Description
Based in North and South America, scholars from fields including anthropology, performance studies, history, literature, and communications studies explore specific variations of cultural agency across Latin America. Contributors reflect, for example, on the paradoxical programming and reception of a state-controlled Cuban radio station that connects listeners at home and abroad; on the intricacies of indigenous protests in Brazil; and the formulation of cultural policies in cosmopolitan Mexico City. One contributor notes that trauma theory targets individual victims when it should address collective memory as it is worked through in performance and ritual; another examines how Mapuche leaders in Argentina perceived the pitfalls of ethnic essentialism and developed new ways to intervene in local government. Whether suggesting modes of cultural agency, tracking exemplary instances of it, or cautioning against potential missteps, the essays in this book encourage attentiveness to, and the multiplication of, the many extraordinary instantiations of cultural resourcefulness and creativity throughout Latin America and beyond.
Contributors. Arturo Arias, Claudia Briones, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Denise Corte, Juan Carlos Godenzzi, Charles R. Hale, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Claudio Lomnitz, Jesus Martin Barbero, J. Lorand Matory, Rosamel Millaman, Diane M. Nelson, Mary Louise Pratt, Alcida Rita Ramos, Doris Sommer, Diana Taylor, Santiago Villaveces
An exploration of how cultural agency can be used by different organizations and artists to rethink and challenge the notion of a globalized society
About the Author
Doris Sommer is Ira Jewell Williams Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish at Harvard University. Her books include Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews
"In titling itself as it does, Cultural Agency in the Americas makes a foundational gesture. The thing to be founded is a scholarly praxis, a blueprint for academic work committed to advancing energetic, creative, nonharmonious but nonviolent democratic relations."-Mary Louise Pratt, from her afterword
Book Information
ISBN 9780822334996
Author Doris Sommer
Format Paperback
Page Count 392
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 581g