Argentine Intimacies

Revisits a foundational moment in Argentine history to demonstrate how the crisis of modernity opened up new possibilities for imagining kinship otherwise. As Argentina rose to political and economic prominence at the turn of the twentieth century, debates about the family, as an ideological structure and set of lived relationships, took center stage in efforts to shape the modern nation. In Argentine Intimacies, Joseph M. Pierce draws on queer studies, Latin American studies, and literary and cultural studies to consider the significance of one family in particular during this period of intense social change: Carlos, Julia, Delfina, and Alejandro Bunge. One of Argentina’s foremost intellectual and elite families, the Bunges have had a profound impact on Argentina’s national culture and on Latin American understandings of education, race, gender, and sexual norms. They also left behind a vast archive of fiction, essays, scientific treatises, economic programs, and pedagogical texts, as well as diaries, memoirs, and photography. Argentine Intimacies explores the breadth of their writing to reflect on the intersections of intimacy, desire, and nationalism and to expand our conception of queer kinship. Approaching kinship as an interface of relational dispositions, Pierce reveals the queerness at the heart of the modern family. Queerness emerges not as an alternative to traditional values so much as a defining feature of the state project of modernization. “Argentine Intimacies provides a valuable intervention in the fields of cultural studies, Latin American studies, LGBT/queer studies, literary studies, and photography studies. Pierce conducted extensive archival research on the historically significant Bunge family in Argentina and offers lucid, theoretically informed, and original readings of their lives and cultural productions.” — Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, University of Michigan

This book develops our understanding of the global literary field in the long nineteenth century by discussing nine different places outside the established metropoles. It shows how different economic, geographical and political factors combined to give each place its own distinctive literary culture and symbolic capital. Taking a geocritical approach, the book shows how its different case studies can be seen as ‘literary capitals’ in terms of their role within the wider nation, region or empire. The volume is divided into three parts. Part One discusses Kolkata, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. Part Two considers ‘semi-peripheral’ European cities: Pest-Buda (Budapest), Helsinki and Dublin. Part Three focuses on cities within Italy: Trieste, Florence and Rome. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts and different genres, the book reads the nineteenth-century literary field as a constellation where different connections can be plotted across various points on the map at different times.

As a nation, the Philippines has a colonial history with both Spain and the United States. Its links to the Americas are longstanding and complex. Intercolonial Intimacies interrogates the legacy of the Spanish Empire and the cultural hegemony of the United States by analyzing the work of twentieth-century Filipino and Latin/o American writers and diplomats who often read one other and imagined themselves as kin. The relationships between the Philippines and the former colonies of the Spanish Empire in the Americas were strengthened throughout the twentieth century by the consolidation of a discourse of shared, even familiar, identity. This distinct inherited intercolonial bond was already disengaged from their former colonizer and further used to defy new forms of colonialism. By examining the parallels and points of contact between these Filipino and Latin American writers, Paula C. Park elaborates on the “intercolonial intimacies” that shape a transpacific understanding of coloniality and latinidad.

Las Raras proposes that the Modernistas’ advocacy for a writing style they considered feminine helps us to understand why so few (and perhaps no) women were accepted as active participants in Modernismo. Author Sarah Moody studies how particular writers contributed to the idea of a feminine aesthetic and tracks the intellectual networks of Modernismo through periodicals and personal papers, such as albums and correspondence. Buenos Aires, Paris, and Montevideo figure prominently in this transatlantic study, which reexamines some of the most important period writers in Spanish, including Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, and Enrique Gómez Carrillo. This book also considers the critiques launched by women writers, such as Aurora Cáceres, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, who experienced Modernista exclusion firsthand, deconstructed the Modernista discourse of a modern, “feminine” style, and built literary success in alternative terms. These writers reoriented the discussion about women in modernity to address women’s education, professionalization, and advocacy for social and civic improvements. In this study, Modernismo emerges as both a literary style and an intellectual network, in which style and sociability are mutually determining and combine to form a system of prestige and validation that excluded women writers.

Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies looks for pathways that better connect two often siloed disciplines. This edited collection brings together different disciplinary experiences and perspectives to this objective, weaving together researchers, artists, instructors, and authors who have found ways of bridging Indigenous and Hispanic studies through trans-Indigenous reading methods, intercultural dialogues, and reflections on translation and epistemology. Each chapter brings rich context that bears on some aspect of the Indigenous Americas and its crossroads with Hispanic studies, from Canada to Chile. Such a hemispheric and interdisciplinary approach offers innovative and significant means of challenging the coloniality of Hispanic studies.

Queer Precarity in Higher Education looks at queer scholars pushing against institutional structures, and the queer knowledge that gets pushed out by universities. It provides insight into the work of, in and beyond academia as it is un-done in the contemporary (post)Covid moment, not least by queer academic-activists. This radical un-doing represents cycles of queer precarity, pragmatism and participation both situating and questioning the 'queer arrival' of institutionalized programmes and presences (e.g. queer and gender studies degrees, prominent and public feminist academics). In this book, the contributors push back against contemporary educational precarity, mobilizing queer insight and insistence; and push back against confinement of the University, socially and spatially. The collection brings together academic-activist perspectives to extend understandings of experiences of marginalization and inequality in higher education. It also documents the diversity of tactics with which queers negotiate and resist the various, shifting and interconnected forms of precarity and privilege found on the edges of academia. Contributors consider these issues from inside/outside academia and across career course, challenging the 'queer arrival' as emanating outward from the university to the community, from the academic to the activist, or from a state of privilege to a place of precarity.

Madness in the Family traces the history of how family became crucial in the care of those considered mad, as well as in creating gendered explanations of madness, in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Japan. As women and families navigated a shifting therapeutic landscape of madness, they produced their own understandings and approaches to madness that, like elsewhere in the world, would take precedence over the claims of psychiatry, the law, and the state in everyday life.

Until the 1960s, the Ayoreo people of Paraguay's Chaco region had remained uncontacted by the world. But as development encroached on their territory, the Ayoreo began to experience rapid cultural change. Paola Canova looks at one aspect of this change in Frontier Intimacies: the sexual practices of Ayoreo women, specifically the curajodie, or single women who exchange sex for money or material goods with non-Ayoreo men, often Mennonite settlers. Weaving personal anecdotes into her extensive research, Canova shows how the advancement of economic and missionary frontiers has reconfigured gender roles, sexual ethics, and notions of desire in the region. Ayoreo women, she shows, have reappropriated their sexual practices, approaching intimate liaisons on their own terms and seeing the involvement of money not as morally problematic but as constitutive of sexual encounters. By using their sexuality to construct an intimate frontier operating according to their own logics, Canova reveals, Ayoreo women expose the fractured workings of frontier capitalism in spaces of rapid transformation. Inviting broader examination of the ways in which contemporary frontier economies are constructed and experienced, Frontier Intimacies brings a captivating new perspective to the economic development of the Chaco region.