Más allá de la nación: medios, espacios comunicativos y nuevas comunidades imaginadas (review)

Sabine Hofmann's edited volume makes a useful contribution to current debates in Latin American cultural studies, and explores how issues such as globalization and new media are creating opportunities for the expression of new identities and communities. Hofmann's 'Presentación' opens the volume and provides an excellent - if rather tantalizingly short - introduction to the key issues shaping this book. Using Lefebvre's notion of space not as a given but as a product of semiotic and social practices, Hofmann proposes an investigation into how 'se crean y se articulan comunidades e identidades' through different media (7). Following this with a brief overview of the importance of the press in creating the nation state and a sense of community in bygone eras (7-8), Hofmann then proceeds to explore how, in the present day, mediatic circuits go beyond national boundaries.

After this introduction, the main body of the manuscript is divided into three sections: 'Espacios transnacionales, políticas lingüísticas e industrias culturales'; 'Más allá de la nación: prácticas de resistencia y nuevas comunidades'; and 'Imaginar la nación en tiempos de la globalización'. In the first of these sections there are three chapters. Firstly, Elvira Narvaja de Arnoux's chapter, entitled '"La lengua es la patria", "Nuestra lengua es mestiza" y "el español es americano"' provides an illuminating analysis of the terms used in debates about language during the III Congreso de la Lengua Española. Following on from this, Gabriele Knauer in 'Somos diferentes, sí, pero indiscutiblemente americanos' engages in a detailed and very revealing analysis of the manipulation of linguistic and other factors in US electoral campaigns. The last chapter of this section, Sabine Hofmann's, 'Construir el espacio latinoamericano: los noticieros de CNN en español' analyses features such as the use of the first person plural in CNN's programmes to create an 'identidad colectiva' and a sense of 'nuestra región, América Latina', but then concludes that this space is 'un espacio vacío de prácticas políticas por parte de los agentes correspondientes' (83).

The second section, which is the largest, contains five chapters that cover topics ranging from the construction of identities by Andean women to Fernando Solanas's film El viaje, and Diego Bonilla's multimedia poetry. Of these five chapters, one of the most interesting is Martha Zapata Galindo's 'Internet, actores sociales y nuevas formas de organización y resistencia en las Americas'. Here, Galindo starts from the premise that globalization is not merely a 'proceso histórico-económico vinculado con la expansión del capitalismo', but that it also extends to cultural practices and social relations (87). Leading on from this, Galindo argues that the fragmented global space has led to new forms of relations between localities and the global system, and that the concept of transnationalism provides for new forms of subjectivity, a re-evaluation of 'la relación entre lo privado y lo público', and also for 'procesos de dester-ritorialización y reterritorialización' (87-88).

Again within the second section, Freya Schiwy's chapter, 'Contra la mirada colonial: algunos apuntes sobre género y sexualidad, video digital y comunicación indígena' compares two Bolivian shorts: Qati qati and Llanthupi Munakuy. By means of a detailed analysis of the role of the camera in the construction of gender, Schiwy contrasts the two films, revealing that Qati qati 'representa el cuerpo femenino como cercano a las tradiciones y como redentor de la subjetividad masculina' (117), whereas Llanthupi 'insiste en que la descolonización no puede ser un rescate de las tradiciones feminizadas por un héroe masculino, sino que más bien requiere una interrogación profunda de los imaginarios y prácticas de género' (120).

The final section contains three further chapters, which cover the construction of a national imaginary in Mexican cinema and television...