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This book explores how young Cuban filmmakers have expanded the range of sexual subjectivities on screen. It analyzes cine joven (films made by young directors) from the late 1980s to the early 2020s, film reviews, articles, and materials from the Cinematheque of Cuba's archive to illustrate the confluence of sexuality, cinema, and discourses of youth. While sexual and cinematic cultures have their own unique relation to the public sphere, state institutions, and transnational flows, this book e...

This is the first book to shed light on the growing presence, influence and expansion of China in the daily life of Argentina. While most previous academic studies focus on the geopolitical and macroeconomics dimensions of the relations between Argentina and China, this book shows at a micro-social level the multiple facets of the economic, political and social influence of China in Argentina. The book presents ethnographic studies of encounters of actors and negotiation of identities from Argen...

 In this collective work, researchers from different disciplines reflect upon the challenges and opportunities of decolonizing transpacific studies through the lens of a few paradigmatic case-studies that deal with connections between East Asia and Latin America. The present book offers a productive problematization of the idea of the transpacific as a concept and a space that is not restricted to a single definition. We defend that the transpacific can instead promote an understanding of agents...

An ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity. Reckoning with Harm is a striking ethnographic analysis of the harm resulting from oil extraction. Covering fifty years of settler colonization and industrial transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Amelia Fiske interrogates the relations of harm. She moves between forest-courtrooms and oily waste pits, farms and toxic tours, to explore both the ways...

In Cuba Was Different, Even Sandvik Underlid explores the views of Cuban authorities, official press, and Party members as they reflect back on the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European socialism. In so doing, he contributes to a better understanding as to why the Cuban system-often associated with Fidel Castro leadership-did not itself collapse. Despite the loss of its most important allies, key ideological referents, and even most of its foreign trade, Cuba did not embrace capitalism. The a...

Indigenous people constitute a large portion of Latin America's population and suffer from widespread poverty. This book provides the first rigorous assessment of changes in socio-economic conditions among the region's indigenous people, tracking progress in these indicators during the first international decade of indigenous peoples (1994-2004). Set within the context of existing literature and political changes over the course of the decade, this volume provides a rigorous statistical analysis...

A landmark in Brazilian music scholarship, A Respectable Spell introduces English-speaking readers to the rich history of samba from its nineteenth century origins to its emergence as a distinctive genre in the 1930s. Merging storytelling with theory, Carlos Sandroni profiles performers, composers, and others while analyzing the complex ideologies their music can communicate in their lyrics and rhythms, and how the meaning of songs and musical genres can vary depending on social and historical c...

In this interdisciplinary work, Stacy J. Lettman explores real and imagined violence as depicted in Caribbean and Jamaican text and music, how that violence repeats itself in both art and in the actions of the state, and what that means for Caribbean cultural identity. Jamaica is known for having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, a fact that Lettman links to remnants of the plantation era-namely the economic dispossession and structural violence that still haunt the island...

Tourism generates intense atmospheric relations between people and places. Exploring the complex nature of these relations, Bloom Spaces considers the experiences of women who travel to Costa Rica in search of health and wellness, and find that it leads to an unexpected but seemingly natural outcome: pregnancy. The book looks beyond pregnancy as the result of an isolated act between two people, and instead probes the ways that the reproductive experience resonates with powerful tourist imaginari...

Amerindian societies have an iconic status in classical political thought. For Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Rousseau, the native American ‘state of nature’ operates as a foil for the European polity. Challenging this tradition, The Imbalance of Power demonstrates ethnographically that the Carib speaking indigenous societies of the Guiana region of Amazonia do not fit conventional characterizations of ‘simple’ political units with ‘egalitarian’ political ideologies and ‘harmonious’ relati...

Buyers Beware offers a new perspective for critical inquiries about the practices of consumption in (and of) Caribbean popular culture. The book revisits commonly accepted representations of the Caribbean from "less respectable" segments of popular culture such as dancehall culture and 'sistah lit' that proudly jettison any aspirations toward middle-class respectability. Treating these pop cultural texts and phenomena with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of...

The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema is the most comprehensive survey of Latin American cinemas available in a single volume. While highlighting state-of-the-field research, essays also offer readers a cohesive overview of multiple facets of filmmaking in the region, from the production system and aesthetic tendencies, to the nature of circulation and reception. The volume recognizes the recent "new cinemas" in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, and, at the same time, provides a m...

This book highlights important but insufficiently documented dimensions of the experience of English-speaking Caribbean immigrants in the United States. It focuses on successes and challenges of what might be perceived as “living in two worlds.” The central theme, post-migration transnational connections, is informed by new research on the topic. The thrust of the book is on trends, practices, and policies pertaining to transnational issues, and it uses both academic and applied approaches in it...

Exploring three major hubs of muralist activity in California, where indigenist imagery is prevalent, Walls of Empowerment celebrates an aesthetic that seeks to firmly establish Chicana/o sociopolitical identity in U.S. territory. Providing readers with a history and genealogy of key muralists' productions, Guisela Latorre also showcases new material and original research on works and artists never before examined in print. An art form often associated with male creative endeavors, muralism in f...

This book was published originally in French in 1979 and in Portuguese in 1982. Written without scholarly footnotes for a general readership, it is a deceptively simple book direct in its presentation, lacking a specialized jargon, and organized in an imaginative and interesting way. But it also is a volume that reflects some of the most recent and innovative research on the question of slavery. Putting aside the somewhat arid debate over the feudal or capitalist nature of the "slave mode of pro...

Mobilizing Ethnic Identity in the Andes examines why some groups choose to organize themselves based on ethnic identity, that is, why ethnic identities are mobilized and politicized by some populations and not others. It demonstrates that the mobilization of ethnic identity is a political choice, and it is not necessarily the first or natural choice of a group of people who have grievances with their government. The book provides an argument as to when that choice to mobilize an ethnic, as oppos...