Teaching Central American Literature In A Global Context

Central America has a long history as a site of cultural and political exchange, from Mayan and Nahua trade networks to the effects of Spanish imperialism, capitalism, and globalization. In Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context, instructors will find practical, interdisciplinary, and innovative pedagogical approaches to the cultures of Central America that are adaptable to various fields of study. The essays map out classroom lessons that encourage students to relate writings and films to their own experience of global interconnectedness and to read critically the history that binds Central America to the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean. In the context of debates about immigration and a growing Central American presence in the United States, this book provides vital resources about the region's cultural production and covers trends in Central American literary studies including Mayan and other Indigenous literatures, modernismo, Jewish and Afro-descendant literatures, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and contemporary texts and films. This volume contains discussion of the following authors, filmmakers, and public figures: Humberto Ak'abal, María José Álvarez and Martha Clarissa Hernández, Dennis Ávila, Abner Benaim, Jayro Bustamante, Berta Cáceres, Isaac Esau Carrillo Can, Jennifer Cárcamo, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Quince Duncan, Jacinta Escudos, Regina José Galindo, Francisco Gavidia, Francisco Goldman, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Gaspar Pedro González, Carlos "Cubena" Guillermo Wilson, Eduardo Halfon, Tatiana Huezo, Florence Jaugey, Hernán Jimenez, Óscar Martínez, Victor Montejo, Marisol Ceh Moo, Victor Perera, Archbishop Óscar Romero, José Coronel Urtecho, and Marcela Zamora.

Challenging the notion that Central American literature is a marginal space within Latin American literary and world literary production, this collection positions and discusses Central American literature within the recently revived debates on world literature. This groundbreaking volume draws on new scholarship on global, transnational, postcolonial, translational, and sociological perspectives on the region's literature, expanding and challenging these debates by focusing on the heterogenous literatures of Central America and its diasporas. Contributors discuss poems, testimonios, novels, and short stories in relation to center-periphery, cosmopolitan, and Internationalist paradigms. Central American Literatures as World Literature explores the multiple ways in which Central American literature goes beyond or against the confines of the nation-state, especially through the indigenous, Black, and migrant voices.

How an overlooked film industry became a cinematic force The first book in English dedicated to the study of Central American film, this volume explores the main trends, genres, and themes that define this emerging industry. The seven nations of the region have seen an unprecedented growth in film production during the twenty-first century with the creation of over 200 feature-length films compared with just one in the 1990s. This volume provides a needed overview of one of the least explored cinemas in the world. In these essays, various scholars of film and cultural studies from around the world provide insights into the continuities and discontinuities between twentieth- and twenty-first-century cinematic production on the Isthmus. They discuss how political, social, and environmental factors, along with new production modes and aesthetics, have led to a corpus of films that delve into issues of the past and present such as postwar memory, failed revolutions, trauma, migration, popular culture, minority populations, and gender disparities. From Salvadoran documentaries to Costa Rican comedies and Panamanian sports films, the movies analyzed here demonstrate the region’s flourishing film industry and the diversity of approaches found within it. The Rise of Central American Film in the Twenty-First Century pays homage to an overlooked cultural phenomenon and shows the importance of regional cinema studies. Contributors: Liz Harvey-Kattou | Daniela Granja Núñez | Carolina Sanabria | Juan Carlos Rodríguez | María Lourdes Cortés | Júlia González de Canales Carcereny | Arno Jacob Argueta | Tomás Arce Mairena | Dr. Mauricio Espinoza | Lilia García Torres | Dr. Jared List | Patricia Arroyo Calderón | Esteban E. Loustaunau | Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste | Juan Pablo Gómez Lacayo | Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"Many Spanish language teachers have little understanding of the indigenous languages and cultures that are part of the Spanish-speaking Americas. This book proposes to fill that gap and help teachers include the history and culture of Indigenous Peoples using a social justice lens. Indigenous America begins with an overview of the history of colonialism throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas and ties it to language teaching curricula and standards. Each substantive chapter ends with a list of conclusions, a list of questions for discussion and debate, and a set of teaching topics and concrete classroom exercises. Fountain will include photographs of places, people, and artifacts to make this history tangible. Appendices with more details about incorporating some rich resources into the Spanish language classroom are included, as is a glossary of important terms. This book is the first resource of its kind and is timely--teachers are eager to include more voices in their courses"--

The reality of Central American migrations is broad, diverse, multidirectional, and uncertain. It also offers hope, resistance, affection, solidarity, and a sense of community for a region that has one of the highest rates of human displacement in the world. Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century tackles head-on the way Central America has been portrayed as a region profoundly marked by the migration of its people. Through an intersectional approach, this volume demonstrates how the migration experience is complex and affected by gender, age, language, ethnicity, social class, migratory status, and other variables. Contributors carefully examine a broad range of topics, including forced migration, deportation and outsourcing, intraregional displacements, the role of social media, and the representations of human mobility in performance, film, and literature. The volume establishes a productive dialogue between humanities and social sciences scholars, and it paves the way for fruitful future discussions on the region’s complex migratory processes. Contributors Guillermo Acuña Andrew Bentley Fiore Bran-Aragón Tiffanie Clark Mauricio Espinoza Hilary Goodfriend Leda Carolina Lozier Judith Martínez Alicia V. Nuñez Miroslava Arely Rosales Vásquez Manuel Sánchez Cabrera Ignacio Sarmiento Gracia Silva Carolina Simbaña González María Victoria Véliz

'Wall to Wall: Law as Culture in Latin America and Spain' comprises interventions from a wide array of scholars based in the US, Spain, and Latin America, exploring the encounter of Hispanophone cultures and the law. Its contributors delineate a fraught relationship of complicity, negotiation, and outright confrontation covering five centuries and a truly global landscape, from Inquisitorial processes at the onset of the Spanish Empire to last-ditch plans to preserve it in the 19th century Philippines, to the challenges to contemporary articulations of the nation-state in Catalonia. Beyond single, specialized time-period and national cultures, 'Wall to Wall' embraces and showcases the heterogeneity of the field, covering both well-known territory (Argentina, Mexico, Spain) and often-neglected cultures (Venezuela, Philippines, and indigenous communities in the Yucatan area), as well as problems that cannot be narrowed down to the nation-state (exile, independence processes, non-state laws, translation of foreign cultures). Contributors include: Aurélie Vialette, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza, Daniela Dorfman, María Fernanda Lander, Gloria Elizabeth Chacón, Iván Trujillo, Benjamin Easton, Pauline de Tholozany, Lauren G.J. Reynolds, Ignasi Gozalo-Salellas, and Gabriela Balcarce. The chapters included foreground the conceptual diversity of the field, in dialogue with issues in literary and visual culture, (post-)colonialism, race, nationalism, gender, and class. Not only do they place vernacular objects in dialogue with current international concepts and methods, but these essays also aim to advance an autonomous conceptual and theoretical work-based approach. Its chapters aspire to enter a global discussion around the state-centered aspiration to shape culture and the many literary and cultural practices that escape it; researchers of those issues and Latin American and Iberian studies will find new venues to rethink their global archive.

Traditional histories of Black letters in Latin America have delimited their geographic scope to the Caribbean while also omitting intertwined Afro-Indigenous discourses. Inspired by the legacy of Amefrican thinker Lélia Gonzalez, Améfrica in Letters highlights the Black poets, songwriters, novelists, essayists, and bloggers who have created a counter-multiculturalist literary history on the Latin American mainland. To capture a sense of the variety of their contributions, this book spans Mexico, Central America, the Andes, and the Southern Cone—highlighting the transcontinental nature of the legacy of Black writing and its impact beyond national boundaries. The writers examined in the volume engage with regional intellectual frameworks while putting into circulation a demand for a recalibration of the Hispanophone and Lusophone contexts in which they and other Afrodescendants reside.

This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by examining the ways in which ecocritical cinema studies have matured and proliferated over the last decade, opening whole new areas of study and research. Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis. This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies.