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Area and Ethnic Studies > Latin American and Caribbean Studies


Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse
Popular Music and the Staging of Brazil
Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse is a close-to-the-ground account of musicians and dancers from Arcoverde, Pernambuco—a small city in the northeastern Brazilian backlands. The book’s focus on samba de coco families, marked as bearers of tradition, and the band Cordel do Fogo Encantado, marketed as pop iconoclasts, offers a revealing portrait of performers engaged in new forms of cultural preservation during a post-dictatorship period of democratization and neoliberal reform. Daniel B. Sharp explores how festivals, museums, television, and tourism steep musicians’ performances in national-cultural nostalgia, which both provides musicians and dancers with opportunities for cultural entrepreneurship and hinders their efforts to be recognized as part of the Brazilian here-and-now. The book charts how Afro-Brazilian samba de coco became an unlikely emblem in an interior where European and indigenous mixture predominates. It also chronicles how Cordel do Fogo Encantado—drawing upon the sounds of samba de coco, ecstatic Afro-Brazilian religious music, and heavy metal—sought to make folklore dangerous by embodying an apocalyptic register often associated with northeastern Brazil.


Beyond Alterity
Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico
Although previous studies have usually focused on the most visible aspects of differences—cosmovision, language, customs, resistance—the contributors to this volume show that emphasizing difference prevents researchers from seeing all the social phenomena where alterity is not obvious. Those phenomena are equally or even more constitutive of social life and include property relations (especially individual or private ones), participation in national projects, and the use of national languages.
The category of “indigenous” has commonly been used as if it were an objective term referring to an already given social subject. Beyond Alterity shows how this usage overlooks the fact that the social markers of differentiation (language, race or ethnic group, phenotype) are historical and therefore unstable. In opposition to any reification of geographical, cultural, or social boundaries, this volume shows that people who (self-)identify as indigenous share a multitude of practices with the rest of society and that the association between indigenous identification and alterity is the product of a specific political history.
Beyond Alterity is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding indigenous identity, race, and Mexican history and politics.
Contributors
Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo
Laura Cházaro
Michael T. Ducey
Paul K. Eiss
José Luis Escalona-Victoria
Vivette García Deister
Peter Guardino
Emilio Kourí
Paula López Caballero
Elsie Rockwell
Diana Lynn Schwartz
Gabriela Torres-Mazuera


Beyond Displacement
Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War
During the civil war that wracked El Salvador from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, the Salvadoran military tried to stamp out dissidence and insurgency through an aggressive campaign of crop-burning, kidnapping, rape, killing, torture, and gruesome bodily mutilations. Even as human rights violations drew world attention, repression and war displaced more than a quarter of El Salvador’s population, both inside the country and beyond its borders. Beyond Displacement examines how the peasant campesinos of war-torn northern El Salvador responded to violence by taking to the hills. Molly Todd demonstrates that their flight was not hasty and chaotic, but was a deliberate strategy that grew out of a longer history of collective organization, mobilization, and self-defense.


Beyond Geopolitics
New Histories of Latin America at the League of Nations
Even though it failed to prevent World War II, the League of Nations left a lasting legacy. This precedent-setting international organization created important institutions and initiatives in labor, economics, culture, science, and more, from the International Labor Organization to initiatives targeting education, taxation, nutrition, and other issues. Otherwise marginalized in global diplomacy, Latin Americans were involved, and often acted as leaders, in many League-related activities and made a number of positive contributions to the League. In this book foremost scholars from Europe and the Americas consider Latin American leadership and experiences in the League of Nations. Using research in frequently overlooked collections, Beyond Geopolitics makes groundbreaking contributions to the study of Latin American international relations, the history of the League of Nations, and the broader story of cooperation across borders.


Beyond Imported Magic
Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America


Beyond the City
Resource Extraction Urbanism in South America
Presenting five case studies from South America, this foundational book examines the roles played by architecture and urban design in large territorial transformation projects, which remake landscapes but leave a questionable legacy when resource-extraction projects move on.


Beyond the Eagle's Shadow
New Histories of Latin America's Cold War
The dominant tradition in writing about U.S.–Latin American relations during the Cold War views the United States as all-powerful. That perspective, represented in the metaphor “talons of the eagle,” continues to influence much scholarly work down to the present day. The goal of this collection of essays is not to write the United States out of the picture but to explore the ways Latin American governments, groups, companies, organizations, and individuals promoted their own interests and perspectives.
The book also challenges the tendency among scholars to see the Cold War as a simple clash of “left” and “right.” In various ways, several essays disassemble those categories and explore the complexities of the Cold War as it was experienced beneath the level of great-power relations.


Beyond the Lettered City
Indigenous Literacies in the Andes
In Beyond the Lettered City, the anthropologist Joanne Rappaport and the art historian Tom Cummins examine the colonial imposition of alphabetic and visual literacy on indigenous groups in the northern Andes. They consider how the Andean peoples received, maintained, and subverted the conventions of Spanish literacy, often combining them with their own traditions. Indigenous Andean communities neither used narrative pictorial representation nor had alphabetic or hieroglyphic literacy before the arrival of the Spaniards. To absorb the conventions of Spanish literacy, they had to engage with European symbolic systems. Doing so altered their worldviews and everyday lives, making alphabetic and visual literacy prime tools of colonial domination. Rappaport and Cummins advocate a broad understanding of literacy, including not only reading and writing, but also interpretations of the spoken word, paintings, wax seals, gestures, and urban design. By analyzing secular and religious notarial manuals and dictionaries, urban architecture, religious images, catechisms and sermons, and the vast corpus of administrative documents produced by the colonial authorities and indigenous scribes, they expand Ángel Rama’s concept of the lettered city to encompass many of those who previously would have been considered the least literate.


Beyond the Page
Poetry and Performance in Spanish America
Jill S. Kuhnheim, looking at poetry and performance in Spanish America over time, has organized the book to begin with the early twentieth century and arrive at the present day. She includes noteworthy poets and artists such as José Martí, Luis Palés Matos, Eusebia Cosme, Nicomedes Santa Cruz, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Nicolás Guillén, as well as very recent artists whose performance work is not as well known. Offering fresh historical material and analysis, the author illuminates the relationship between popular and elite cultural activity in Spanish America and reshapes our awareness of the cultural work poetry has done in the past and may do in the future, particularly given the wide array of technological possibilities. The author takes a broad view of American cultural production and creates a dialogue with events and criticism from the United States as well as from Spanish American traditions.
Oral and written elements in poetry are complementary, says Kuhnheim, not in opposition, and they may reach different audiences. As poetry enjoys a revival with modern media, performance is part of the new platform it spans, widening the kind of audience and expanding potential meanings.
Beyond the Page will appeal to readers with an interest in poetry and performance, and in how poetry circulates beyond the page. With an international perspective and dynamic synthesis, the book offers an innovative methodology and theoretical model for humanists beyond the immediate field, reaching out to readers interested in the intersection between poetry and identity or the juncture of popular-elite and oral-written cultures.


Beyond Wari Walls
Regional Perspectives on Middle Horizon Peru
The scholars whose work is assembled here attempt to better understand the nature of Wari by examining its impact beyond Wari walls. By studying Wari from a village in Cuzco, a water shrine in Huamachuco, or a compound on the Central Coast, these authors provide us with information that cannot be gleaned from either digs around the city of Huari or work at the major Wari installations in the periphery. This book provides no definitive answers to the Wari phenomena, but it contributes to broader debates about interregional influences and interaction during the emergence of early cities and states throughout the world.