This book highlights the ruin's prolific resurgence in Latin American cultural life at the turn of the millennium and sharply reveals a stirring creative drive by artists and intellectuals toward ethical reflection and change in the midst of ruinous devastation.

Though constantly in decay, ruins continue to fascinate the observer. Their still-standing survival is a loud affirmation of their presence, in which we can admire the struggle against the power of Nature aesthetically manifested during the decay. This volume takes a thematic approach to examining the aesthetics of ruins. It looks at the general aspects of architectural decay and its classical forms of admiration and then turns towards ruins from both classical and contemporary periods, from both Western and non-Western areas, and with examples from “high art” as well as popular culture. Combining the methodologies of art history, aesthetics and cultural history, this book opens up new ways of looking at the phenomenon of ruins.

Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) was the most prominent novelist in contemporary Mexico and, until his recent death, one of the leading voices in Latin America’s Boom generation. He received the most prestigious awards and prizes in the world, including the Latin Civilization Award (presented by the Presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and France), the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award. During his fecund and accomplished life as a writer, literary theorist, and political analyst, Fuentes turned his attention to the major conflicts of the twentieth century – from the Second World War and the Cuban Revolution, to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in Vietnam, and the post-revolutionary crisis of the one-party rule in Mexico – and attended to their political and international importance in his novels, short fiction, and essays. Known for his experimentation in narrative techniques, and for novels and essays written in a global range that illuminate the conflicts of our times, Fuentes’s writings have been rightfully translated into most of the world’s languages. His literary work continues to spur and provoke the interest of a global readership on diverse civilizations and eras, from Imperial Spain and post-revolutionary France, to Ancient and Modern Mexico, the United States, and Latin America. The Reptant Eagle: Essays on Carlos Fuentes and the Art of the Novel includes nineteen essays and one full introduction written exclusively for this volume by renowned Fuentes scholars from Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Collected into five parts, the essays integrate wide-ranging methods and innovative readings of The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975) and, among other novels, Distant Relations (1980); they analyze the visual arts in Fuentes’s novels (Diego Rivera’s murals and world film); chart and comment on the translations of Fuentes’s narratives into Japanese and Romanian; and propose comprehensive readings of The Buried Mirror (1992) and Personas (2012), Fuentes’s posthumous book of essays. Beyond their comprehensive and interdisciplinary scope, the book’s essays trace Fuentes’s conscious resolve to contribute to the art of the novel and to its uninterrupted tradition, from Cervantes and Rabelais to Thomas Mann and Alejo Carpentier, and from the Boom generation to Latin America’s “Boomerang” group of younger writers. This book will be of importance to literary critics, teachers, students, and readers interested in Carlos Fuentes’s world-embracing literary work.

Presenting and interrogating an array of texts and discourses, this collection brings into focus a broad range of topics whose common denominator is the intersection between cultural productions and politics in different moments of the history of Latin America and Spain. From the struggles of class distinction, identity and community in 19th and 20th century and contemporary Latin America as explored in photography, literature and film, to how political and sexual transgressions from medieval times to the present are portrayed in Hispanic literature, and the ways that canonical and non-canonical texts in Spain have been defying hegemonic power relations in the 20th century and beyond. This volume provides fresh approaches from well-established scholars, as well as from a new generation of researchers whose works enlighten the reader about the rich facets of such intersections. This publication also offers a background to pursue further research in these areas and to serve the general public interested in Latin American and Spanish literary and cultural studies, and those seeking a greater understanding of social and economic change in both Latin America and Spain: specifically, issues of inclusion and citizenship; the constraints on state power in the neoliberal era; the strategies used by texts to create subjects that are not bound to conventional identity formations; and the challenges and possibilities of subverting the gaze of the institutional spectator.

The figure of the freak as perceived by the Western gaze has always been a part of the Latin American imaginary, from the letters that Columbus wrote about his encounters with dog-faced people to Shakespeare's Caliban. The freak acquires greater significance in a globalized, neoliberal world that defines the "abnormal" as one who does not conform mentally, physically, or emotionally and is unable or unwilling to follow the economic and cultural norms of the institutions in power. Freak Performances examines the continuing effects of colonialism on modern Latin American identities, with a particular focus on the way it has constructed the body of the other through performance. Theater questions the representations of these bodies, as it enables the empowerment of the silenced other; the freak as a spectacle of otherness finds in performance an opportunity for re-appropriation by artists resisting the dominant authority. Through an analysis of experimental theater, dance theater, performance art, and gallery-based installation art across eight countries, Analola Santana explores the theoretical issues shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different bodies in the current Latin American landscape.

Imperial Debris redirects critical focus from ruins as evidence of the past to "ruination" as the processes through which imperial power occupies the present. Ann Laura Stoler's introduction is a manifesto, a compelling call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address the toxic but less perceptible corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, as well as their durable traces on the material environment and people's bodies and minds. In their provocative, tightly focused responses to Stoler, the contributors explore subjects as seemingly diverse as villages submerged during the building of a massive dam in southern India, Palestinian children taught to envision and document ancestral homes razed by the Israeli military, and survival on the toxic edges of oil refineries and amid the remains of apartheid in Durban, South Africa. They consider the significance of Cold War imagery of a United States decimated by nuclear blast, perceptions of a swath of Argentina's Gran Chaco as a barbarous void, and the enduring resonance, in contemporary sexual violence, of atrocities in King Leopold's Congo. Reflecting on the physical destruction of Sri Lanka, on Detroit as a colonial metropole in relation to sites of ruination in the Amazon, and on interactions near a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the contributors attend to present-day harms in the occluded, unexpected sites and situations where earlier imperial formations persist. Contributors. Ariella Azoulay, John F. Collins, Sharad Chari, E. Valentine Daniel, Gastón Gordillo, Greg Grandin, Nancy Rose Hunt, Joseph Masco, Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Ann Laura Stoler

The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel provides an accessible introduction to an important World literature. While many of the authors covered-Aira, Bolaño, Castellanos Moya, Vásquez-are gaining an increasing readership in English and are frequently taught, there is sparse criticism in English beyond book reviews. This book provides the guidance necessary for a more sophisticated and contextualized understanding of these authors and their works. Underestimated or unfamiliar Spanish American novels and novelists are introduced through conceptually rigorous essays. Sections on each writer include: *the author's reception in their native country, Spanish America, and Spain *biographical history *a critical examination of their work, including key themes and conceptual concerns *translation history *scholarly reception The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel offers an authoritative guide to a rich and varied novelistic tradition. It covers all demographic areas, including United States Latino authors, in exploring the diversity of this literature and its major themes, such as exile, migration, and gender representation.

The Limits of Identity is a polemical critique of the repudiation of universalism and the theoretical commitment to identity and difference embedded in Latin American literary and cultural studies. Through original readings of foundational Latin American thinkers (such as José Martí and José Enrique Rodó) and contemporary theorists (such as John Beverley and Doris Sommer), Charles Hatfield reveals and challenges the anti-universalism that informs seemingly disparate theoretical projects. The Limits of Identity offers a critical reexamination of widely held conceptions of culture, ideology, interpretation, and history. The repudiation of universalism, Hatfield argues, creates a set of problems that are both theoretical and political. Even though the recognition of identity and difference is normally thought to be a form of resistance, The Limits of Identity claims that, in fact, the opposite is true.

Although fictional—and often fantastic—representations of nature have been a distinguishing feature of Latin American literature for centuries, ecocriticism, understood as the study of literature as it relates to depictions of the natural world, environmental issues, and the ways in which human beings interact and identify with their natural surroundings, did not emerge as a field of scholarly interest in the region until the end of the twentieth century. This volume employs an ecocritical lens in order to explore and question the use of the river imagery in Latino and Latin American literature from the colonial period to our modern world, creating a space in which to examine both its literal and figurative meanings, associated as much with processes of a personal nature as with those of the collective experience in the region. The slow, meandering streams of nostalgia, the raging currents of conflict or the stagnant waters of social decay are just a few of the ways in which the river has become an important symbol and inspiration to many of the region’s writers. This book offers a diverse collection of writings that, through a trans-historical and trans-geographical perspective, allows us, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, to reflect on the rich and dynamic image of the river and, by extension, on the vital context of Latin/o America, its people and societies.

Reveals and analyzes how Peru's military elite have engaged in a cultural campaign--via memoirs, novels, films, museums--to shift public memory and debate about the nation's recent violent conflict and their part in it.