Search results for ""Vanderbilt University Press""

Elderly ex-offenders are some of the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in Japan today, with high levels of poverty and homelessness, disability, mental health problems, and social isolation. They and their families, face stigma and discrimination that further erodes their ability to reintegrate and puts them at greater risk of reoffending.

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The first book to explore the history of college fight songs as a culturally important phenomenon, From Dixie to Rocky Top zeroes in on the US South, where college football has forged a powerful, quasi-religious sense of meaning and identity throughout the region. Tracing the story of Southeastern Conference (SEC) fight songs from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, author Carrie Tipton places this popular repertory within the broader commercial music industry and uses fight songs to explore themes of authorship and copyright; the commodification of school spirit; and the construction of race, gender, and regional identity in Southern football culture. This book explores the history embedded in SEC football’s music traditions, drawing from the archives of the seventeen universities currently or formerly in the conference. Alongside rich primary sources, Tipton incorporates approaches and literature from sports history, Southern and American history, Southern and American studies, and musicology. Chronicling iconic Southern fight songs’ origins, dissemination, meanings, and cultural reception over a turbulent century, From Dixie to Rocky Top weaves a compelling narrative around a virtually unstudied body of popular music.

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In an era in which collegiate monuments physical (the University of North Carolina's Silent Sam statue) and aural (the University of Texas's use of "Eyes on Texas") are being scrutinized on a national stage, From Dixie to Rocky Top explains how so much history became embedded in Southern football culture and reflects on how Southern universities reckon with their troubling icons, symbols, and songs. The project took author Carrie Tipton deep into the archives of the seventeen universities currently or formerly in the Southeastern Conference. It also draws on historic newspapers, magazines, recordings, football programs, scrapbooks, photographs, and sheet music accessible in online databases and print sources. In interpreting the primary source data, the book draws on approaches and secondary literature from sports history, Southern and American history, Southern and American studies, and musicology.From Dixie to Rocky Top traces and analyzes the history of SEC football fight songs over a turbulent century. The book chronicles iconic Southern fight songs’ origins, dissemination, meanings, and cultural reception, weaving a compelling narrative around a repertory virtually unexplored by scholars.

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Through dozens of interviews, intensive reporting, and deep research and analysis, Sebastiaan Faber sets out to understand what remains of Francisco Franco's legacy in Spain today. Faber's work is grounded in heavy scholarship, but the book is an engaging, accessible introduction to a national conversation about fascism. Spurred by the disinterment of the dictator in 2019, Faber finds that Spain is still deeply affected—and divided—by the dictatorial legacies of Francoism. This new edition, with additional interviews and a new introduction, illuminates the dangers of the rise of right-wing nationalist revisionism by using Spain as a case study for how nations face, or don't face, difficult questions about their past.

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The End of the Future broadens the theoretical framework for understanding memories' role in reconciliation following a violent conflict. This book explores the complicated and confusing linkages between memory and trauma for individuals caught up in civil war and post-conflict reconciliation in the Peruvian Amazon's Huallaga Valley—an epicenter for leftist rebels and a booming shadow economy based on the extraction and circulation of cocaine. The End of the Future tells the story of the TÚpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement's (Movimiento Revolucionario TÚpac Amaru, MRTA) violent attempts to overthrow the state in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the perspective of the poorest residents of the lower Huallaga's Caynarachi Basin. To give context to the causes and consequences of the MRTA's presence in the lower and central Huallaga, a poorly documented part of the Peruvian Amazon, the book relies on the written works and testimony of SÍstero GarcÍa Torres, an MRTA rebel commander, the government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, MRTA propaganda, media accounts, and critical historical texts. Besides exposing Huallaga Valley human rights abuses, the book's contribution to political anthropology is consequential for its insistence that reconciliation is by no means equivalent to local, indigenous notions of "justice" or customary forms of dispute resolution. Without deliberately addressing the diverse socio-cultural contours defining overlapping epistemologies of justice, freedom, and communal wellbeing, enduring reconciliation will likely remain elusive.

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Whether or not it constituted a complete break from the past, the 15-M movement’s most important legacy was a more expansive notion of the popular political, one that recognized cultural representation as a mode of political articulation and as part of a political culture. In an effort to understand the populist cycle inaugurated by 15-M, and to do so beyond a series of narrated events, Performing Populism sets out to explain Spanish populism in relation to the performances of its visual politics. The book's first part examines how the 15-M movement created a new way of seeing that in turn led to a new way of doing politics in Spain. Part Two focuses on the multiple ramifications of that new vision once the people stopped marching and the movement became less visible. From electoral posters to fiction films, documentaries, and internet memes, Performing Populism traces the ways that collective Spanish identities evolved from a period when "the people" seemed to have been willingly subsumed under the apathetic ideation of the middle-class consumer to the moment in 2011 when a crisis of representation forced many into political consciousness. This rude awakening kickstarted the reconstruction of a Spanish "us" that staged exhibitions of popular will on par with and parallel to the Arab Spring, but in a European register that embraced the countercultural through art that disremembered its political past but could not escape the ghostly shadow of its history.

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Sonic Strategies for Performing the Modern Nation highlights what author Christina Baker refers to as the “sonic strategies” employed by contemporary performance artists in Mexico in response to the violence surrounding the government’s so-called War on Drugs. The introduction (which opens with the scene of the 2007 reenactment of the Grito, or “cry,” of independence) presents the theme, and each subsequent chapter focuses on the works of one or more performance artist. Taken together, the case studies illuminate how critiques of the nation’s rising death tolls, governmental corruption, and gendered violence very literally sound whether in MÚsica de balas, a post-dramatic piece by Hugo Salcedo, CompaÑÍa Teatro Penitenciario’s journey to theatre by way of incarceration, the lamentations of the nation’s Antigones, satirical revisions of Mexican Golden Age Film in the cabaret piece Nosotras las proles, or the story of transfemicide in CÉsar EnrÍquez's La Prietty Guoman by way of U.S. pop music. Written in an accessible style grounded in theatre studies, but interdisciplinary by design, Sonic Strategies for Performing the Modern Nation will appeal to literary critics, students, (ethno)musicologists, and theater and performance scholars alike. ​By paying close attention to both planned and spontaneous sounds within live and textual experiences, Sonic Strategies for Performing the Modern Nation contends that conscientious listening practices highlight dynamic practices that reside beyond the linguistic and embodied gesture.

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The Argentine vision of “transpacific modernity” was in part informed by historical imaginings of Japan in the early twentieth century. Intellectuals such as Eduardo Wilde and Manuel Domecq GarcÍa celebrated Japanese customs and traditions as important values that can be integrated into Argentine society. But a new generation of Nikkei or Japanese Argentines is rewriting this conventional narrative in the twenty-first century. Nikkei writers such as Maximiliano Matayoshi and Anna Kazumi Stahl are challenging the earlier, unapologetic view of Japan based on their own immigrant experiences. Compared to the experience of political persecution against Japanese immigrants in Brazil and Peru, the Japanese in Argentina generally lived under a more agreeable sociopolitical climate. In order to understand the “positive” perception of Japan in Argentine history and literature, Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho turns to the current debate on race in Argentina, particularly as it relates to the discourse of whiteness. One of the central arguments is that Argentina’s century-old interest in Japan represents a disguised method of (re)claiming its white, Western identity. Through close readings of diverse genres (travel writing, essay, novel, short story, and film) Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho yields a multi-layered analysis in order to underline the role Japan has played in both defining and defying Argentine modernity from the twenty century to the present.

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Translated from Spanish for the first time, and with a new introduction to the English edition, The Sky Is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine is comprised of sixty short entries detailing life in and reflections on the Occupied Territories of Palestine in the twenty-first century. In this collection, Irmgard Emmelhainz operates in the committed literature tradition of Walter Benjamin and Andre Gide in Moscow in the 1920s, and Susan Sontag and Juan Goytisolo in Sarajevo in the 1990s—writers and cultural observers grappling with the political processes of others, elsewhere. In order to render the issue of representation, of speaking on behalf of the Palestinian ordeal in all its complexity, The Sky Is Incomplete is composed as a collage, gathering diary entries, letters, experimental passages, script, poetry, art criticism, political analysis, and other genres to convey an opaque view of the Palestine Question. Beyond representation in the sense of giving testimony or speaking on behalf of the Palestinians, however, the author’s parting point is relational: The Sky Is Incomplete is about encounters—with friends, mentors, interlocutors, lovers, children, activists, and soldiers (Israeli and Palestinian).

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Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828) was fascinated by reading, and Goya's attention to the act and consequences of literacy—apparent in some of his most ambitious, groundbreaking creations—is related to the reading revolution in which he participated. It was an unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available, accompanied by a profound shift in the way they were consumed and, for the artist, represented.Goya and the Mystery of Reading studies the way Goya's work heralds the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his art, multiplying its potential for meaning. While the reading revolution resulted from and contributed to the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya and the Mystery of Reading explains how this transition can be tracked in the work of Goya, an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to read it.

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From a donated typewriter that frequently breaks down, people on Alabama's death row have literally cut and pasted together a newsletter, On Wings of Hope, for the last three decades to educate the public about the death penalty. This newsletter, a labor of love, documents decades of work, wisdom, activism, and lived experience of those who have been executed, or are scheduled to be executed, by the state of Alabama. The writings also chart the changing policy and practice of capital punishment in the state that sentences more people to death per capita than any other in the US.Ghosts Over the Boiler is a curated collection of poetry, visual art, photographs, essays, creative writings, and other archival materials that have emerged from Alabama's death row from the organization Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty (PHADP). This group was founded at Holman Correctional Facility and has been operating autonomously since 1989 toward its mission to abolish the death penalty in Alabama and in the nation.

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Based on years of archival research in Madrid and Barcelona, this interdisciplinary study offers a fresh approach to understanding how men visualized themselves and their place in a nation that struggled to modernize after nearly a century of civil war, colonial entanglement, and imperial loss. Masculine Figures is the first study to provide a comprehensive overview of competing models of masculinity in nineteenth-century Spain, and is particularly novel in its treatment of Catalan texts and previously unstudied evidence (e.g., department store catalogs, commercial advertisements, fashion plates, and men’s tailoring journals).Fictional masculinity performs a symbolic role in representing and negotiating the contradictions male novelists often encountered in their attempts to professionalize not only as writers, but also as businessmen, professors, lawyers, and politicians. Through specific and recurring figures like the student, the priest, the businessman, and the heir, male novelists represent an increasingly middle-class world at odds with the values and virtues it inherited from an imperial Spanish past, and those it imported from more industrialized nations like England and France. The visual culture of the time and place marks the material turn in middle-class masculinity and sets the stage for discussions of race and sexuality.Significant chapter sections on the used clothing trade (in the Rastro flea market in Madrid, also called “Las AmÉricas” during the nineteenth century) and the "indiano businessman" (the colonial returnee) discuss the racial implications of fashion of the period—in the first example, through the racialized discourse of contagion that hygienists used to frame the market. In the second example, the book discusses the ways the Catalan indiano “accessorizes” himself with racialized commodities like pocket watches and tobacco and objectified/infantilized figures like Black house servants and footmen.

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Traditional histories of Black letters in Latin America have delimited their geographic scope to the Caribbean while also omitting intertwined Afro-Indigenous discourses. Inspired by the legacy of Amefrican thinker LÉlia Gonzalez, AmÉfrica in Letters highlights the Black poets, songwriters, novelists, essayists, and bloggers who have created a counter-multiculturalist literary history on the Latin American mainland. To capture a sense of the variety of their contributions, this book spans Mexico, Central America, the Andes, and the Southern Cone—highlighting the transcontinental nature of the legacy of Black writing and its impact beyond national boundaries. The writers examined in the volume engage with regional intellectual frameworks while putting into circulation a demand for a recalibration of the Hispanophone and Lusophone contexts in which they and other Afrodescendants reside.

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From June 12, 2020, until the passage of the state law making the occupation a felony two months later, peaceful protesters set up camp at Nashville's Legislative Plaza and renamed it for Ida B. Wells.Central to the occupation was Justin Jones, a student of Fisk University and Vanderbilt Divinity School whose place at the forefront of the protests brought him and the occupation to the attention of the Metro Nashville Police Department, state and US senators, and Governor Bill Lee. The result was two months of solidarity in the face of rampant abuse, community in the face of state-sponsored terror, and standoff after standoff at the gates of the people's house with those who claimed to represent them. In this, his first book, Jones describes those two revolutionary months of nonviolent resistance against the state's soldiers who sought to dehumanize its citizens.The People's Plaza is a rumination on the abuse of power, and a vision of a more just, equitable, anti-racist Nashville—a vision that kept Jones and those with him posted on the plaza through intense heat, unprovoked arrests, vandalism, theft, and violent suppression. It is a first-person account of hope, a statement of intent, and a blueprint for nonviolent resistance in the American South and elsewhere.

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The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, and Performance considers the influence of a Japanese ethnic background or lack thereof in the writing of several twentieth and twenty-first century Mexican authors, directors, and artists. In spite of the unquestionable influence of the Nikkei communities in Mexico’s history and culture, and the numerous historical studies recently published on these two communities, the study of their cultural production and, therefore, their self-definition and how they conceive themselves has been, for the most part, overlooked.This book, a continuation of the author's previous research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry, focuses mostly on texts, films, and artworks produced by Asian Mexicans, rather than on the Japanese or Chinese as mere objects of study. However, it will also be contrasted with the representation of Asians by Mexican authors with no Asian ancestry. With this interdisciplinary study, the author hopes to bring to the fore this silenced community's voice and agency to historicize their own experience.The Mexican Transpacific is a much needed contribution to the fields of contemporary Mexican studies, Latin American studies, race and ethnic studies, transnational Asian studies, and Japanese diaspora studies, in light of the theoretical perspectives of cultural studies, the decolonial turn, and postcolonial theory.

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We are living a moment in which famous chefs, Michelin stars, culinary techniques, and gastronomical accolades attract moneyed tourists to Spain from all over the world. This has prompted the Spanish government to declare its cuisine as part of Spanish patrimony.Yet even with this widespread global attention, we know little about how Spanish cooking became a litmus test for demonstrating Spain’s modernity and, in relation, the roles ascribed to the modern Spanish women responsible for daily cooking. Efforts to articulate a new, modern Spain infiltrated writing in multiple genres and media. Women’s Work places these efforts in their historical context to yield a better understanding of the roles of food within an inherently uneven modernization process. Further, the book reveals the paradoxical messages women have navigated, even in texts about a daily practice that shaped their domestic and work lives. This argument is significant because of the degree to which domestic activities, including cooking, occupied women’s daily lives, even while issues like their fitness as citizens and participation in the public sphere were hotly debated. At the same time, progressive intellectuals from diverse backgrounds began to invoke Spanish cooking and eating as one measure of Spanish modernity.Women’s Work shows how culinary writing engaged these debates and reached women at the site of much of their daily labor—the kitchen—and, in this way, shaped their thinking about their roles in modernizing Spain.

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The birth of the world’s great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the “urban age” inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world’s urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities.Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state.A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.

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Guided by the thesis that literature can transform social reality, Tirana Modern draws on ethnographic and historical material to examine the public culture of reading in modern Albania. Formulated as a question, the topic of the book is: How has Albanian literature and literary translation shaped social action during the longue durée of Albanian modernity?Drawing on material from the independent Albanian publisher, Pika pa sipërfaqe (“Point without Surface”), Tirana Modern provides a tightly focused ethnography of literary culture in Albania that brings into relief the more general dialectic between social imagination and social reality as mediated by reading and literature.

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Trajectories of Empire extends from the beginning of the Iberian expansion of the mid-fifteenth century, through colonialism and slavery, and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Latin American republics. Its point of departure is the question of empire and its aftermath, as reflected in the lives of contemporary Latin Americans of African descent, and of their ancestors caught up in the historical process of Iberian colonial expansion, colonization, and the Atlantic slave trade. The book's chapters explore what it's like to be Black today in the so-called racial democracies of Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba; the role of medical science in the objectification and nullification of Black female personhood during slavery in Brazil in the nineteenth century; the deployment of visual culture to support insurgency for a largely illiterate slave body again in the nineteenth century in Cuba; aspects of discourse that promoted the colonial project as evangelization, or alternately offered resistance to its racialized culture of dominance in the seventeenth century; and the experiences of the first generations of forced African migrants into Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the discursive template was created around their social roles as enslaved or formerly enslaved people.Trajectories of Empire's contributors come from the fields of literary criticism, visual culture, history, anthropology, popular culture (rap), and cultural studies. As the product of an interdisciplinary collective, this book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in Iberian or Hispanic Studies, Africana Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Transatlantic Studies, as well as the general public.

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Sex in the Middle East and North Africa examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices.The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies.

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Although many depictions of the city in prose, poetry and visual art can be found dating from earlier periods in human history, Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City emphasizes a particular phase in urban development. This is the quintessentially modern city that comes into being in the nineteenth century. In social terms, this nineteenth-century city is the product of a specialist class of planners engaged in what urban theorist Henri Lefebvre has called the bourgeois science of modern urbanism. One thinks first of the large scale and the wide boulevards of Baron Georges von Haussmann's Paris or the geometrical planning vision of Ildefons CerdÀ's Barcelona. The modern science of urban design famously inaugurates a new way of thinking the city; urban modernity is now defined by the triumph of exchange value over use value, and the lived city is eclipsed by the planned city as it is envisioned by capitalists, builders and speculators. Thus urban plans, architecture, literary prose and poetry, documentary cinema and fiction film, and comics art serve as windows into our modern obsession with urban aesthetics. Our collective cultural obsession with the urban environment has endured, from the nineteenth century through today. This book investigates the social relationships implied in our urban modernity by concentrating on four cities that are in broad strokes representative of the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the Iberian peninsula. Each chapter introduces but moves well beyond an identifiable urban area in a given city, noting the cultural obsession implicit in its reconstruction as well as the role of obsession in its artistic representation of the urban environment. These areas are Barcelona's Eixample district, Madrid's Linear City, Lisbon's central Baixa area, and Bilbao's Seven Streets, or Zazpikaleak. The theme of obsession-which as explored is synonymous with the concept of partial madness-provides a point of departure for understanding the interconnection of both urbanistic and artistic discourses.

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A manufactured and pre-programmed serial killer; a suicidal robot; a romantic necrophiliac; and an archaeologist who feeds the perverse desires of aficionados of the apocalypse-Francisco García González's stories map out literary and metafictional approaches to the sci-fi universe in ways that echo the humor and violence of Miguel de Cervantes, María de Zayas, Jorge Luis Borges, Rosa Montero, and Roberto BolaÑo. With a scholarly introduction by translator Bradley J. Nelson that introduces García González's oeuvre to contemporary readers and scholars of Spanish-language literature, this science fiction collection introduces Anglophones to this unique author. García González turns a black mirror on contemporary society and its relation both to history and to the future. His insightfulness and relevance draw comparisons with Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, and China Miéville, though his verbal economy and elegance are more akin to Cormac McCarthy, producing both disturbingly uncanny violence and unexpected comedy.

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Narrative Sociology defines classics, identifies exemplars of narrative analysis, and delineates a field in the making.

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We are living a moment in which famous chefs, Michelin stars, culinary techniques, and gastronomical accolades attract moneyed tourists to Spain from all over the world. This has prompted the Spanish government to declare its cuisine as part of Spanish patrimony.Yet even with this widespread global attention, we know little about how Spanish cooking became a litmus test for demonstrating Spain’s modernity and, in relation, the roles ascribed to the modern Spanish women responsible for daily cooking. Efforts to articulate a new, modern Spain infiltrated writing in multiple genres and media. Women’s Work places these efforts in their historical context to yield a better understanding of the roles of food within an inherently uneven modernization process. Further, the book reveals the paradoxical messages women have navigated, even in texts about a daily practice that shaped their domestic and work lives. This argument is significant because of the degree to which domestic activities, including cooking, occupied women’s daily lives, even while issues like their fitness as citizens and participation in the public sphere were hotly debated. At the same time, progressive intellectuals from diverse backgrounds began to invoke Spanish cooking and eating as one measure of Spanish modernity.Women’s Work shows how culinary writing engaged these debates and reached women at the site of much of their daily labor—the kitchen—and, in this way, shaped their thinking about their roles in modernizing Spain.

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Now back in print! The rise and fall of a Southern financial empire.

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Analyses the ethical debates and political contexts relating to Latin American rights of nature' legislation and the political ontology of nonhuman political speech within a framework of intercultural and multispecies diplomacy.

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The Legal Aid Society’s mission is to advance, defend, and enforce the legal rights of low-income and otherwise vulnerable people in order to secure for them the basic necessities of life. Everyday Justice is an on-the-ground history of the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands, the story of how national debates about access to justice have impacted the work of its lawyers, and a warning about why the federally imposed limits on that work must be lifted in order to fulfill the pledge of justice for all. Those surviving on low incomes often see the legal system as an oppressive force stacked against them. Everyday Justice is about lawyers trying to make the law work for these people. This book traces the development and evolution of legal aid in Middle Tennessee from the late 1960s to the turn of the millennium, as told by Ashley Wiltshire, who worked for the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands in all its incarnations for four decades, beginning a year after its inception. Set in the context of the legal aid movement in the United States—beginning as a part of the social awakening in the post–Civil War era, continuing with volunteer efforts in the first part of the twentieth century, and coming to fruition beginning with the OEO Office of Legal Services grants of the 1960s as part of the War on Poverty—Everyday Justice is a story of Nashville, which levied an extended period of opposition because of prevailing cultural and religious views on race and poverty.

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Latin America and the Transports of Opera studies a series of episodes in the historical and textual convergence of a hallowed art form and a part of the world often regarded as peripheral. Perhaps unexpectedly, the archives of opera generate new arguments about several issues at the heart of the established discussion about Latin America: the allure of European cultural models; the ambivalence of exoticism; the claims of nationalism and cosmopolitanism; and, ultimately, the place of the region in the global circulation of the arts. Opera’s transports concern literal and imagined journeys as well as the emotions that its stories and sounds trigger as they travel back and forth between Europe—the United States, too—and Latin America. Focusing mostly on librettos and other literary forms, the book analyzes CalderÓn de la Barca’s baroque play on the myth of Venus and Adonis, set to music by a Spanish composer at Lima’s viceregal court; Alejo Carpentier’s neobaroque novella on Vivaldi’s opera about Moctezuma; the entanglements of opera with class, gender and ethnicity throughout Cuban history; music dramas about enslaved persons by Carlos Gomes and Hans Werner Henze, staged in Rio de Janeiro and Copenhagen; the uses of Latin American poetry and magical realism in works by John Adams and Daniel CatÁn; and a novel by Manuel Mujica Lainez set in Buenos Aires’s Teatro ColÓn, plus a chamber opera about Victoria Ocampo with a libretto by Beatriz Sarlo. Close readings of these texts underscore the import and meanings of opera in Latin American cultural history.

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Latin America and the Transports of Opera studies a series of episodes in the historical and textual convergence of a hallowed art form and a part of the world often regarded as peripheral. Perhaps unexpectedly, the archives of opera generate new arguments about several issues at the heart of the established discussion about Latin America: the allure of European cultural models; the ambivalence of exoticism; the claims of nationalism and cosmopolitanism; and, ultimately, the place of the region in the global circulation of the arts. Opera’s transports concern literal and imagined journeys as well as the emotions that its stories and sounds trigger as they travel back and forth between Europe—the United States, too—and Latin America. Focusing mostly on librettos and other literary forms, the book analyzes CalderÓn de la Barca’s baroque play on the myth of Venus and Adonis, set to music by a Spanish composer at Lima’s viceregal court; Alejo Carpentier’s neobaroque novella on Vivaldi’s opera about Moctezuma; the entanglements of opera with class, gender and ethnicity throughout Cuban history; music dramas about enslaved persons by Carlos Gomes and Hans Werner Henze, staged in Rio de Janeiro and Copenhagen; the uses of Latin American poetry and magical realism in works by John Adams and Daniel CatÁn; and a novel by Manuel Mujica Lainez set in Buenos Aires’s Teatro ColÓn, plus a chamber opera about Victoria Ocampo with a libretto by Beatriz Sarlo. Close readings of these texts underscore the import and meanings of opera in Latin American cultural history.

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The End of the Future broadens the theoretical framework for understanding memories' role in reconciliation following a violent conflict. This book explores the complicated and confusing linkages between memory and trauma for individuals caught up in civil war and post-conflict reconciliation in the Peruvian Amazon's Huallaga Valley—an epicenter for leftist rebels and a booming shadow economy based on the extraction and circulation of cocaine. The End of the Future tells the story of the TÚpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement's (Movimiento Revolucionario TÚpac Amaru, MRTA) violent attempts to overthrow the state in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the perspective of the poorest residents of the lower Huallaga's Caynarachi Basin. To give context to the causes and consequences of the MRTA's presence in the lower and central Huallaga, a poorly documented part of the Peruvian Amazon, the book relies on the written works and testimony of SÍstero GarcÍa Torres, an MRTA rebel commander, the government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, MRTA propaganda, media accounts, and critical historical texts. Besides exposing Huallaga Valley human rights abuses, the book's contribution to political anthropology is consequential for its insistence that reconciliation is by no means equivalent to local, indigenous notions of "justice" or customary forms of dispute resolution. Without deliberately addressing the diverse socio-cultural contours defining overlapping epistemologies of justice, freedom, and communal wellbeing, enduring reconciliation will likely remain elusive.

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Mexican independence was, in a sense, an economic event. It was so on two counts. First, it was in the realm of the economic that elites managed to create a common ground with non-elites in their demands against foreign domination. Second, it was an economic event in that, throughout the 19th century, independence was imagined by the lettered men of Mexico as a feat that nationalized, or that could have nationalized, a rich and productive economic apparatus.Mexico, Interrupted investigates the fate of these economic hopes during the difficult decades between the year of the country’s definite separation from Spain and the year of the defeat of the French occupation and the restoration of the Republic, which many took to be the second and final independence of the territory. Drawing on the writings of politicians, journalists, intellectuals, industrialists, and novelists, this book studies the Mexican intelligentsia’s obsessive engagement with the labor and idleness of the citizenry in their attempts to create a wealthy, independent nation. By focusing on work and its opposites in the period between, Mexico, Interrupted reconstructs the period’s “economic imaginaries of independence”: the repertoire of political and cultural discourses that structured the understandings, beliefs, and fantasies about the relationships between “the economy” and the life of an independent polity. All told, by bringing together intellectual history, critical theory, and cultural studies, this project offers a new account of the Mexican nineteenth century and complicates existing histories of the spread of the “spirit of capitalism” through the Americas.

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The birth of the world’s great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the “urban age” inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world’s urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities.Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state.A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.

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Violence has only increased in Mexico since 2000: 23,000 murders were recorded in 2016, and 29,168 in 2017. The abundance of laws and constitutional amendments that have cropped up in response are mirrored in Mexico's fragmented cultural production of the same period. Contemporary Mexican literature grapples with this splintered reality through non-linear stories from multiple perspectives, often told through shifts in time. The novels, such as Jorge Volpi's Una novela criminal [A Novel Crime] (2018) and JuliÁn Herbert's La casa del dolor ajeno [The House of the Pain of Others] (2015) take multiple perspectives and follow non-linear plotlines; other examples, such as the very short stories in ¡Basta! 100 mujeres contra la violencia de gÉnero [Enough! 100 Women against Gender-Based Violence] (2013), also present multiple perspectives. Few scholars compare cultural production and legal texts in situations like Mexico, where extreme violence coexists with a high number of human rights laws. Unlawful Violence measures fictional accounts of human rights against new laws that include constitutional amendments to reform legal proceedings, laws that protect children, laws that condemn violence against women, and laws that protect migrants and indigenous peoples. It also explores debates about these laws in the Mexican house of representatives and senate, as well as interactions between the law and the Mexican public.

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Jacques-Timothe Boucher Sieur de Montbrun (anglicized to Demonbreun soon thereafter), born 1747 in Quebec, set the bar for country music's stories of cheating, gambling, drinking, and being the boss more than two centuries before anybody thought of supporting the storyline with a 1-4-5-4 chord progression and a fiddle. Lightly called a "fur trader," he came to the city to make his fortune and fame, much like songwriters today. Looking back, it would be easy to call Demonbreun, the son of French Canadian near-royalty and brother to two nuns, a spoiled child who did what he wanted, a classic-case misogynist and polygamist, a conceited adventurer. He was a man who conned the Spanish governor out of a war, carried on graceful correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, owned several slaves, may have served as a spy, and was a decorated veteran. He fought in the Revolutionary War, extraordinarily so it seems, given the number of land grants he received across Kentucky and Tennessee. He's also known around Nashville as the guy who lived in a cave. Author Elizabeth Elkins sorts through the legends and nails down the facts in order to present the true story of "Nashville's First Citizen.

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Flexible Families examines the struggles among Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica (and their families back in Nicaragua) to maintain a sense of family across borders. The book is based on more than twenty-four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Costa Rica and Nicaragua (2009-2012) and more than ten years of engagement with Nicaraguan migrant communities. Author Caitlin Fouratt finds that migration and family intersect as sites for triaging inequality, economic crisis, and a lack of state-provided social services since the 1990s.Flexible Families situates transnational families in an analysis of the history of unstable family life in Nicaragua due to decades of war and economic crisis, rather than in the migration process itself, which is often blamed for family breakdown in public discourse. Fouratt argues that the kinds of family configurations often seen as problematic consequences of migration—specifically single mothers, absent fathers, and grandmother caregivers—represent flexible family configurations that have enabled Nicaraguan families to survive the chronic crises of the past decades. By examining the work that goes into forging and sustaining transnational kinship, the book argues for a rethinking of national belonging and discourses of solidarity. In parallel, the book critically examines conditions in Costa Rica, especially the ways in which the instabilities and inequalities that have haunted the rest of the region have begun to take shape there, resulting in perceptions of increased crime rates and a declining quality of life. By linking this crisis of Costa Rican exceptionalism to recent immigration reform, the book also builds on scholarship about the production and experiences of immigrant exclusion. Flexible Families offers insight into the impacts of increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the everyday lives of transnational families within the developing world.

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Catalan-language publishers were under constant threat during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975). Both the Catalan language and the introduction of foreign ideas were banned by the regime, preoccupied as it was with creating a "one, great and free Spain." Books against Tyranny examines the period through its censorship laws and censors' accounts by means of intertextuality, an approach that aims to shed light on the evolution of Francoism's ideological thought. The documents examined here includes firsthand witness accounts, correspondence, memoirs, censorship files, newspapers, original interviews, and unpublished material housed in various Spanish archives. As such, the book opens up the field and serves as an informative tool for scholars of Franco's Spain, Catalan social movements, or censorship more generally.

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Sex in the Middle East and North Africa examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices.The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies.

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