Latin American Studies - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

The Carnivalesque Defunto

Thu, 01 May 2008

The Carnivalesque Defunto (2008)
Death and the Dead in Modern Brazilian Literature

By Robert H. Moser

The Carnivalesque Defunto explores the representations of death and the dead in Brazil’s collective and literary imagination. The recurring stereotype of Brazil as the land of samba, soccer, and sandy beaches overlooks a more complex cultural heritage in which, since colonial times, a relationship of proximity and reciprocity has been cultivated between the living and the dead.

Robert H. Moser details the emergence of a prominent motif in modern Brazilian literature, namely the carnivalesque defunto (the dead) that, in the form of a protagonist or narrator, returns to beseech, instruct, chastise, or even seduce the living. Drawing upon the works of esteemed Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Érico Veríssimo, and Jorge Amado, Moser demonstrates how the defunto, through its mocking laughter and Dionysian resurrection, simultaneously subverts and inverts the status quo, thereby exposing underlying points of tension within Brazilian social and political history.

Incorporating elements of both a celestial advocate and an untrustworthy specter, the defunto also serves as a metaphor for one of modern Brazil’s greatest dilemmas: reconciling the past with the present.

The Carnivalesque Defunto offers a comparative framework by juxtaposing the Brazilian literary ghost with other Latin American, Caribbean, and North American examples. It also presents a cross-disciplinary approach toward understanding the complex relationship forged between Brazil’s spiritual traditions and literary expressions.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Carnivalesque+Defunto.
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Madness in Buenos Aires

Tue, 15 Apr 2008

Madness in Buenos Aires (2008)
Patients, Psychiatrists and the Argentine State, 1880–1983

By Jonathan Ablard

Madness in Buenos Aires examines the interactions between psychiatrists, patients and their families, and the national state in modern Argentina. This book offers a fresh interpretation of the Argentine state’s relationship to modernity and social change during the twentieth century, while also examining the often contentious place of psychiatry in modern Argentina.

Drawing on a number of previously untapped archival sources, author Jonathan Ablard uses the experience of psychiatric patients as a case study of how the Argentine state developed and functioned over the last century and of how Argentines interacted with it. Ablard argues that the capacity of the state to provide social services and professional opportunities and to control the populace was often constrained to an extent not previously recognized in scholarly literature. These limitations, including a shortage of hospitals, insufficient budgets, and political and economic instability, shaped the experiences of patients, their families, and doctors and also influenced medical and lay ideas about the nature and significance of mental illness. Furthermore, these experiences, and the institutional framework in which they were imbedded, had a profound impact on how Argentine psychiatrists discussed not only mental illness but also a host of related themes including immigration, poverty, and the role of the state in mitigating social problems.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Madness+in+Buenos+Aires.
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Women and Slavery, Volume One

Fri, 28 Sep 2007

Women and Slavery, Volume One (2007)
Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic

Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller

The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until Women and Slavery, no single collection has focused on female slaves who—as these two volumes reveal—probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.

Women enslaved in the Americas came to bear highly gendered reputations among whites—as “scheming Jezebels,” ample and devoted “mammies,” or suffering victims of white male brutality and sexual abuse—that revealed more about the psychology of enslaving than about the courage and creativity of the women enslaved. These strong images of modern New World slavery contrast with the equally expressive virtual invisibility of the women enslaved in the Old—concealed in harems, represented to meddling colonial rulers as “wives” and “nieces,” taken into African families and kin-groups in subtlely nuanced fashion.

Women and Slavery presents papers developed from an international conference organized by Gwyn Campbell.

Volume 1 Contributors
Sharifa Ahjum
Richard B. Allen
Katrin Bromber
Gwyn Campbell
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch
Jan-Georg Deutsch
Timothy Fernyhough
Philip J. Havik
Elizabeth Grzymala Jordan
Martin A. Klein
George Michael La Rue
Paul E. Lovejoy
Fred Morton
Richard Roberts
Kirsten A. Seaver

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Women+and+Slavery%2C+Volume+One.
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Organic Coffee

Sat, 01 Jul 2006

Organic Coffee (2006)
Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers

By Maria Elena Martinez-Torres

Despite deepening poverty and environmental degradation throughout rural Latin America, Mayan peasant farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, are finding environmental and economic success by growing organic coffee. Organic Coffee: Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers provides a unique and vivid insight into how this coffee is grown, harvested, processed, and marketed to consumers in Mexico and in the north.

Maria Elena Martinez-Torres explains how Mayan farmers have built upon their ethnic networks to make a crucial change in their approach to agriculture. Taking us inside Chiapas, Mexico's poorest state and scene of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, she examines the anatomy of the ongoing organic coffee boom and the fair-trade movement. The organic coffee boom arose as very poor farmers formed cooperatives, revalued their ethnic identity, and improved their land through organic farming. The result has been significant economic benefits for their families and ecological benefits for the future sustainability of agriculture in the region.

Organic Coffee refutes the myth that organic farming is less productive than chemical-based agriculture and gives us reasons to be hopeful for indigenous peoples and peasant farmers

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Organic+Coffee.
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Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution

Wed, 25 Aug 2004

Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution (2004)
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas

By Karen Kampwirth

In many Latin American countries, guerrilla struggle and feminism have been linked in surprising ways. Women were mobilized by the thousands to promote revolutionary agendas that had little to do with increasing gender equality. They ended up creating a uniquely Latin American version of feminism that combined revolutionary goals of economic equality and social justice with typically feminist aims of equality, nonviolence, and reproductive rights.

Drawing on more than two hundred interviews with women in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Mexican state of Chiapas, Karen Kampwirth tells the story of how the guerrilla wars led to the rise of feminism, why certain women became feminists, and what sorts of feminist movements they built. Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas explores how the violent politics of guerrilla struggle could be related to the peaceful politics of feminism. It considers the gains, losses, and internal conflicts within revolutionary women's organizations.

Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution challenges old assumptions regarding revolutionary movements and the legacy of those movements for the politics of daily life. It will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience in political science, sociology, anthropology, women's studies, and Latin American studies as well as to general readers with an interest in international feminism.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Feminism+and+the+Legacy+of+Revolution.
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Writing Women in Central America

Mon, 27 Oct 2003

Writing Women in Central America (2003)
Gender and the Fictionalization of History

By Laura Barbas-Rhoden

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past?

Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts. This study analyzes how authors appropriate history to confront the rhetoric of the state, global economic powers, and even dissident groups within their own cultures. Laura Barbas-Rhoden winds a common thread in the literary imaginations of Claribel Alegría, Rosario Aguilar, Gioconda Belli, and Tatiana Lobo and shows how these writers offer provocative supplements to the historical record.

Writing Women in Central America considers more than a dozen narratives in which the authors craft their own interpretations of history to make room for women, indigenous peoples, and Afro-Latin Americans. Some of the texts reveal silences in the narratives of empire- and nation-building. Others reinterpret events to highlight the struggle of marginalized peoples for dignity and humanity in the face of oppression. All confront the ways in which stories have been told about the past.

Yet ultimately, Professor Barbas¿Rhoden asserts, all concern the present and the future. As seen in Writing Women in Central America, though their fictions are historical, the writers direct their readers beyond the present toward a more just future for all who live in Central America.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Writing+Women+in+Central+America.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Gabriela Mistral

Thu, 25 Sep 2003

Gabriela Mistral (2003)
The Audacious Traveler

Edited by Marjorie Agosín

Gabriela Mistral is the only Latin American woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even so, her extraordinary achievements in poetry, narrative, and political essays remain largely untold. Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler explores boldly and thoughtfully the complex legacy of Mistral and the way in which her work continues to define Latin America.

Edited by Professor Marjorie Agosín, Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler addresses for the first time the vision that Mistral conveyed as a representative of Chile during the drafting of the United Nations Human Rights Declaration. It depicts Mistral as a courageous social activist whose art and writings against fascism reveal a passionate voice for freedom and justice.

The book also explores Mistral's Pan-American vision and her desire to be part of a unified American hemisphere as well as her concern for the Caribbean and Brazil. Readers will learn of her sojourn in Brazil, her turbulent years as consul in Madrid, and, finally, her last days on Long Island.

Students of her poetry, as well as general readers, will find Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler an insightful collection dedicated to the life and work of an inspiring and original artist.

The contributors are Jonathan Cohen, Joseph R. Slaughter, Verónica Darer, Patricia Varas, Eugenia Muñoz, Darrell B. Lockhart, Ivonne Gordon Vailakis, Santiago Daydí-Tolson, Diana Anhalt, Ana Pizarro, Randall Couch, Patricia Rubio, Elizabeth Horan, Emma Sepúlveda, Luis Vargas Saavedra, and Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Gabriela+Mistral.
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Cultivating Coffee

Sat, 15 Feb 2003

Cultivating Coffee (2003)
The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880–1930

By Julie A. Charlip

Many scholars of Latin America have argued that the introduction of coffee forced most people to become landless proletarians toiling on large plantations. Cultivating Coffee tells a different story: small and medium-sized growers in Nicaragua were a vital part of the economy, constituting the majority of the farmers and holding most of the land.

Alongside these small commercial farmers was a group of subsistence farmers, created by the state's commitment to supplying municipal lands to communities. These subsistence growers became the workforce for their coffee-growing neighbors, providing harvest labor three months a year. Mostly illiterate, perhaps largely indigenous, they nonetheless learned the functioning of the new political and economic systems and used them to acquire individual plots of land.

Julie Charlip's Cultivating Coffee joins the growing scholarship on rural Latin America that demonstrates the complexity of the processes of transition to expanded export agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing the agency of actors at all levels of society. It also sheds new light on the controversy surrounding landholding in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Cultivating+Coffee.
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Taking Root

Mon, 30 Sep 2002

Taking Root (2002)
Narratives of Jewish Women in Latin America

By Marjorie Agosín

In Taking Root, Latin American women of Jewish descent, from Mexico to Uruguay, recall their coming of age with Sabbath candles and Hebrew prayers, Ladino songs and merengue music, Queen Esther and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Jewish immigrant families searched for a new home and identity in predominantly Catholic societies. The essays included here examine the religious, economic, social, and political choices these families have made and continue to make as they forge Jewish identities in the New World.

Marjorie Agosín has gathered narratives and testimonies that reveal the immense diversity of Latin American Jewish experience. These essays, based on first- and second-generation immigrant experience, describe differing points of view and levels of involvement in Jewish tradition. In Taking Root, Agosín presents us with a contemporary and vivid account of the Jewish experience in Latin America.

Taking Root documents the sadness of exile and loss but also a fierce determination to maintain Jewish traditions. This is Jewish history but it is also part of the untold history of Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, and all of Latin America.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Taking+Root.
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Beyond the Barricades

Sat, 15 Jun 2002

Beyond the Barricades (2002)
Nicaragua and the Struggle for the Sandinista Press, 1979–1998

By Adam Jones

Throughout the 1980s, Barricada, the official daily newspaper of the ruling Sandinista Front, played the standard role of a party organ, seeking the mobilize the Nicaraguan public to support the revolutionary agenda. Beyond the Barricades, however, reveals a story that is both more intriguing and much more complex. Even during this period of sweeping transformation and outside military siege, another, more professional agenda also motivated Barricada’s journalists and editors.

When the Sandinistas unexpectedly fell from power in the 1990 elections, Barricada gained a substantial degree of autonomy that allowed it to explore a more balanced and nuanced journalism “in the national interest.” This new orientation, however, ran afoul of more orthodox party leaders, who gradually gained the upper hand in the bitter internal struggle that wracked the Sandinista Front in the early 1990s. The paper closed its doors in January 1998.

Adam Jones’s outstanding study offers an unprecedented behin-the-scenes looks at Barricada’s two decades of evolution and dissolution. It also presents an intimate portrait of a key revolutionary institution and the memorable individuals who were a part of it.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Beyond+the+Barricades.
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