Human Rights in Colombian Literature and Cultural Production

Human Rights in Colombian Literature and Cultural Production
Author: Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2022-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100056407X

This volume explores how Colombian novelists, artists, performers, activists, musicians, and others seek to enact—to perform, to stage, to represent—human rights situations that are otherwise enacted discursively, that is, made public or official, in juridical and political realms in which justice often remains an illusory or promised future. In order to probe how cultural production embodies the tensions between the abstract universality of human rights and the materiality of violations on individual human bodies and on determined groups, the volume asks the following questions: How does the transmission of historical traumas of Colombia’s past, through human rights narratives in various forms, inform the debates around the subjects of rights, truth and memory, remembrance and forgetting, and the construction of citizenship through solidarity and collective struggles for justice? What are the different roles taken by cultural products in the interstices among rights, laws, and social justice within different contexts of state violence and states of exception? What are alternative perspectives, sources, and (micro)histories from Colombia of the creation, evolution, and practice of human rights? How does the human rights discourse interface with notions of environmental justice, especially in the face of global climate change, regional (neo)extractivism, the implementation of megaprojects, and ongoing post-accord thefts and (re)appropriations of land? Through a wide range of disciplinary lenses, the different chapters explore counter-hegemonic concepts of human rights, decolonial options struggling against oppression and market logic, and alternative discourses of human dignity and emancipation within the pluriverse.

Colombia

Colombia
Author: Michael J. LaRosa
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2023
Genre: History
ISBN: 1538177129

Updated to include the historic 2022 presidential election, this deeply informed and accessible book traces the history of Colombia thematically over the past two centuries. LaRosa and Mejía move beyond the common perception of a failed state to explore the rich heritage and dynamism that have characterized Colombia past and present.

The Intellectual and Cultural Worlds of Rubén Darío

The Intellectual and Cultural Worlds of Rubén Darío
Author: Kathleen T. O’Connor-Bater
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2022-12-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000803414

Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916) has had a foundational influence on virtually all Spanish language writers and poets of the twentieth century and beyond. Yet, while he is a household name among Hispano-phone readers, the seminal modernista remains virtually unknown to an English readership. This book examines the writings of Ruben Dario as both poet and chronicler, as he renovates language drawing lessons from ancient mythologies to embrace the ideal of "art for art’s sake"; all the while opposing United States aggression in the hemisphere along with the pseudo-Bohemian European bourgeoisie in poetry and prose at the cusp of the Great War.

Reterritorializing the Spaces of Violence in Colombia

Reterritorializing the Spaces of Violence in Colombia
Author: Constanza López López Baquero
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2024-02-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1003844588

This volume examines how violence and resilience is experienced in urban spaces, and explores the history of a variety of people told from the perspective of the margins. Reterritorializing the Spaces of Violence in Colombia provides critical and empirical examples of individuals and groups who believe in their collective power, reject war and violence, and manifest their resistance through art and activism in ways that rethread the social fabric. This book is the result of extensive fieldwork conducted over ten years in Medellín and Bogotá and it brings into focus the ways that hip hop, poetry, urban art, and the creation of communities and shared experiences bring about new ways to dignify life and inhabit the city. It analyses the contemporary history of Colombia by drawing on the critical perspectives and tools of various disciplines. It also puts into dialogue the diverse and innovative scholarship from the North and the South that addresses inequality, violence, trauma and resilience. Most importantly, it focuses on the challenges that women and young people face today in situations of conflict and post-conflict. This book will be of interest for researchers and students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as readers interested in issues of human rights and the history of the Americas.

Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America

Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America
Author: Cristián H. Ricci
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000828522

This volume considers the Arabic and African diasporas through the underexplored Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Africans, and Mahjari (South American and Mexican authors of Arab descent) experiences in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches, the authors explore the ways in which individual writers and artists negotiate the geographical, cultural, and historical parameters of their own diasporic trajectories influenced by their particular locations at home and elsewhere. At the same time, this volume sheds light on issues related to Spain, Portugal, and Latin American racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of the Middle East and Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American economic crunches in shaping attitudes towards immigration. This collection of thought-provoking chapters extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Portuguese, and Mahjaris are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens.

Commodifying Violence in Literature and on Screen

Commodifying Violence in Literature and on Screen
Author: Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola
Publisher: Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2021
Genre: Colombia
ISBN: 9780367459659

Through an exploration of the cultural processes that perpetuate the darker side of Latin America for global consumption, this book investigates the "condition" that has led writers, filmmakers, and artists to embrace (purposefully or not) the incessant violence in Colombian society as the object of their own creative endeavors.

Inventing the Romantic Don Quixote in France

Inventing the Romantic Don Quixote in France
Author: Clark Colahan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2023-06-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000864278

Cervantes’ now mythical character of Don Quixote began as a far different figure than the altruistic righter of wrongs we know today. The transformation from mad highway robber to secular saint took place in the Romantic Era, but how and where it began has just begun to be understood. Germany and England played major roles, but, contrary to earlier literary historians, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau and the Jansenists scooped Henry and Sarah Fielding. Jansenism, a persecuted puritanical and intellectual movement linked to Pascal, identified itself with Don Quixote’s virtues, excused his vices, and wrote a game-changing sequel mediated by the transformative powers of a sorcerer from Commedia dell’Arte. As an early Romantic, Rousseau was attracted to the hero’s fertile imagination and tender love for Dulcinea, foregrounding the would-be knight’s quest in a play and his best-selling novel, Julie. Sarah Fielding reacted similarly, basing her utopian novel David Simple on the Jansenist concept of quixotic trust in others. Colahan here reproduces and explains for the first time the extremely rare original illustrations of the French sequel to Cervantes’ novel, and documents the fortunes in French culture of the magician at the heart of the Romantic Quixote.

Queer Rebels

Queer Rebels
Author: Łukasz Smuga
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2022-01-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000544370

Queer Rebels is a study of gay narrative writings published in Spain at the turn of the 20th century. The book scrutinises the ways in which the literary production of contemporary Spanish gay authors – José Luis de Juan, Luis G. Martín, Juan Gil-Albert, Juan Goytisolo, Eduardo Mendicutti, Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo – engages with homophobic and homophile discourses, as well as with the vernacular and international literary legacy. The first part revolves around the metaphor of a rebellious scribe who queers literary tradition by clandestinely weaving changes into copies of the books he makes. This subversive writing act, named ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ after the protagonist of José Luis de Juan’s This Breathing World (1999), is examined in four highly intertextual works by other writers. The second part of the book explores Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo, who in their different ways seek to coin their own definitions of homosexual experience in opposition both to the homophobic discourses of the past and to the homonormative regimes of the commercialised and trivialised gay culture of today. In their novels, ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ involves playing a sophisticated queer game with readers and their expectations.

A Posthumous History of José Martí

A Posthumous History of José Martí
Author: Alfred J. López
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2022-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000632725

A Posthumous History of José Martí: The Apostle and His Afterlife focuses on Martí’s posthumous legacy and his lasting influence on succeeding generations of Cubans on the island and abroad. Over 120 years after his death on a Cuban battlefield in 1895, Martí studies have long been the contested property of opposing sides in an ongoing ideological battle. Both the Cuban nation-state, which claims Martí as a crucial inspiration for its Marxist revolutionary government, and diasporic communities in the US who honor Martí as a figure of hope for the Cuban nation-in-exile, insist on the centrality of his words and image for their respective visions of Cuban nationhood. The book also explores more recent scholarship that has reassessed Martí’s literary, cultural, and ideological value, allowing us to read him beyond the Havana-Miami axis toward engagement with a broader historical and geographical tableau. Martí has thus begun to outgrow his mutually-reinforcing cults in Cuba and the diaspora, to assume his true significance as a hemispheric and global writer and thinker.

Afro-Colombian Hip-hop

Afro-Colombian Hip-hop
Author: Christopher Dennis
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2012
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0739150561

Afro-Colombian Hip-Hop: Globalization, Transcultural Music, and Ethnic Identities, by Christopher Dennis, explores the impact that globalization and the transnational spread of U.S. popular culture--specifically hip-hop and rap--are having on the social identities of younger generations of black Colombians. Along with addressing why and how hip-hop has migrated so effectively to Colombia's black communities, Dennis introduces readers to some of the country's most renowned Afro-Colombian hip-hop artists, their musical innovations, and production and distribution practices. Above all, Dennis demonstrates how, through a mode of transculturation, today's young artists are transforming U.S. hip-hop into a more autonomous art form used for articulating oppositional social and political critiques, reworking ethnic identities, and actively contributing to the reimagining of the Colombian nation. Afro-Colombian Hip-Hop uncovers ways in which young Afro-Colombian performers are attempting to use hip-hop and digital media to bring the perspectives, histories, and expressive forms of their marginalized communities into national and international public consciousness.