| Andes Imagined | Jorge Coronado | Repositions Peruvian indigenismo as a discourse of and about modernity, in which the movement's artists and intellectuals used the figure of the Indian to mobilize larger questions about becoming modern. |
| Art and Archaeology of Pre-Columbian Cuba | Ramón Dacal Moure | Art and Archaeology of Pre-Columbian Cuba is the first report of archaeological findings in Cuba since 1959 and the first synthesis of Cuban prehistoric art and archaeology since Mark Harrington’s Cuba Before Columbus, published in 1921. More than one hundred photographs reveal the superb artistry of the Pre-Columbian Ciboney and Taino cultures and give the reader a deep appreciation of these early Cubans. |
| Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America | Fernando Rosenberg | Examines the canonical Latin American avant-garde texts of the 1920s and 1930s, with particular focus on Roberto Arlt and Mário de Andrade. The movement developed on its own terms, in polemic dialogue with European movements, critiquing modernity itself, and developed a geopolitical awareness that bridged postcolonial and postmodern culture and continues its influence today. |
| Corpus Delicti | Josefina Ludmer | An intellectual tour de force from one of today’s leading critics of Latin American literature and culture, The Corpus Delicti [The Body of Crime] is a manual of crime, a compendium of crime tales, and an extended meditation on the role of crime in life. |
| Curse of Nemur | Ticio Escobar | Part field diary, part art critique, and part cultural anthropology— the book offers a glimpse of an aesthetic “other” (the Ishir [Chamacoco] of Parguay), causing us to reexamine Western perspectives on the interpretation of art, religion, and Native American culture. |
| Essays on Mexican Kinship | Hugo Nutini | Essays in Mexican Kinship offers new and important data on the social structure of Indian and rural Mestizo communities of Mexico, particularly those of the highlands, and provides models and suggestions for future research. |
| Female and Male in Latin America | Ann Pescatello | A pioneering study of Latin American women that views contemporary perceptions and realities of women’s lives, women’s roles in modernization versus tradition, the conflicts of class struggles among women, and the future of women's participation in Cuban society. |
| Film Industry in Brazil | Randal Johnson | Looking back through the prism of the severe economic crisis for filmmaking in the 1980s, this book trace the development of this industry in Brazil, focusing specifically on its relationship to the state. |
| Imagination Beyond Nation | Eva Bueno | This innovative collection features studies of iconography in Mexico, telenovelas in Venezuela, drama in Chile, cinema in Brazil, comic strips and tango in Argentina, and ceramics in Peru. From the studies of these popular arts the idea of nationality in Latin America is revealed to be a problematic, divided one, worthy of further study.
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| Intersecting Tango | Adriana Bergero | Intersecting Tango engages Buenos Aires during the sweeping changes of 1900-1930, to capture a culture in motion through which Buenos Aires transformed itself into a modern, cosmopolitan city. Taking the reader through a dazzling array of sites, sources, and events, Bergero conveys the city in all its complexity. Drawing on architecture and gendered spaces, photography, newspaper columns, schoolbooks, “high” and “low” literature, private letters, advertising, fashion, and popular music, she illuminates a range of urban social geographies inhabited by the city's defining classes and groups. In mining this vast material, Bergero traces the profound change in social fabric by which these diverse identities evolved, through the processes of modernization and its many dislocations, into a new national identity capable of embodying modernity.
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| Liberalism at Its Limits | Ileana Rodriguez | Looks to the criminality and violence of Latin America to assess the discord between liberalism in theory and practice, and thus how liberalism might be exhausted in relation to local conditions not reconcilable to its core tenants. |
| Life, Music, and Times of Carlos Gardel | Simon Collier | The first English-langiuage biography of the great Argentinian tango singer Carlos Gardel (1890-1935), that traces his rise from modest beginnings to become the first genuine “superstar” of twentieth-century Latin America. |
| Literature and Subjection | Horacio Legrás | Legrás views the factors that have both formed and stifled the integration of peripheral experiences into Latin American literature. He analyzes key works by novelists Juan José Saer (The Witness), Nellie Campobello (Cartucho), Roa Bastos (Son of Man), and Jose María Arguedas (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below), among others, to provide a theoretical basis for understanding the plight of the author, the peripheral voice, and the confines of the literary medium. |
| Mestizaje Upside-Down | Javier Sanjinés C. | Mestizaje refers to the process of cultural, ethnic, and racial mixture that is part of cultural identity in Latin America. Through a careful study of fiction, political essays, and visual art, this book defines the meaning of mestizaje in the context of the emergence of a modern national and artistic identity in late-19th- and early 20th-century Bolivia. |
| Metamorphosis of Heads | Denise Arnold | Provides a comprehensive ethnography of writing in the Andes, and details the relationship between Andean peoples’ struggle to preserve their indigenous textual forms in the face of Western cirricula, with their struggle for land and power. |
| Muralism without Walls | Anna Indych-López | Examines the introduction of Mexican muralism to the United States in the 1930s, and the challenges faced by the artists, their medium, and the political overtones of their work in a new society. |
| Nationalizing Blackness | Robin Dale Moore | Nationalizing Blackness represents one of the first politicized studies of twentieth-century culture in Cuba. It demonstrates how music can function as the center of racial and cultural conflict during the formation of a national identity. |
| Nightmares of the Lettered City | Juan Dabove | An original study of the popular theme of banditry in works of literature, essays, poetry, and drama, from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s, and banditry's pivotal role during the conceptualization and formation of the Latin American nation-state. While focusing 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. |
| Optic of the State | Jens Andermann | Traces the production of nationalist imaginaries through the public visual representation of modern state formation in Brazil and Argentina. The purpose of these imaginaries was to vindicate political upheavals and secure the viability of the newly independent states through a sense of historic destiny and inevitable evolution. The visions of national heritage, territory, and social and ethnic composition were conceived in a complex interplay between government, cultural and scientific institutions, as a means of propagating political agendas and power throughout the emerging states. |
| Other South | Hosam Aboul-Ela | Other South raises new questions about the scope and attitude of Faulkner's project, positioning his work as an inherent critique of colonialism and emphasizing a more specific conceptualization of coloniality. Engaging with theorists from the former colonies, Aboul-Ela draws on an understanding of economics, social structures, and the colonial/neocolonial status of the Third World, and steps outside the preconceptions of current postcolonial studies to offer a view of our shared literary heritage. |
| Rockin’ Las Américas | Deborah Pacini Hernandez | Rockin’ Las Americas is the first book to explore the production, dissemination, and consumption of rock music throughout Latin America. Contributors include experts in music, history, literature, sociology, and anthropology, as well as practicing rockeros. |
| Social Documentary in Latin America | Julianne Burton | Twenty essays by major filmmakers and critics provide the first survey of the evolution of documentary film in Latin America. While acknowledging the political and historical weight of the documentary, the contributors are also concerned with the aesthetic dimensions of the medium and how Latin American practitioners have defined the boundaries of the form. |
| Spanish King of the Incas | Ana María Lorandi | Spanish King of the Incas tells the fascinating story of a Spanish commoner who participated in the conquest of Latin America, then changed loyalties. He declared himself a king among the Calchaquí Indians and was eventually executed for his role in an Inca rebellion in 1667. |
| Sport in Cuba | Paula Pettavino | The first major study on the Cuban system of sports and physical culture. Analyzes how sports were given such high priority in Cuba, how the country became a world sports power by the mid-1970s, and the impact of sports on Cuban society. |
| Without History | José Rabasa | Rabasa offers new interpretations of the meaning of history from indigenous perspectives and develops the concept of a communal temporality that is not limited by time, but rather exists within the individual, community, and culture as a living knowledge that links both past and present. Rabasa recalls the works of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci, and contemporary south Asian subalternists Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others. He incorporates their conceptions of communality, insurgency, resistance to hegemonic governments, and the creation of autonomous spaces as strategies employed by indigenous groups around the globe, but goes further in defining these strategies as millennial and deeply rooted in Mesoamerican antiquity. |
