A Latin American Existentialist Ethos


Book Description

With their emphasis on freedom and engagement, European existentialisms offered Latin Americans transformative frameworks for thinking and writing about their own locales. In taking up these frameworks, Latin Americans endowed them with a distinctive ethos, a turn towards questions of identity and ethics. Stephanie Merrim situates major literary and philosophical works—by the existentialist Grupo Hiperión, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, and Rodolfo Usigli—within this dynamic context. Collectively, their writings manifest an existentialist ethos attuned to the matters most alive and pressing in their specific situations—matters linked to gender, Indigeneity, the Mexican Revolution, and post-Revolution politics. That each of these writers orchestrates a unique center of gravity renders Mexican existentialist literature an always shifting, always passionate adventure. A Latin American Existentialist Ethos takes readers on this adventure, conveying the passions of its subjects lucidly and vibrantly. It is at once a detailed portrait of twentieth-century Mexican existentialism and an expansive look at Latin American literary existentialism in relation—and opposition—to its European counterparts.




Latin America and Existentialism


Book Description

Latin America and Existentialism is a preliminary intellectual history, prioritising literature and contextualising Latin American philosophical contributions from the 1860s to the late 1930s, decades that coincide with the canon’s foundational years. This study takes a Pan-American approach to move the critical focus away from the River Plate, a region that has received some critical attention. In doing so, it focuses on existentially-neglected writers such as Brazil’s Machado de Assis and Graciliano Ramos, José Asunción Silva from Colombia, Cuba’s Enrique Labrador Ruiz, and the Chilean María Luisa Bombal. Underappreciated Latin American philosophical voices and existentialism’s canonical perspectives allow the author to discuss the many problems concerning the experiencing ‘I’ of these authors, and to consider such existential themes as ethical vacuity, forlornness, the crisis of insufficiency, the conundrum of choice, and the enigma of authentic being. The concentration on Latin America’s existentially-hued interest in the human condition is an invitation to the reader to reconsider the peripheral status in the existentialism canon.




A Companion to Latin American Philosophy


Book Description

This comprehensive collection of original essays written by an international group of scholars addresses the central themes in Latin American philosophy. Represents the most comprehensive survey of historical and contemporary Latin American philosophy available today Comprises a specially commissioned collection of essays, many of them written by Latin American authors Examines the history of Latin American philosophy and its current issues, traces the development of the discipline, and offers biographical sketches of key Latin American thinkers Showcases the diversity of approaches, issues, and styles that characterize the field




Philosophy and Literature in Latin America


Book Description

Philosophy and Literature in Latin America presents a unique and original view of the current state of development in Latin America of two disciplines that are at the core of the humanities. Divided into two parts, each section explores the contributions of distinguished American and Latin American experts and authors. The section on literature includes the literary activities of Latin Americans working in the United States, an area in which very little research has been demonstrated and, for that reason, will add an interesting new dimension to the field of Latin American studies.




The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America


Book Description

Postmodernism may seem a particularly inappropriate term when used in conjunction with a region that is usually thought of as having only recently, and then unevenly, acceded to modernity. Yet in the last several years the concept has risen to the top of the agenda of cultural and political debate in Latin America. This collection explores the Latin American engagement with postmodernism, less to present a regional variant of the concept than to situate it in a transnational framework. Recognizing that postmodernism in Latin America can only inaccurately be thought of as having traveled from an advanced capitalist "center" to arrive at a still dependent neocolonial "periphery," the contributors share the assumption that postmodernism is itself about the dynamics of interaction between local and metropolitan cultures in a global system in which the center-periphery model has begun to break down. These essays examine the ways in which postmodernism not only designates the effects of this transnationalism in Latin America, but also registers the cultural and political impact on an increasingly simultaneous global culture of a Latin America struggling with its own set of postcolonial contingencies, particularly the crisis of its political left, the dominance of neoliberal economic models, and the new challenges and possibilities opened by democratization. With new essays on the dynamics of Brazilian culture, the relationship between postmodernism and Latin American feminism, postmodernism and imperialism, and the implications of postmodernist theory for social policy, as well as the text of the Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle of the Zapatatista National Liberation Army, this expanded edition of boundary 2 will interest not only Latin Americanists, but scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern. Contributors. Xavier Albó, José Joaquín Brunner, Fernando Calderón, Enrique Dussel, Néstor García Canclini, Martín Hopenhayn, Neil Larsen, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, Norbert Lechner, María Milagros López, Raquel Olea, Aníbal Quijano, Nelly Richard, Carlos Rincón, Silviano Santiago, Beatriz Sarlo, Roberto Schwarz, and Hernán Vidal







A History of the Church in Latin America


Book Description

This comprehensive history of the church in Latin America, with its emphasis on theology, will help historians and theologians to better understand the formation and continuity of the Latin American tradition.




Beyond the Ancient Quarrel


Book Description

In Plato's Republic, Socrates spoke of an 'ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy' which he offered to resolve once and for all by banning the poets from his ideal city. Few philosophers have taken Socrates at his word, and out of the ancient quarrel there has emerged a long tradition that has sought to value literature chiefly as a useful supplement to philosophical reasoning. The fiction of J.M. Coetzee makes a striking challenge to this tradition. While his writing has frequently engaged philosophical subjects in explicit ways, it has done so with an emphasis on the dissonance between literary expression and philosophical reasoning. And while Coetzee has often overtly engaged with academic literary theory, his fiction has done so in a way that has tended to disorient rather than affirm those same theories, wrong-footing the normal processes of literary interpretation. This volume brings together philosophers and literary theorists to reflect upon the challenge Coetzee has made to their respective disciplines, and to the disciplinary distinctions at stake in the ancient quarrel. The essays use his fiction to explore questions about the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism; the relationship between literature, theology, and post-secularism; the particular ways in which literature engages reality; how literature interacts with the philosophies of language, action, subjectivity, and ethics; and the institutions that govern the distinctions between literature and philosophy. It will be of importance not only to readers of Coetzee, but to anyone interested in the ancient quarrel itself.




Music and Youth Culture in Latin America


Book Description

The book examines the ways in which music is used to advance identity claims in several Latin American countries and among Latinos in the U.S. Individual chapters address the ways in which music provides people with both enjoyment and the tools they use to understand who they are in terms of nationality, region, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and migration status."




Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino?


Book Description

DIV This first volume of the Critical Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art series published by the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents 168 crucial texts written by influential artists, critics, curators, journalists, and intellectuals whose writings shed light on questions relating to what it means to be "Latin American" and/or "Latino." Reinforced within a critical framework, the documents address converging issues, including: the construct of "Latin-ness" itself; the persistent longing for a continental identity; notions of Pan–Latin Americanism; the emergence of collections and exhibitions devoted specifically to "Latin American” or "Latino" art; and multicultural critiques of Latin American and Latino essentialism. The selected documents, many of which have never before been published in English, span from the late fifteenth century to the present day. They encompass key protagonists of this comprehensive history as well as unfamiliar figures, revealing previously unknown facets of the questions and issues at play. The book series complements the thousands of seminal documents now available through the ICAA Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art digital archive, http://icaadocs.mfah.org. Together they establish a much-needed intellectual foundation for the exhibition, collection, and interpretation of art produced in Latin America and among Latino populations in the United States. /div