Imagining Spanish America as Eden and sublime force, colonial environmental aesthetics inaugurated American "disponibilité," figuring environment in the colonial matrix of power as the non-place outside of European time and space. The image of the garden evoked by this aesthetics corresponded to the desired, secular transformation of…

In this article, I use aerial footage of the Amazon as a guiding thread to argue that the sublime is the most fitting concept to describe our aesthetic response to the representation of Amazonian nature in cinema. In my discussion of rainforest aesthetics, I focus on two Brazilian films, made ten years apart: Glauber Rocha's short "Amazonas,…

Historically, black women's hair has been a site where power and social relations are defined. In Puerto Rico, cultural production has been critical in perpetuating as well as in contesting the prevailing white European ideal of beauty and its impact on women's hairstyling practices. Nevertheless, the link between aesthetic preferences and the…

Federico García Lorca's appropriation of the puppet play genre reveals that at the same time he was reaching into deep roots of popular tradition, he also was seeking opportunity to innovate and break free from limitations imposed by the commercial theater scene of the first decades of the twentieth century. Tracing the trajectory of…

This paper reveals and analyzes the cinematographic, political, and aesthetic transitions intersecting two Southern Cone films that premiered concurrently in 1991: the award-winning Chilean movie "La frontera" by Ricardo Larraín and the forgotten Argentine independent production "La redada" directed by Rolando Pardo. Despite…

This current study focuses on the effects of neoliberalism on the Chilean sociopolitical period of postdictatorship (1990-2010) by studying a new generation of filmmakers in the work of Alberto Fuguet. In the trilogy of "Se arrienda" (2005), "Velódrom" (2010), and "Música campesin"a (2011), Fuguet reviews the…

This article examines poetry written during the Spanish Civil War that reflects on the modern character of the conflict: the novel tactic of aerial bombing civilian populations as it was disseminated through the mass media. A comparative reading of this body of poetry written by Spanish, British, and American authors allows for the examination of…

This article directly resulted from the teacher/researcher experience, describing new analyses resulting from subtitling a film for curriculum incorporation: "Tango feroz, la leyenda de Tanguito" (1993). Set in Argentina in the sixties and loosely based on the life of José Alberto Iglesias Correa, also known as Tanguito, this film…

The film "La teta asustada" (Claudia Llosa, 2009) was inspired by the text titled "Entre prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú" by the medical anthropologist Kimberly Theidon. In this study, Theidon compiles the testimonies of a group of indigenous women who were sexually assaulted…

At the beginning of the twentieth century a new subgenre of poetry written in Spanish, but rooted in Japanese literary tradition, began to emerge in the works of Spain's vanguard and Generation of 1927 poets and among young modernist poets in Mexico and South America. Transmitted first through France and later directly from Japan, the popularity…

Interpreting the occurrence of sexual violation in seventeenth-century Spanish literary works necessitates for modem scholars the difficult task of understanding prevailing contemporary attitudes toward rape. Studies by Higgins and Silver, Casas, and Welles discuss how literary texts with rape scenes as narrative material often use the act or its…

This article argues that Eduardo Lopez Bago's "La prostituta" evidences a deprivileging of a "visual" approach to narration and of the sensorial predominance of sight. Rather, Lopez Bago harnesses odors and deploys them as an important structuring device and a central generator of meaning, permitting his novel to be judged on its ability to evoke…

Alberto Fuguet, one of the leaders of the McOndo writers who seek cultural direction from the United States and exploit mass-media formulas, is a polarizing figure in contemporary Latin American culture. His most recent full-length novel, the semi-autobiographical "Las peliculas de mi vida" (2003), has led many to conclude that Fuguet is simply a…