Synopses & Reviews
Can scholarly pursuit of soap operas and folk art actually reveal a national imagination? 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. In examining these popular arts, the scholars gathered here ask the same broad questions: what precisely is a national culture at the level of the popular? The national idea in Latin America emerges from these pages as a problematic, divided one, worth sustained attention in the field of culture studies. Many different arts come forth in all their richness and vitality, compelling us to look, listen, and understand.
Review
“It is inordinately refreshing to read these essays. They are original and provocative.... Perhaps the singlemost original contribution is the essays' relationship to questions of nationness. In a field that is often absurdly tied to the idea and preservation of some kind of threatened or precarious national essence perceived as embodied in various objects and popular culture practices, these essays expand and problematize the idea of nationness while sustaining its possibility.”
--Ana M. López, Tulane University
Synopsis
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.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-304) and index.
About the Author
Eva P. Bueno teaches Spanish and comparative literature at Penn State Univ., Dubois. She has published Resisting Boundaries (1995) and essays on Spanish-American and Brazilian literature in
MLN, Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, Sociocriticism, and others. She is editing
The Feminist Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature and
Naming the Father.
Terry Caesar teaches American literature and literary theory at Clarion Univ., and is the author of Forgiving the Boundaries), Conspiring with Forms and Writing in Disguise. His essays have been published in American Literary History, History, Substance, and the Yale Journal of Criticism.
Table of Contents
Gender : ethnicity and piety : the case of the China poblana / Jeanne L. Gillespie -- Caipira culture : the politics of nation in Mazzaropi's films / Eva P. Bueno -- Big snakes on the streets and never ending stories : the case of Venezuelan telenovelas / Nelson Hippolyte Ortega -- From Mafalda to Boogie : the city in Argentine humor / Hâector D. Fernâandez L'Hoeste -- Framing the Peruvian Cholo : popular art by unpopular people / Milagros Zapata Swerdlow and David Swerdlow -- You're all guilty : Lo cubano in the confession / James J. Pancrazio -- The Cueca of the last judgement : politics of Chilean resistance in Tres Marâias y una rosa / Oscar Lepeley -- Tango, Buenos Aires, Borges : cultural production and urban sexual regulation / David William Foster -- Myth, modernity, and postmodern tragedy in Walter Lima's The dolphin / Jerrold Van Hoeg -- "Useless spaces" of the feminine in popular culture : Like water for chocolate and The silent war / Vincent Spina -- Masculinities at the margins : representations of the Malandro and the Pachuco / Simon Webb.