of being a Japanese Peruvian. Despite a few notable...

This volume is a collection of essays dealing with the critical dialogue between the cultural production of the Hispanic/Latino world and that of the so-called Orient or the Orient itself, including the Asian and Arab worlds. As we see in these essays, the Europeans' cultural others (peripheral nations and former colonies) have established an intercultural and intercontinental dialogue among themselves, without feeling the need to resort to the center-metropolis' mediation. These South-to-South dialogues tend not to be as asymmetric as the old dialogue between the (former) metropolis (the...

Los Angeles has long been a place where cultures clash and reshape. The city has a growing number of Latina/o authors and filmmakers who are remapping and reclaiming it through ongoing symbolic appropriation. In this illuminating book, Ignacio Lopez-Calvo foregrounds the emotional experiences of authors, implicit authors, narrators, characters, and readers in order to demonstrate that the evolution of the imaging of Los Angeles in Latino cultural production is closely related to the politics of spatial location. This spatial-temporal approach, he writes, reveals significant social anxieties,...

Building on his 2013 study on Nikkei cultural production in Peru, in Dragons in the Land of the Condor Ignacio Lopez-Calvo studies the influence of a Chinese ethnic background in the writing of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century Sino-Peruvian authors.
While authors like Siu Kam Wen and Julia Wong often rely on their Chinese cultural heritage for inspiration, many others, like Pedro Zulen, Mario Wong, and Julio Villanueva Chang, choose other sources of inspiration and identification. Lopez-Calvo studies the different strategies used by these writers to claim either their...

Roberto Bolano is considered one of the most influential Latin American writers of his generation. The first English-language volume on the Chilean author, essays address such topics as Borges's influence, social memory, allegory, and neoliberalism and discuss works like 2666, The Savage Detectives, and Distant Star .

Nota de contratapa: A simple vista, una muchacha se desnuda y el panuelo del mundo, percudido de espantos y miserias, puede tornarse tiernamente habitable; urdir lloviznas y astrolabios; fraguar zaguanes y estampidas; inventariar las maravillas, las deslumbrantes sinuosidades de amaneceres y atardeceres de marzo; o, simplemente, de un casi imperceptible manotazo, despertar del letargo las brasas del poema. A simple vista, Rapsodia de todo lo visible e invisible no es un libro -pudiera serlo-, sus confluencias y afluencias estallan, copulan y se esparcen visibles, transparentes, manoseables,...