Browse

This book centers on the ways in which aesthetics and commercialism intersected in officially sanctioned public collections and displays in late nineteenth-century Mexico. The book approaches questions of origin, citizenry, membership, and difference by reconstructing the lineage of institutionally collected objects around which a modern Mexican identity was negotiated. In doing so, it arrives at a deeper understanding of the ways in which displayed objects become linked with nationalistic meaning and why they exert such persuasive force. Spanning the Porfiriato period from 1867 to 1910, the text illuminates the creation and institutionalization of a Mexican cultural inheritance. Employing a wide range of examples—including the erection of public monuments, the culture of fine arts, and the representation of Mexico at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889—the text pursues two strands of thought that weave together in surprising ways: national heritage as a transcendental value and patrimony as potential commercial interest.

Following Argentina’s revolution in 1810, the dress of young patriots inspired a nation and distanced its politics from the relics of Spanish colonialism. Fashion writing often escaped the notice of authorities, allowing authors to masquerade political ideas under the guise of frivolity and entertainment. This book maps this pivotal and overlooked facet of Argentine cultural history, showing how politics emerged from dress to disrupt authoritarian practices and stimulate creativity in a newly independent nation. Drawing from genres as diverse as fiction, poetry, songs, and fashion magazines, the text offers a sartorial history that produces an original understanding of how Argentina forged its identity during the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829—1852), a critical historical time. The book closely analyzes military uniforms, women’s dress, and the novels of the era to reveal fashion’s role in advancing an agenda and disseminating political goals, notions the book connects to the contemporary moment.

The Idea of Haiti critically examines the politics of Haiti’s past—its “facts and fables”—and how these narratives illuminate our understanding of the domestic and transnational structures in place that have contributed to Haitian underdevelopment, a persistent image of deviance, and also cultural survival in the 20^th and 21^st century. Moreover, the book examines the challenges and benefits of strategic recovery operations during the post-earthquake period in Haiti. The essays in the anthology, which stem from original research and in-depth interviews with leading scholars, take into account that in spite of the recent efforts to rebuild Haiti and the proliferation of the reference of a “new Haiti” during 2010 and 2011, this idea of a “new Haiti” is not particular to the aftermath of January 12^th. Thus, the notion of a “new Haiti” possesses historical roots and insight to understanding potential pitfalls and obstacles to current development plans and the key actors involved. The Idea of Haiti’s contributors draw from their disciplinary training in history, literature, anthropology, urban planning, and sociology to explore how these historical discursive practices on race, power, class, and national development inform strategies to envision the republic anew.

The Mestizo State examines how the ideas, images, and public discourse around race, nation, and citizen formation have been transformed in Mexico from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Starting with the Porfiriato, this book investigates the rise of a racialized “mestizo state,” its reinvention after the Mexican Revolution, and its mobilization as a critical lever that would act both on behalf of and against mainstream Mexican political culture during the long hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The book takes race as its object of critical reflection in the context of modern Mexico. An analysis that does not confuse race with mestizaje, indigeneity, African identity, or whiteness, the book sheds light on the history of the materialism of race as it unfolds within the cultural production of modern Mexico, grounded on close readings of four writers whose work explicitly challenged the politics of race in Mexico: Luis Alva, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Rosario Castellanos, and Elena Garro. In seeking to address race as a cultural-political problematic, the book considers race as integral to the production of the materiality of Mexican national history: constitutive of the nation form, a mediator of capitalist accumulation, and a central actor in the rise of modernity.

This book explores how myth and history impacted the social struggle of the Chicano movement and the postmovement years. Drawing on archival materials and political speeches as well as music and protest poetry, the text scrutinizes the ideas that emerged from the effort to organize and legitimize the Chicano movement’s aims. Examining the deployment of the Aztec eagle by the United Farm Workers union, the poem Yo Soy Joaquín, the document El Plan de Santa Barbara, and icons like La Malinche and La Virgen de Guadalupe, the book reveals the centrality of culture to the Chicano movement. The active implementation of cultural narrative was strategically significant in several ways. First, it allowed disparate movement participants to imagine themselves as part of a national, and nationalist, community of resistance. Second, Chicano use of these narratives contested the images that fostered Anglo-American hegemony.

Posthegemony is an investigation into the origins, limits, and possibilities for contemporary politics and political analysis. This book presents accounts of historical movements in Latin America, from Columbus to Chávez, and from Argentine Peronism to Peru’s Sendero Luminoso. Challenging dominant strains in social theory, the book contends that cultural studies simply replicates the populism that conditions it, and that civil society theory merely nourishes the neoliberalism that it sets out to oppose. Both end up entrenching the fiction of a social contract. In place of hegemony or civil society, the book presents a theory of posthegemony, focusing on affect, habit, and the multitude. This approach addresses an era of biopolitics and bare life, tedium and terror, in which state control is ever more pervasive but something always escapes.

Just as mariners use triangulation, mapping an imaginary triangle between two known positions and an unknown location, so, this text contends, Latino authors in late twentieth-century America employed the coordinates of familiar ideas of self to find their way to new, complex identities. Through this metaphor, the book reveals how Latino autobiographical texts, written after the rise of cultural nationalism in the 1960s, challenge mainstream notions of individual identity and national belonging in the United States. In a traditional autobiographical work, the protagonist frequently opts out of his or her community. In the works that this text analyzes, protagonists instead opt in to collective groups—often for the express political purpose of redefining that collective. Reading texts by authors such as Ernesto Galarza, Jesús Colón, Piri Thomas, Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Judith Ortiz Cofer, John Rechy, Julia Alvarez, and Sandra Cisneros, this book engages debates about the relationship between literature and social movements, the role of cultural nationalism in projects for social justice, the gender and sexual problematics of 1960s cultural nationalist groups, the possibilities for interethnic coalitions, and the interpretation of autobiography. In the process, the book considers the potential for cultural nationalism as a productive force for aggrieved communities of color in their struggles for equality.