In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony’s residents followed a man known as Antonio Conselheiro (“the Counselor”), who promoted a communal existence free of taxes and oppression. To the fledgling republic of Brazil, the settlement represented a threat to its system of government. Estimates of the death toll range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand. Sentencing Canudos presents an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this monumental event in Brazilian history. Adriana Michele Campos Johnson offers a close examination of nation building and the silencing of other voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, which has become the defining—and nearly exclusive—account of the conflict, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been sentenced to history by this work. Johnson investigates other accounts of Canudos such as local oral histories, letters, newspaper articles, and the writings of Cunha’s contemporaries in order to strip away political agendas.

This multi-disciplinary collection of essays draws on current anxieties about "legitimate" sexual identities and practices across the Caribbean to explore both the impact of globalization and the legacy of the region's history of sexual exploitation during colonialism and slavery.

Small Axe focuses on the renewal of practices of intellectual criticism. It recognizes a tradition of social, political, and cultural criticism in and about regional/disasporic Caribbean and honors that tradition but also argues with it because it is through such argument that a tradition renews itself.

David Foster brings an intense curiosity and lifelong familiarity to this unique examination of the cultural tapestry of São Paulo, the largest city in South America and the second largest in Latin America.

Examining everything from the poetics of Mário de Andrade to the Eisner Award–winning graphic novels of Fabio Moon and Gabriel Bá, Foster paints a portrait as colorful and multifaceted as the city it reveals. He offers representative examples of poetry, fiction, graphic art, photography, film, and social commentary to introduce readers to some of the most important cultural dimensions of the city as well as some of its most outstanding writers and artists.

Foster selects his featured artists and works with care and precision in order to reveal insights into the development of the city throughout the twentieth century. This is a tour-de-force overview of the cultural output of one of the world’s great urban centers, one that future researchers on Brazilian culture will ignore at their peril.

The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture tracks the three spectacular forces of New World literary culture—cities, festivals, and wonder—from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, from the Old World to the New, and from Mexico to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. It treats a multitude of imperialist and anti-imperialist texts in depth, including poetry, drama, protofiction, historiography, and journalism. While several of the landmark authors studied, including Hernán Cortés and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, are familiar, others have received remarkably little critical attention. Similarly, in spotlighting creole writers, Merrim reveals an intertextual tradition in Mexico that spans two centuries. Because the spectacular city reaches its peak in the seventeenth century, Merrim’s book also theorizes and details the spirited work of the New World Baroque. The result is the rich examination of a trajectory that leads from the Renaissance ordered city to the energetic revolts of the spectacular city and the New World Baroque.

Fornazzari analyzes the reconfiguration of the aesthetic and the economic spheres in the context of the Chilean neoliberal transition (1973 to the present) and argues that one of the dominant legacies of that transition is the economization of all spheres of life. This logic is explored through a series of emergent figures in contemporary Chilean cultural and economic production. Fornazzari examines the relation between the aesthetic and the economic in the context of the Chilean transition, and the texts under analysis comprise a varied selection from different fields including literature, film, economic texts, the visual arts, cultural critique, and political theory. One of the author’s ambitions is to move beyond a culturalistic approach, so he explores the logic of neoliberalism proper by engaging with the economic theory produced by some of the major Chicago School thinkers and their reception by the Chilean economic discourse. Through an analysis of these figures Fornazzari develops a critical materialist approach to culture and the economy in a neoliberal context.

Focusing specifically and exclusively on the relation of trauma to race, this book distinguishes itself from previous studies of the literatures of trauma. Jennifer Griffiths examines the influence of racism on the creation and reception of trauma survivors' narrative testimony in selected works by African American writers and playwrights.

In Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar, Ronald Briggs shines a much-needed light on the writings and life of Simón Rodríguez, early tutor to the hero of Latin American independence Simón Bolívar and an accomplished essayist in his own right. Bolívar and Rodríguez's lives intersected often after those early years. When Bolívar swore his life to Spanish American independence on a hill outside Rome in 1805, Rodríguez was there to witness the historic moment. And when Bolívar needed to shape the new government of Bolivia, he enlisted Rodríguez to serve roles in developing both its educational system and its infrastructure. The book, released during the bicentennial of the early wars for Latin American independence, boldly places Rodríguez in the pantheon of important writers who influenced philosophical thought during the upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Noah Webster, and Tom Paine. Beyond merely providing the first in-depth analysis of Rodríguez's writings and life work, Briggs also reveals an innovator of style as Rodríguez shaped the utility and vitality of the essay as an emerging form of argument. Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar is an essential study of a unique and playful writer who is finally revealed as a foundational figure in Spanish American independence and an influential thinker in the larger field of hemispheric studies.

Spanish American novels of the Boom period (1962–1967) attracted a world readership to Latin American literature, but Latin American writers had already been engaging in the modernist experiments of their North American and European counterparts since the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the desire to be "modern" is a constant preoccupation in twentieth-century Spanish American literature and thus a very useful lens through which to view the century’s novels. In this pathfinding study, Raymond L. Williams offers the first complete analytical and critical overview of the Spanish American novel throughout the entire twentieth century. Using the desire to be modern as his organizing principle, he divides the century’s novels into five periods and discusses the differing forms that "the modern" took in each era. For each period, Williams begins with a broad overview of many novels, literary contexts, and some cultural debates, followed by new readings of both canonical and significant non-canonical novels. A special feature of this book is its emphasis on women writers and other previously ignored and/or marginalized authors, including experimental and gay writers. Williams also clarifies the legacy of the Boom, the Postboom, and the Postmodern as he introduces new writers and new novelistic trends of the 1990s.

Blending biography, literary analysis, and cultural history, Uncivil Wars reveals a new understanding of the works of Elena Garro and Octavio Paz, placing these iconic writers in the context of the revolutions—military, social, and feminist—that shaped their lives.