Practicing Memory in Central American Literature

Practicing Memory in Central American Literature
Author: N. Caso
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2010-03-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230106250

Through penetrating analysis of twentieth-century historical fiction from Central America this book asks: why do so many literary texts in the region address historical issues? What kinds of stories are told about the past when authors choose the fictional realm to represent history? Why access memory through fiction and poetry? Nicole Caso traces the active interplay between language, space, and memory in the continuous process of defining local identities through literature. Ultimately, this book looks to the dynamic between form and content to identify potential maps that are suggested in each of these texts in order to imagine possibilities of action in the future.

The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature

The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature
Author: Ileana Rodríguez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2015-11-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131641910X

The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature is an essential resource for anyone interested in the development of women's writing in Latin America. Ambitious in scope, it explores women's literature from ancient indigenous cultures to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Organized chronologically and written by a host of leading scholars, this History offers an array of approaches that contribute to current dialogues about translation, literary genres, oral and written cultures, and the complex relationship between literature and the political sphere. Covering subjects from cronistas in Colonial Latin America and nation-building to feminicide and literature of the indigenous elite, this History traces the development of a literary tradition while remaining grounded in contemporary scholarship. The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature will not only engage readers in ongoing debates but also serve as a definitive reference for years to come.

From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals

From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals
Author: Yajaira M. Padilla
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2022-06-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1477325298

The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and “forever illegals.” Central Americans are unseen within the broader conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to recognition. Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and invisibility emerged over the past forty years—bookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump—and how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.

Practicing Memory in Central American Literature

Practicing Memory in Central American Literature
Author: N. Caso
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2010-04-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781349382750

This book is an analysis of twentieth-century historical fiction from Central America, tracing the active interplay between language, space, and memory.

The Maya

The Maya
Author: Megan E. O’Neil
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2022-07-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789145511

An illuminating look at the myriad communities who have engaged with the ancient Maya over the centuries. This book reveals how the ancient Maya—and their buildings, ideas, objects, and identities—have been perceived, portrayed, and exploited over five hundred years in the Americas, Europe, and beyond. Engaging in interdisciplinary analysis, the book summarizes ancient Maya art and history from the preclassical period to the Spanish invasion, as well as the history of outside engagement with the ancient Maya, from Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century to later explorers and archaeologists, taking in scientific literature, visual arts, architecture, world’s fairs, and Indigenous activism. It also looks at the decipherment of Maya inscriptions, Maya museum exhibitions and artists’ responses, and contemporary Maya people’s engagements with their ancestral past. Featuring the latest research, this book will interest scholars as well as general readers who wish to know more about this ancient, fascinating culture.

Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context

Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context
Author: Gloria Elizabeth Chacón
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2022-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603295895

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.

Le Maya Q'atzij/Our Maya Word

Le Maya Q'atzij/Our Maya Word
Author: Emil’ Keme
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1452961875

Bringing to the fore the voices of Maya authors and what their poetry tells us about resistance, sovereignty, trauma, and regeneration In 1954, Guatemala suffered a coup d’etat, resulting in a decades-long civil war. During this period, Indigenous Mayans were subject to displacement, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing. Within the context of the armed conflict and the postwar period in Guatemala, K’iche’ Maya scholar Emil’ Keme identifies three historical phases of Indigenous Maya literary insurgency in which Maya authors use poetry to dignify their distinct cultural, political, gender, sexual, and linguistic identities. Le Maya Q’atzij / Our Maya Word employs Indigenous and decolonial theoretical frameworks to critically analyze poetic works written by ten contemporary Maya writers from five different Maya nations in Iximulew/Guatemala. Similar to other Maya authors throughout colonial history, these authors and their poetry criticize, in their own creative ways, the continuing colonial assaults to their existence by the nation-state. Throughout, Keme displays the decolonial potentialities and shortcomings proposed by each Maya writer, establishing a new and productive way of understanding Maya living realities and their emancipatory challenges in Iximulew/Guatemala. This innovative work shows how Indigenous Maya poetics carries out various processes of decolonization and, especially, how Maya literature offers diverse and heterogeneous perspectives about what it means to be Maya in the contemporary world.

Post-Conflict Central American Literature

Post-Conflict Central American Literature
Author: Yvette Aparicio
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2013-11-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611485487

Post-Conflict Central American Literature: Searching for Home and Longing to Belong studies often-overlooked contemporary poetry. Through the exploration of poetry and a select number of short stories, this book contemplates the meanings of home, belonging, and the homeland in post-conflict, globalizing, and neoliberal El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Aparicio analyzes literary representations of and meditations on the current conditions as well as the recent pasts of Central American homelands. Additionally, the book highlights aesthetic renditions of home at the same time that it engages with and is grounded in contemporary Central American cultures, politics, and societies. In effect, this book contests hegemonic and apparently commonsense views that assert that globalization produces global citizenship and globalized experiences. Instead it argues that a palpable desire for home and belonging survives and thrives in rapidly globalizing Central American homelands.

Symbolism 17: Latina/o Literature

Symbolism 17: Latina/o Literature
Author: Rüdiger Ahrens
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2017-10-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110532913

The complex nature of globalization increasingly requires a comparative approach to literature in order to understand how migration and commodity flows impact aesthetic production and expressive practices. This special issue of Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics explores the trans-American dimensions of Latina/o literature in a trans-Atlantic context. Examining the theoretical implications suggested by the comparison of the global North-global South dynamics of material and aesthetic exchange, this volume highlights emergent Latina/o authors, texts, and methodologies of interest in for comparative literary studies. In the essays, literary scholars address questions of the transculturation, translation, and reception of Latina/o literature in the United States and Europe. In the interviews, emergent Latina/o authors speak to the processes of creative writing in a transnational context. This volume suggests how the trans-American dialogues found in contemporary Latina/o literature elucidates trans-Atlantic critical dialogues.