Cruelty and Utopia


Book Description

This landmark collection of illustrated essays explores the vastly underappreciated history of America's other cities -- the great metropolises found south of our borders in Central and South America. Buenos Aires, So Paulo, Mexico City, Caracas, Havana, Santiago, Rio, Tijuana, and Quito are just some of the subjects of this diverse collection. How have desires to create modern societies shaped these cities, leading to both architectural masterworks (by the likes of Luis Barragn, Juan O'Gorman, Lcio Costa, Roberto Burle Marx, Carlos Ral Villanueva, and Lina Bo Bardi) and the most shocking favelas? How have they grappled with concepts of national identity, their colonial history, and the continued demands of a globalized economy? Lavishly illustrated, Cruelty and Utopia features the work of such leading scholars as Carlos Fuentes, Edward Burian, Lauro Cavalcanti, Fernando Oayrzn, Roberto Segre, and Eduardo Subirats, along with artwork ranging from colonial paintings to stills from Chantal Akerman's film From the Other Side. Also included is a revised translation of Spanish King Philip II's influential planning treatise of 1573, the "Laws of the Indies," which did so much to define the form of the Latin American city.




Inverted Utopias


Book Description

In the twentieth century, avant-garde artists from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean created extraordinary and highly innovative paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mixed-media works, and installations. This innovative book presents more than 250 works by some seventy of these artists (including Gego, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Xul Solar, and Jose Clemente Orozco) and artists' groups, along with interpretive essays by leading authorities and newly translated manifestoes and other theoretical documents written by the artists. Together the images and texts showcase the astonishing artistic achievements of the Latin American avant-garde. The book focuses on two decisive periods: the return from Europe in the 1920s of Latin American avant-garde pioneers; and the expansion of avant-garde activities throughout Latin America after World War II as artists expressed their independence from developments in Europe and the United States. As the authors explain, during these periods Latin American art was fueled by the belief that artistic creations could present a form of utopia - an inversion of the original premise that drove the European avant-garde - and serve as a model for




Sabers and Utopias


Book Description

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A landmark collection of essays on the Nobel laureate’s conception of Latin America, past, present, and future Throughout his career, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa has grappled with the concept of Latin America on a global stage. Examining liberal claims and searching for cohesion, he continuously weighs the reality of the continent against the image it projects, and considers the political dangers and possibilities that face this diverse set of countries. Now this illuminating and versatile collection assembles these never-before-translated criticisms and meditations. Reflecting the intellectual development of the writer himself, these essays distill the great events of Latin America’s recent history, analyze political groups like FARC and Sendero Luminoso, and evaluate the legacies of infamous leaders such as Papa Doc Duvalier and Fidel Castro. Arranged by theme, they trace Vargas Llosa’s unwavering demand for freedom, his embrace of and disenchantment with revolutions, and his critique of nationalism, populism, indigenism, and corruption. From the discovery of liberal ideas to a defense of democracy, buoyed by a passionate invocation of Latin American literature and art, Sabers and Utopias is a monumental collection from one of our most important writers. Uncompromising and adamantly optimistic, these social and political essays are a paean to thoughtful engagement and a brave indictment of the discrimination and fear that can divide a society.




On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias


Book Description

Artist, educator, curator, and critic Luis Camnitzer has been writing about contemporary art ever since he left his native Uruguay in 1964 for a fellowship in New York City. As a transplant from the "periphery" to the "center," Camnitzer has had to confront fundamental questions about making art in the Americas, asking himself and others: What is "Latin American art"? How does it relate (if it does) to art created in the centers of New York and Europe? What is the role of the artist in exile? Writing about issues of such personal, cultural, and indeed political import has long been an integral part of Camnitzer's artistic project, a way of developing an idiosyncratic art history in which to work out his own place in the picture. This volume gathers Camnitzer's most thought-provoking essays—"texts written to make something happen," in the words of volume editor Rachel Weiss. They elaborate themes that appear persistently throughout Camnitzer's work: art world systems versus an art of commitment; artistic genealogies and how they are consecrated; and, most insistently, the possibilities for artistic agency. The theme of "translation" informs the texts in the first part of the book, with Camnitzer asking such questions as "What is Latin America, and who asks the question? Who is the artist, there and here?" The texts in the second section are more historically than geographically oriented, exploring little-known moments, works, and events that compose the legacy that Camnitzer draws on and offers to his readers.




America's Communal Utopias


Book Description

From the Shakers to the Branch Davidians, America's communal utopians have captured the popular imagination. Seventeen original essays here demonstrate the relevance of such groups to the mainstream of American social, religious, and economic life. The contributors examine the beliefs and practices of the most prominent utopian communities founded before 1965, including the long-overlooked Catholic monastic communities and Jewish agricultural colonies. Also featured are the Ephrata Baptists, Moravians, Shakers, Harmonists, Hutterites, Inspirationists of Amana, Mormons, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, Janssonists, Theosophists, Cyrus Teed's Koreshans, and Father Divine's Peace Mission. Based on a new conceptual framework known as developmental communalism, the book examines these utopian movements throughout the course of their development--before, during, and after their communal period. Each chapter includes a brief chronology, giving basic information about the group discussed. An appendix presents the most complete list of American utopian communities ever published. The contributors are Jonathan G. Andelson, Karl J. R. Arndt, Pearl W. Bartelt, Priscilla J. Brewer, Donald F. Durnbaugh, Lawrence Foster, Carl J. Guarneri, Robert V. Hine, Gertrude E. Huntington, James E. Landing, Dean L. May, Lawrence J. McCrank, J. Gordon Melton, Donald E. Pitzer, Robert P. Sutton, Jon Wagner, and Robert S. Weisbrot.




Intercultural Utopias


Book Description

DIVExplores how participants in the indigenous movement in Cauca, Colombia--including indigenous, non-indigenous, scholars, and shamans--have helped define a new sense of Colombian nationhood./div




The New Latin American Left


Book Description

Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.




Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias


Book Description

The Maya Indian peoples of Chiapas had been mobilizing politically for years before the Zapatista rebellion that brought them to international attention. This authoritative volume explores the different ways that Indians across Chiapas have carved out autonomous cultural and political spaces in their diverse communities and regions. Offering a consistent and cohesive vision of the complex evolution of a region and its many cultures and histories, this work is a fundamental source for understanding key issues in nation building. In a unique collaboration, the book brings together recognized authorities who have worked in Chiapas for decades, many linking scholarship with social and political activism. Their combined perspectives, many previously unavailable in English, make this volume the most authoritative, richly detailed, and authentic work available on the people behind the Zapatista movement.




Utopian Road to Hell


Book Description

"William Murray provides a unique perspective that should be read, particularly by America's youth, at a time central planners are once again promising utopian dreams at a cost to the most productive among us.” ―Governor Mike Huckabee Utopian dreamers are deceived and deceiving. Their “fight for the people” rhetoric may sound good at first, but history proves egalitarian governments and the cultures they try to create destroy freedom, destroy creativity, destroy human lives, create poverty and misery, and often spread beyond their borders to bring others under slavery. Utopians believe that through their own personal brilliance a better society can be created on earth. When the belief in man as a creation in the image of God is completely rejected, the use of slavery and mass execution can be justified in the name of the creation of a utopian state for the masses. Pol Pot, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung―together these so-called visionaries through their fanciful policies are responsible for the deaths of millions of people. In Utopian Road to Hell William J. Murray, son of atheist apologist Madelyn Murray O’Hair, describes the totalitarians throughout history and the current utopians who are determined to engage in social engineering to control the lives of every person on earth. From Marx to Hitler, Murray explains the progression of socialist engineering from its occultist roots to the extreme madness of the Nazis’ nationalistic racism. From Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the rebellious desire to be free from morality drives the “at-any-cost” campaigns such as abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and overreaching government provisions. From Woodrow Wilson’s “living document” distortion of the Constitution and his income tax to FDR’s New Deal to Obama’s executive orders, those who seek centralized power typically do so by proclaiming some utopian scheme that they claim will perfect mankind and eliminate competition, greed, poverty, and war. William J. Murray masterfully educates us on the utopians’ swath of destruction throughout history and warns us of the dangers of present-day utopians fighting to hold power. We must heed the warning of George Washington when he said in his 1796 Farewell Address that it is important for those entrusted with the administration of this great and free nation, “to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another.” We must reclaim the freedom of the individual to avoid the continued path down the utopian road to hell.




Chicanx Utopias


Book Description

Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for civil rights and global justice in the post–World War II era, Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams that sprang from everyday experiences. In Chicanx Utopias, Luis Alvarez offers a broad study of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the film Salt of the Earth, brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms, poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements, and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.