Geopolitics Culture And The Scientific Imaginary In Latin America

Highlighting the relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history Challenging the common view that Latin America has lagged behind Europe and North America in the global history of science, this volume reveals that the region has long been a center for scientific innovation and imagination. It highlights the important relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history. Scholars from a variety of fields including literature, sociology, and geography bring to light many of the cultural exchanges that have produced and spread scientific knowledge from the early colonial period to the present day. Among many topics, these essays describe ideas on health and anatomy in a medical text from sixteenth-century Mexico, how fossil discoveries in Patagonia inspired new interpretations of the South American landscape, and how Argentinian physicist Rolando García influenced climate change research and the field of epistemology. Through its interdisciplinary approach, Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America shows that such scientific advancements fueled a series of visionary utopian projects throughout the region, as countries grappling with the legacy of colonialism sought to modernize and to build national and regional identities.

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.

Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are highly innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Inventive artwork and sophisticated scripts have combined to satisfy the demand of a growing readership, both at home and abroad. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, which is the first book-length study of the topic, argues that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America as a uniquely powerful force to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity. The authors place particular emphasis on the ways in which humans are bound to their non-human environment, and these ideas are productively drawn out in relation to posthuman thought and experience. The book draws together a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, many of which experiment with questions of transmediality, the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and a new form of ethics for a posthuman world. Praise for Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America '...well-referenced and… well considered - the analyses it brings are overall well-executed and insightful...' Image and Narrative, Jan 2018, vol 18, no 4

This edited volume analyzes how migration, the conformation of urban areas, and globalization impact Latin American geopolitics. Globalization has decisively influenced Latin American nationhood and it has also helped create a global region with global cities that are the result of the urbanization process. Also, globalization and migration are changing Latin America's own vision as a collective community. This book tackles how migration triggers concerns about security, which lead to policies based on the protection of borders as a matter of national security. The contributors argue that economic regionalization-globalization promotes changes in the social and economic geography which refer to social phenomena, the dynamic of social classes and their spatial implications, all of which may impact economic growth on the region. The project will appeal to a wider audience including political scientists, scholars, researchers, students and non-academics interested in Latin American geopolitics.

An assembly of a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists. Projects that bring the sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few have focused on regions beyond the Global North. This book assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists' kitchens. Page shows how these artworks also "decolonize" science by resisting the exploitation of the natural world that has attended the creation of knowledge in western contexts. Instead, the artists featured in this volume emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. Establishing critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, this book interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas.

Examines the canonical Latin American avant-garde texts of the 1920s and 1930s, with particular focus on Roberto Arlt and Mrio de Andrade. The movement developed on its own terms, in polemic dialogue with European movements, critiquing modernity itself, and developed a geopolitical awareness that bridged postcolonial and postmodern culture and continues its influence today.

In Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art, Joanna Page illuminates the ways in which contemporary artists in Latin America are reinventing historical methods of collecting, organizing, and displaying nature in order to develop new aesthetic and political perspectives on the past and the present. Page brings together an entirely new corpus of artistic projects from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru that engage critically and creatively with forms as diverse as the medieval bestiary, baroque cabinets of curiosities, atlases created by European travellers to the New World, the floras and herbaria composed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists, and the dioramas designed for natural history museums. She explores how artists develop decolonial and post-anthropocentric perspectives on the collections and expeditions that were central to the evolution of European natural history. Their works forge a critique of the rationalizing approach to nature taken by modern Western science, reconnecting it with forms of popular, indigenous and spiritual knowledge and experience that it has systematically excluded since the Enlightenment. Drawing on photography, video, illustration, sculpture, and installation, this vividly illustrated and lucidly written book (also available in premium quality in hardback edition) explores how these artworks might also deconstruct the apocalyptic visions of environmental change that often dominate Western thought, developing a renewed understanding of alternative ways in which humans might co-inhabit the natural world.

This book approaches the diversity of south and central America from a critical human geography perspective. It seeks to overcome stereotypes by stressing the need for an inclusionary political geography which cuts across traditional boundaries.