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Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies looks for pathways that better connect two often siloed disciplines. This edited collection brings together different disciplinary experiences and perspectives to this objective, weaving together researchers, artists, instructors, and authors who have found ways of bridging Indigenous and Hispanic studies through trans-Indigenous reading methods, intercultural dialogues, and reflections on translation and epistemology. Each chapter brings rich context that bears on some aspect of the Indigenous Americas and its crossroads with Hispanic studies, from Canada to Chile. Such a hemispheric and interdisciplinary approach offers innovative and significant means of challenging the coloniality of Hispanic studies.

In Italy to Argentina: Travel Writing and Emigrant Colonialism, Tullio Pagano examines Italian emigration to Argentina and the Rio de la Plata region through the writings of Italian economists, poets, anthropologists, and political activists from the 1860s to the beginning of World War I. He shows that Italians played an important role in the so-called conquest of the desert, which led to Argentina's economic expansion and the suppression and killing of the remaining indigenous population. Many of the texts he discusses have hardly been studied before: from Paolo Mantegazza’s real and imaginary travel narratives at the time of Italian unification to Gina Lombroso’s descriptions of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina in early 1900s. Pagano questions the apparent opposition between diaspora and empire and argues that there was a continuity between the “peaceful conquest” though spontaneous emigration envisioned by Italian liberal intellectuals at the turn of the century and the military colonialism of Italian Nationalists and Fascists. He shows that racist assumptions about Native American and “creole” cultures were present in the work of progressive authors like Edmondo de Amicis, whose writings became enormously popular in Argentina, and anarchist militants and legal scholars like Pietro Gori, who founded the first revolutionary unions in Buenos Aires while remaining dangerously attached to Cesare Lombroso’s theories of atavism and primitivism. The “growl” of Italian emigrants about to land in Argentina, found in Dino Campana’s poem Buenos Aires (1907), echoes throughout Pagano’s book, and encourages the reader to explore the apparent oxymoron of “emigration colonialism” and the role of literature and public media in the formation of our social imaginary. “Italy to Argentina shows meticulous bibliographic work and is attentive to both fundamental and marginal texts in a double task, on the one hand, of textual analysis, and on the other, of rescuing and recovering a corpus forgotten by critics even when it is highly significant. It is, then, a research work that addresses the Italian emigration to Argentina from an original point of view, linking texts that have not been studied or that have not been sufficiently analyzed.” —Fernanda Elisa Bravo Herrera, author of Huellas y recorridos de una utopía: La emigración italiana en la Argentina "From Boccadasse to La Boca. Tullio Pagano complexifies the relationship between ‘diaspora’ and ‘colonialism’ in the context of Italian migration to South America. In six thematic chapters, Pagano explores the thought of authors on and off the canon. Such diverse voices lead the reader to a new approach to the study of emigrant colonialism and creole studies, towards a deeper, more realistic understanding of the  ‘conquest of the desert’ that Italian emigrants wanted to perform in Argentina."—Giuseppe Gazzola, Stony Brook University

Decolonizing Diasporas proposes a new way to read the literary and cultural productions of the Afro-Atlantic. Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking Sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Figueroa-Vásquez argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists offer ways of imagining new worldviews which dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. Utilizing women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Figueroa-Vásquez analyzes artists from the peripheries of their respective diasporas to reveal the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools that they offer when read in relation to one another. Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression. This study serves as a primer for approaching questions of home, diaspora, belonging, and justice, by centering the cultural productions of peoples of African descent.

¿Cómo se disponen en el poema las palabras y los cuerpos? ¿Cómo entran en contacto desde su latitud, longitud y profundidad, desde la sustancia verbal que los define? Materia frágil: poéticas para el siglo XXI en América Latina y España aspira a responder estas preguntas mediante diversas aproximaciones a la poesía actual, atendiendo a los límites, conflictos y nuevas condiciones de posibilidad de nuestro ser en común. Para hacerlo, se proponen varios estudios sobre las estéticas disidentes que están abriéndose paso a ambos lados del Atlántico, sobre las últimas derivas performáticas del discurso lírico y las implicaciones de nuestra creciente transmedialidad. A ellos viene a sumarse una serie de indagaciones sobre las poetas del siglo XXI y su intervención de la palabra mediante propuestas que perturban la estructura de lo íntimo y de lo colectivo, la identidad sexual o la familia, suscitando formas alternativas de subjetividad. A partir de diferentes horizontes nacionales, culturales e históricos, estos ensayos analizan las políticas de lo común, entendidas como una práctica simbólica y material que atraviesa el discurso poético. Exploran su espacio de emancipación y su trabajo con las nuevas articulaciones de la violencia. Piensan la poesía y su fragilidad como una condición para la resistencia.

Los textos que constituyen este volumen llevan a cabo un análisis comparativo entre la producción literaria de España y México desde las últimas décadas del siglo XX hasta nuestros días, atendiendo a novelas y poemarios, pero también a otros géneros y discursos como el diario, el aforismo, el cine o la novela gráfica, sin olvidar los espacios de creciente transmedialidad.

Examines the underlying precarity in twenty-first-century immigrant fiction and reveals the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology.

PROSE Awards Literature Subject Category Winner, 2020In the politically volatile period from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century, Latin American authors were in direct dialogue with the violent realities of their time and place. Writing Revolution in Latin America is a chronological study of the way revolution and revolutionary thinking is depicted in the fiction composed from the eye of the storm.From Mexico to Chile, the gradual ideological evolution from a revolutionary to a neoliberal mainstream was a consequence of, on the one hand, the political hardening of the Cuban Revolution beginning in the late 1960s, and, on the other, the repression, dictatorships, and economic crises of the 1970s and beyond. Not only was socialist revolution far from the utopia many believed, but the notion that guerrilla uprisings would lead to an easy socialism proved to be unfounded. Similarly, the repressive Pinochet dictatorship in Chile led to unfathomable tragedy and social mutation.This double-edged phenomenon of revolutionary disillusionment became highly personal for Latin American authors inside and outside Castro's and Pinochet's dominion. Revolution was more than a foreign affair, it was the stuff of everyday life and, therefore, of fiction.Juan De Castro's expansive study begins ahead of the century with José Martí in Cuba and continues through the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, and Roberto Bolaño in Mexico (by way of Chile). The various, often contradictory ways the authors convey this precarious historical moment speaks in equal measure to the social circumstances into which these authors were thrust and to the fundamental differences in the ways they themselves witnessed history.

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.

Haitian writers have made profound contributions to debates about the converging paths of political and natural histories, yet their reflections on the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism are often neglected in heated disputes about the future of human life on the planet. The 2010 earthquake only exacerbated this contradiction. Despite the fact that Haitian authors have long treated the connections between political violence, precariousness, and ecological degradation, in media coverage around the world, the earthquake would have suddenly exposed scandalous conditions on the ground in Haiti. This book argues that contemporary Haitian literature historicizes the political and environmental problems brought to the surface by the earthquake by building on texts of earlier generations, especially at the end of the Duvalier era and its aftermath. Informed by Haitian studies and models of postcolonial ecocriticism, the book conceives of literature as an “eco-archive,” or a body of texts that depicts ecological change over time and its impact on social and environmental justice. Focusing equally on established and less well-known authors, the book contends that the eco-archive challenges future-oriented, universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene and the global refugee crisis with portrayals of different forms and paths of migration and refuge within Haiti and around the Americas.

Finalist for the 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in the Essay category From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation, a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is being forgotten by the young, how finger snapping has taken on a new meaning, how the use of ellipses has lapsed, and how autocorrect is shaping the way we communicate. In an incisive meditation, he shows how translating one's own work reinvents oneself in another tongue. The volume includes tête-à-têtes with Pulitzer Prize–winner Richard Wilbur and short-fiction master Lydia Davis, as well as dialogues on silence, multilingualism, poetry, and the durability of the classics. Stavans's explorations cover Spanish, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and the hybrid lexicon of Spanglish. He muses on the meaning of foreignness and on living and dying in different languages. Among his primary concerns are the role and history of dictionaries and the extent to which the authority of language academies is less a reality than a delusion. He concludes with renditions into Spanglish of portions of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and The Little Prince. The wide range of themes and engaging yet informed style confirm Stavans's status, in the words of the Washington Post, as "Latin America's liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast."

The first book-length study of gossip’s place in the literature of the multilingual Caribbean reveals gossip to be a utilitarian and deeply political practice—a means of staging the narrative tensions, and waging the narrative battles, that mark Caribbean politics and culture. Revising the overly gendered existing critical frame, Rodríguez Navas argues that gossip is a fundamentally adversarial practice that at once surveils identities and empowers writers to skirt sanitized, monolithic historical accounts by weaving alternative versions of their nations’ histories from this self-governing discursive material. Reading recent fiction from the Hispanic, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean and their diasporas, alongside poetry, song lyrics, journalism, memoirs, and political essays, Idle Talk, Deadly Talk maps gossip’s place in the Caribbean and reveals its rich possibilities as both literary theme and narrative device.

El sentido de este libro se fundamenta en la idea de formar un corpus de estudios críticos, cuya orientación es la entrega de distintas aproximaciones a la producción de escritores latinoamericanos y chilenos. Para tal efecto, se discuten hitos fundacionales de la crítica en Latinoamérica del siglo XX, junto a la valoración y actualidad de esos proyectos, que dieron origen a diversos “conceptos fundantes”. En el caso de los trabajos sobre poesía y narrativa, el análisis de obras y autores se despliega en épocas y procesos variados, cuya reflexión, por ese mismo hecho, se sitúa en distintas estéticas y problemas, de ahí que el desafío de entregar nuevas lecturas demandó plantearse y resolver cuestiones teóricas y metodológicas.

Why is the capital of the United States named in part after Christopher Columbus, a Genoese explorer commissioned by Spain who never set foot on what would become the nation's mainland? Why did Spanish American nationalists in 1819 name a new independent republic "Colombia," after Columbus, the first representative of the empire from which they had recently broken free? These are only two of the introductory questions explored in The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, a fundamental recasting of Columbus as an eminently powerful tool in imperial constructs.Bartosik-Velez seeks to explain the meaning of Christopher Columbus throughout the so-called New World, first in the British American colonies and the United States, as well as in Spanish America, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She argues that during the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, New World societies commonly imagined themselves as legitimate and powerful independent political entities by comparing themselves to the classical empires of Greece and Rome. Columbus, who had been construed as a figure of empire for centuries, fit perfectly into that framework. By adopting him as a national symbol, New World nationalists appeal to Old World notions of empire.

This book examines how twentieth-century Spanish American literature has registered photography’s powers and limitations, and the creative ways in which writers of this region of the Americas have elaborated in fictional form the conventions and assumptions of this medium. While the book is essentially a study of literary criticism, it also aims to show how texts critically reflect upon the media environment in which they were created. The writings analyzed enter a dialogic relation with visual technologies such as the x-ray, cinema, illustrated journalism, and television. The study examines how these technologies, historically and aesthetically linked to the photographic medium, inform the works of some of the most important writers in Latin America. Methodologically, the close readings of the texts centre on the figure of ekphrasis (defined as the verbal representation of a visual representation). The book is concerned with the thematic, symbolic, structural and cultural imprints photography leaves in narrative texts. The author relies on an immanent approach, reading the selected texts according to their own specificities and making the relevant thematic and structural connections between them drawing from a variety of sources in the fields of literary criticism and theory and history of photography.

Este trabalho apresenta uma leitura do romance O coronel e o lobisomem, publicado em 1964, pelo escritor brasileiro José Cândido de Carvalho. Ao problematizar o conceito de regionalismo literário, busca-se averiguar em que medida é possível aproximar essa obra da chamada tendência super-regionalista, a fim de determinar o lugar que ocupa tanto na produção do autor, quanto no conjunto da literatura regionalista brasileira. O estudo da categoria crítica do super-regionalismo convoca a compreensão de outros conceitos, como o de transculturação narrativa, que também serão dimensionados no sentido de contribuir para uma leitura da narrativa regionalista em sua dimensão insólita. A partir disso, propõe-se um delineamento dos procedimentos formais e dos eixos temáticos mobilizados pelo autor na composição de seu romance, de modo a contribuir para a revisão de sua fortuna crítica, bem como ampliar a compreensão dos paradigmas que orientam tal momento, ainda pouco estudado de maneira sistemática, do regionalismo literário brasileiro.

O presente livro tem por objeto de estudo o romance O Ateneu, de Raul Pompéia, publicado em 1888 em folhetim pela Gazeta de Notícias e, meses mais tarde, em volume, pela tipografia do mesmo jornal. Estuda-seaquio processo narrativo da obra a partir de uma discussão inicial de sua recepção crítica, em que se observam três tendências interpretativas distintas: uma primeira de viés biográfico, bastante comum até a década de 1940; uma segunda, de viés social, iniciada logo após a anterior, e continuada ainda hoje; e uma última, de viés revisionista, mais atual, pautada na análise de aspectos até então considerados acessórios pela crítica. Dentre estes aspectos, está o tratamento cada vez mais aprofundado da narração autodiegética e do memorialismo latente já no subtítulo do romance – “Crônica de saudades”. Para tanto, discute-se a seguir a natureza teórica da narrativa de memórias, levantando-se diversos textos de teoria da narrativa como embasamento teórico da exposição. Propõe-se, assim, o uso de uma terminologia que busca categorizar em três grandes grupos as narrativas de memórias, de acordo com sua orientação mais voltada para o passado da ação – “narrativa retrospectiva” –, para o presente da narração – “narrativa presentificativa” – ou para o processo de leitura e recepção das memórias – “narrativa prospectiva”. A análise posterior de diversos elementos da narração d’O Ateneu chega à conclusão de que o romance de Pompéia representa um exemplo acabado de “narrativa prospectiva”, em que o narrador manipula a infância vivida no internato para fazer-se de vítima do sistema, e, assim, reverter a lógica de opressão a que fora submetidono Ateneu.

Este livro, fruto da dissertação de mestrado do autor, busca compreender a ficção brasileira contemporânea considerando a história político-social da nação, no período que vai do fim da ditadura militar à sua redemocratização. Assim, Fábio Mendes propõe uma análise crítica dos contos de Famílias terrivelmente felizes, escritos por Marçal Aquino, identificando uma linguagem da violência que perpassa a articulação de temas e motivos, a constituição dos narradores, a caracterização das personagens e a materialidade dos textos. Quanto ao conteúdo, essa violência estaria ajustada às imagens da morte, seja de modo predominante ou incidental, física, psicológica, social e simbólica, traços de uma sociedade brasileira autoritária e matéria-prima da linha de produção do novo realismo. Nestes termos, a ironia aparece como o principal elemento constitutivo das narrativas de Aquino, articulando a violência de modo que o leitor seja atraído para o mundo do texto literário e incorpore sua mensagem, consciente ou inconscientemente, em seu modo de vida.

The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Essays written by leading authorities in the field examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South, including Louisiana, which among the Southern states has had a quite particular attachment to France and the Francophone world. The essays focus on issues of history, language, politics and culture in various forms, notably literature, music and theatre.