Throughout the 1960s until her untimely death in 1974, Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez engaged directly and courageously with the social, political, economic, and cultural transformations promised by the Cuban Revolution.Gómez directed numerous documentary films in 10 prolific years. She also made De cierta manera (One way or another), her only feature-length film. Her films navigate complex experiences of social class, race, and gender by reframing revolu...

In the late 1960s, Brazilian artists forged a watershed cultural movement known as Tropicália. Music inspired by that movement is today enjoying considerable attention at home and abroad. Few new listeners, however, make the connection between this music and the circumstances surrounding its creation, the most violent and repressive days of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. With key manifestations in theater, cinema, visual arts, literature, and especially popular...

The Cinema of Latin America is the first volume in the new 24 Frames series of studies of national and regional cinema. In taking an explicitly text-centered approach, the books in this series offer a unique way of considering the particular concerns, styles and modes of representation of numerous national cinemas around the world. This volume focuses on the vibrant practices that make up Latin American cinema, a historically important regional cinema and one that is incr...

This study examines the discourses of nationalism as they intersected or clashed with Spanish film production from its inception to the present. While the book addresses the discourses around filmmakers such as Almodóvar and Medem, whose work has achieved international recognition, Spanish National Cinema is particularly novel in its treatment of a whole range of popular cinema rarely touched on in studies of Spanish cinema. Using accounts of films, popular film magazines and documents not...

An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world."Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a "kosmo-polites," or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses—on the one hand, a detachment from one's place of origin, while on the other, an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling collective.Cosmopo...

Latin American Women Writers: An Encyclopedia presents the lives and critical works of over 170 women writers in Latin America between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. This features thematic entries as well as biographies of female writers whose works were originally published in Spanish or Portuguese, and who have had an impact on literary, political, and social studies.Focusing on drama, poetry, and fiction, this work includes authors who have published at least th...

Jorge Amado is simultaneously one of Brazil's most prolific and widely read novelists and one of its most controversial. Seeking to offer for his English-speaking audience the same range of critical thinking that surrounds his work in Brazil, this volume provides an introduction and chronology to Amado's life, followed by a comprehensive survey of his major works by some of the world's leading Latin American Studies scholars. As the case of Jorge Amado is central to the emergence of Brazil...

In Mexican Melodrama, Elena Lahr-Vivaz explores the compelling ways that new-wave Mexican directors use the tropes and themes of Golden Age films to denounce the excesses of a nation characterized as a fragmented and fictitious construct. Analyzing big hits and quiet successes of both Golden Age and new-wave cinema, the author offers in each chapter a comparative reading of films from the two eras, considering, for instance, Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch, Alejand...

This engaging book explores some of the most significant films to emerge from Latin America since 2000, an extraordinary period of international recognition for the region's cinema. Each chapter assesses an individual film, with some contributors considering the reasons for the unprecedented commercial and critical successes of movies such as City of God, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mamá también, and Nine Queens, while others examine why equally important films failed to break out on the ...

La India María—a humble and stubborn indigenous Mexican woman—is one of the most popular characters of the Mexican stage, television, and film. Created and portrayed by María Elena Velasco, La India María has delighted audiences since the late 1960s with slapstick humor that slyly critiques discrimination and the powerful. At the same time, however, many critics have derided the iconic figure as a racist depiction of a negative stereotype and dismissed the India María films as exploitation...

Over the past fifty years, Puerto Rican voters have roundly rejected any calls for national independence. Yet the rhetoric and iconography of independence have been defining features of Puerto Rican literature and culture. In the provocative new book Dream Nation, María Acosta Cruz investigates the roots and effects of this profound disconnect between cultural fantasy and political reality.Bringing together texts from Puerto Rican literature, history, and popular culture, ...

In this expertly crafted, richly detailed guide, Raymond Leslie Williams explores the cultural, political, and historical events that have shaped the Latin American and Caribbean novel since the end of World War II. In addition to works originally composed in English, Williams covers novels written in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Haitian Creole, and traces the profound influence of modernization, revolution, and democratization on the writing of this era.Beginning in 194...