Pueblos Enfermos

This book investigates three examples of the turn-of-the-century essay in Spain and Latin America: Angel Ganivet's Idearium espanol (1897), Jose Enrique Rodo's Ariel (1900), and Alcides Arguedas's Pueblo enfermo (1909). Michael Aronna traces the reactions of these historically and rhetorically related colonial and postcolonial thinkers to the new economic, cultural, social, and political challenges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He shows how concepts of sexual degeneration, racial inferiority, immaturity, and gender prominent in contemporary philosophy and science were central to these writers' shared understanding of the nation as an organism vulnerable to "social pathogens."

This book investigates three examples of the turn-of-the-century essay in Spain and Latin America: Angel Ganivet's Idearium espanol (1897), Jose Enrique Rodo's Ariel (1900), and Alcides Arguedas's Pueblo enfermo (1909). Michael Aronna traces the reactions of these historically and rhetorically related colonial and postcolonial thinkers to the new economic, cultural, social, and political challenges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He shows how concepts of sexual degeneration, racial inferiority, immaturity, and gender prominent in contemporary philosophy and science were central to these writers' shared understanding of the nation as an organism vulnerable to "social pathogens."

"An examination of sociocultural nation-building processes in Mexico between 1810 and 1910"

This book is an interdisciplinary study that addresses the critical role that gender plays in the formation of national identities in Latin America that are negotiated and challenged within extreme struggles for power. This study, which traverses the national landscapes of Argentina, Cuba, Venezuela, and Guatemala and covers the time span between 1837 and 1946, is linked by the author's common strategy of employing gender codes in order to challenge overtly masculinist hegemonic political orders. One of the goals of this investigation is to explore the fissures that surface as a result of the ongoing fluctuations of gender codes, due in part to the diverse shifting of institutions of power during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By disturbing deleterious conceptualizations associated with femininity and masculinity, one can embark upon new and open-ended readings of these historical national texts, and appreciate the groundbreaking strides of early revolutionary Latin American writers. -- Publisher description.

Written by a team of international contributors this work contains more than 200 entries on all aspects of literature. It is invaluable for those studying Latin American and/or Caribbean literature and the Spanish/Portuguese languages.

How did Latin Americans represent their own countries as modern? Through a comparative analysis of Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, the book investigates four themes that were central to definitions of Latin American modernity at the turn of the twentieth century: race, the autochthonous, education, and aesthetics.

Volume 5 of 6 of the complete premium print version of journal forum for inter-american research (fiar), which is the official electronic journal of the International Association of Inter-American Studies (IAS). fiar was established by the American Studies Program at Bielefeld University in 2008. We foster a dialogic and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Americas. fiar is a peer-reviewed online journal. Articles in this journal undergo a double-blind review process and are published in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

Building on the pioneering work of Edward Said in fresh and useful ways, contributors to this volume consider both historical contacts and literary influences in the formation of Latin American constructs of the “Orient” and the “Self” from colonial times to the present. In the process, they unveil wide-ranging manifestations of Orientalism. Contributors scrutinize the “other” great encounter, not with Europeans but with Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese cultures, as they marked Latin American societies from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean to Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. The perspectives, experiences, and theories presented in these examples offer a comprehensive framework for understanding wide-ranging manifestations of Orientalism in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world. Orientalism and Identity in Latin America expands current theoretical frameworks, juxtaposing historical, biographical, and literary depictions of Middle Eastern and Asian migrations, both of people and cultural elements, as they have been received, perceived, refashioned, and integrated into Latin American discourses of identity and difference. Underlying this intercultural dialogue is the hypothesis that the discourse of Orientalism and the process of Orientalization apply equally to Near Eastern and Far Eastern subjects as well as to immigrants, regardless of provenance—and indeed to any individual or group who might be construed as “Other” by a particular dominant culture.