Nightmares of the Lettered City

Nightmares of the Lettered City PDF Author: Juan Pablo Dabove
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973197
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Nightmares of the Lettered City presents an original study of the popular theme of banditry in works of literature, essays, poetry, and drama, and banditry's pivotal role during the conceptualization and formation of the Latin American nation-state. Juan Pablo Dabove examines writings over a broad time period, from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s, and while Nightmares of the Lettered City focuses on four crucial countries (Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela), it is the first book to address the depiction of banditry in Latin America as a whole. The work offers close reading of Facundo, Do–a Barbara, Os Sert›es, and Martin Fierro, among other works, illuminating the ever-changing and often contradictory political agendas of the literary elite in their portrayals of the forms of peasant insurgency labeled "banditry."Banditry has haunted the Latin American literary imagination. As a cultural trope, banditry has always been an uneasy compromise between desire and anxiety (a "nightmare"), and Dabove isolates three main representational strategies. He analyzes the bandit as radical other, a figure through which the elites depicted the threats posed to them by various sectors outside the lettered city. Further, he considers the bandit as a trope used in elite internecine struggles. In this case, rural insurgency was a means to legitimize or refute an opposing sector or faction within the lettered city. Finally, Dabove shows how, in certain cases, the bandit was used as an image of the nonstate violence that the nation state has to suppress as a historical force and simultaneously exalt as a memory in order to achieve cultural coherence and actual sovereignty. As Dabove convincingly demonstrates, the elite's construction of the bandit is essential to our understanding of the development of the Latin American nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Nightmares of the Lettered City

Nightmares of the Lettered City PDF Author: Juan Pablo Dabove
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973197
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nightmares of the Lettered City presents an original study of the popular theme of banditry in works of literature, essays, poetry, and drama, and banditry's pivotal role during the conceptualization and formation of the Latin American nation-state. Juan Pablo Dabove examines writings over a broad time period, from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s, and while Nightmares of the Lettered City focuses on four crucial countries (Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela), it is the first book to address the depiction of banditry in Latin America as a whole. The work offers close reading of Facundo, Do–a Barbara, Os Sert›es, and Martin Fierro, among other works, illuminating the ever-changing and often contradictory political agendas of the literary elite in their portrayals of the forms of peasant insurgency labeled "banditry."Banditry has haunted the Latin American literary imagination. As a cultural trope, banditry has always been an uneasy compromise between desire and anxiety (a "nightmare"), and Dabove isolates three main representational strategies. He analyzes the bandit as radical other, a figure through which the elites depicted the threats posed to them by various sectors outside the lettered city. Further, he considers the bandit as a trope used in elite internecine struggles. In this case, rural insurgency was a means to legitimize or refute an opposing sector or faction within the lettered city. Finally, Dabove shows how, in certain cases, the bandit was used as an image of the nonstate violence that the nation state has to suppress as a historical force and simultaneously exalt as a memory in order to achieve cultural coherence and actual sovereignty. As Dabove convincingly demonstrates, the elite's construction of the bandit is essential to our understanding of the development of the Latin American nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City

The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City PDF Author: Jean FRANCO
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The cultural Cold War in Latin America was waged as a war of values--artistic freedom versus communitarianism, Western values versus national cultures, the autonomy of art versus a commitment to liberation struggles--and at a time when the prestige of literature had never been higher. The projects of the historic avant-garde were revitalized by an anti-capitalist ethos and envisaged as the opposite of the republican state. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City charts the conflicting universals of this period, the clash between avant-garde and political vanguard. This was also a twilight of literature at the threshold of the great cultural revolution of the seventies and eighties, a revolution to which the Cold War indirectly contributed. In the eighties, civil war and military rule, together with the rapid development of mass culture and communication empires, changed the political and cultural map. A long-awaited work by an eminent Latin Americanist widely read throughout the world, this book will prove indispensable to anyone hoping to understand Latin American literature and society. Jean Franco guides the reader across minefields of cultural debate and histories of highly polarized struggle. Focusing on literary texts by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, and Juan Carlos Onetti, conducting us through this contested history with the authority of an eyewitness, Franco gives us an engaging overview as involving as it is moving.

Beyond the Lettered City

Beyond the Lettered City PDF Author: Joanne Rappaport
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351285
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Geronimo Stilton's relaxing vacation turns into a crazy treasure hunt in South Dakota, complete with a run-in with a mountain lion and a hot-air balloon ride to Mount Rushmore.

Bandit Narratives in Latin America

Bandit Narratives in Latin America PDF Author: Juan Pablo Dabove
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822982323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Bandits seem ubiquitous in Latin American culture. Even contemporary actors of violence are framed by narratives that harken back to old images of the rural bandit, either to legitimize or delegitimize violence, or to intervene in larger conflicts within or between nation-states. However, the bandit seems to escape a straightforward definition, since the same label can apply to the leader of thousands of soldiers (as in the case of Villa) or to the humble highwayman eking out a meager living by waylaying travelers at machete point. Dabove presents the reader not with a definition of the bandit, but with a series of case studies showing how the bandit trope was used in fictional and non-fictional narratives by writers and political leaders, from the Mexican Revolution to the present. By examining cases from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, from Pancho Villa's autobiography to Hugo Chavez's appropriation of his "outlaw" grandfather, Dabove reveals how bandits function as a symbol to expose the dilemmas or aspirations of cultural and political practices, including literature as a social practice and as an ethical experience.

The Lettered City

The Lettered City PDF Author: Angel Rama
Publisher: Latin America in Translation
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Posthumously published to wide acclaim, The Lettered City is a vitally important work by one of Latin America's most highly respected theorists. Angel Rama's groundbreaking study--presented here in its first English translation--provides an overview of the power of written discourse in the historical formation of Latin American societies, and highlights the central role of cities in deploying and reproducing that power. To impose order on a vast New World empire, the Iberian monarchs created carefully planned cities where institutional and legal powers were administered through a specialized cadre of elite men called letrados; it is the urban nexus of lettered culture and state power that Rama calls "the lettered city." Starting with the colonial period, Rama undertakes a historical analysis of the hegemonic influences of the written word. He explores the place of writing and urbanization in the imperial designs of the Iberian colonialists and views the city both as a rational order of signs representative of Enlightenment progress and as the site where the Old World is transformed--according to detailed written instructions--in the New. His analysis continues by recounting the social and political challenges faced by the letrados as their roles in society widened to include those of journalist, fiction writer, essayist, and political leader, and how those roles changed through the independence movements of the nineteenth century. The coming of the twentieth century, and especially the gradual emergence of a mass reading public, brought further challenges. Through a discussion of the currents and countercurrents in turn-of-the-century literary life, Rama shows how the city of letters was finally "revolutionized." Already crucial in setting the terms for debate concerning the complex relationships among intellectuals, national formations, and the state, this elegantly written and translated work will be read by Latin American scholars in a wide range of disciplines, and by students and scholars in the fields of anthropology, cultural geography, and postcolonial studies.

Riot and Rebellion in Mexico

Riot and Rebellion in Mexico PDF Author: Ana Sabau
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477324240
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
2023 Best Book in the Humanities, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Challenging conventional narratives of Mexican history, this book establishes race-making as a central instrument for the repression of social upheaval in nineteenth-century Mexico rather than a relic of the colonial-era caste system. Many scholars assert that Mexico’s complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country. Riot and Rebellion in Mexico traces this race-based narrative through three historical flashpoints: the Bajío riots, the Haitian Revolution, and the Yucatan’s caste war. Sabau shows how rebellions were treated as racially motivated events rather than political acts and how the racialization of popular and indigenous sectors coincided with the construction of “whiteness” in Mexico. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Sabau demonstrates how the race war paradigm was mobilized in foreign and domestic affairs and reveals the foundations of a racial state and racially stratified society that persist today.

Death in Old Mexico

Death in Old Mexico PDF Author: Nicole von Germeten
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009261541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In a Mexico City mansion on October 23, 1789, Don Joaquín Dongo and ten of his employees were brutally murdered by three killers armed with machetes. Investigators worked tirelessly to find the perpetrators, who were publicly executed two weeks later. Labelled the 'crime of the century,' these events and their aftermath have intrigued writers of fiction and nonfiction for over two centuries. Using a vast range of sources, Nicole von Germeten recreates a paper trail of Enlightenment-era greed and savagery, and highlights how the violence of the Mexican judiciary echoed the acts of the murderers. The Spanish government conducted dozens of executions in Mexico City's central square in this era, revealing how European imperialism in the Americas influenced perceptions of violence and how it was tolerated, encouraged, or suppressed. An evocative history, Death in Old Mexico provides a compelling new perspective on late colonial Mexico City.

Searching for Madre Matiana

Searching for Madre Matiana PDF Author: Edward Wright-Rios
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 082634660X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
In the mid-nineteenth century prophetic visions attributed to a woman named Madre Matiana roiled Mexican society. Pamphlets of the time proclaimed that decades earlier a humble laywoman foresaw the nation’s calamitous destiny—foreign invasion, widespread misery, and chronic civil strife. The revelations, however, pinpointed the cause of Mexico’s struggles: God was punishing the nation for embracing blasphemous secularism. Responses ranged from pious alarm to incredulous scorn. Although most likely a fiction cooked up amid the era’s culture wars, Madre Matiana’s persona nevertheless endured. In fact, her predictions remained influential well into the twentieth century as society debated the nature of popular culture, the crux of modern nationhood, and the role of women, especially religious women. Here Edward Wright-Rios examines this much-maligned—and sometimes celebrated—character and her position in the development of a nation.

Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala

Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala PDF Author: Hannah Burdette
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081653988X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
From the rise of the Pan-Maya Movement in Guatemala and the Zapatista uprising in Mexico to the Water and Gas Wars in Bolivia and the Idle No More movement in Canada, the turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed a notable surge in Indigenous political action as well as an outpouring of texts produced by Native authors and poets. Throughout the Americas—Abiayala, or the “Land of Plenitude and Maturity” in the Guna language of Panama—Indigenous people are raising their voices and reclaiming the right to represent themselves in politics as well as in creative writing. Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala explores the intersections between Indigenous literature and social movements over the past thirty years through the lens of insurgent poetics. Author Hannah Burdette is interested in how Indigenous literature and social movements are intertwined and why these phenomena arise almost simultaneously in disparate contexts across the Americas. Literature constitutes a key weapon in political struggles as it provides a means to render subjugated knowledge visible and to envision alternatives to modernity and coloniality. The surge in Indigenous literature and social movements is arguably one of the most significant occurrences of the twenty-first century, and yet it remains understudied. Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala bridges that gap by using the concept of Abiayala as a powerful starting point for rethinking inter-American studies through the lens of Indigenous sovereignty.

Heroes of the Borderlands

Heroes of the Borderlands PDF Author: Christopher Conway
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826361129
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Few genres were as popular and as enduring in twentieth-century Mexico as the Western. Christopher Conway’s lavishly illustrated Heroes of the Borderlands tells the surprising story of the Mexican Western for the first time, exploring how Mexican authors and artists reimagined US film and comic book Westerns to address Mexican politics and culture. Broad in scope, accessible in style, and multidisciplinary in approach, this study examines a variety of Western films and comics, defines their political messaging, and shows how popular Mexican music reinforced their themes. Conway shows how the Mexican Western responds to historical and cultural topics like the trauma of the Conquest, mestizaje, misogyny, the Cult of Santa Muerte, and anti-Americanism. Full of memorable movie stills, posters, lobby cards, comic book covers, and period advertising, Heroes of the Borderlands redefines our understanding of Mexican popular culture by uncovering a vibrant genre that has been hiding in plain sight.