This dissertation explores the process that drives Bartolomé de Las Casas from his early support for introducing black slaves in the West Indies to his late and strong criticism of the Portuguese slave trade in the third volume of The History of the Indies, and his regret for his early support of slave trafficking. Seeking to move beyond the traditional apologetic approach, our argument proceeds by a close genealogical reading of all of Las Casas known writings on the question of slavery. Our hypothesis is that from a representation that presents African slaves as a necessary commodity for the colonization of the New World, Las Casas will move toward a point of view according to which black slaves are similar to the indigenous population that he had defended in many of his works. However, this attempt to equate the black slaves with the indigenous population remains unresolved in Las Casas work. In his last writings, Las Casas comes to think of both slavery and slave population itself as a plaga. We connect Las Casas texts with (1) the early laws proposed by the Spanish authorities regarding black slaves, (2) the attempts of some Portuguese and Spanish chroniclers and intellectuals to justify slavery, as well as some early criticisms of the enslavement of Africans, and (3) the defense of the indigenous population that Las Casas proposes and develops. Our research allows the recognition of an early and decisive moment in the debate about slavery in the Iberian world. By following Las Casas texts about black slavery in the Indies, we can trace the basic arguments of both (1) discourses that justify and encourage black slavery, and (2) discourses that confront and criticize the Atlantic slave trade from its very beginning. Our conclusion is that the origins but also the aporias of an abolitionist position in the Iberian Atlantic pre-dating by almost a century and a half Northern European abolitionism are to be found in Las Casas.

The dissertation investigates reading behaviors in Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96), Tiecks Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798/1843) and Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) within the framework of the history of reading and book production. Social and technological pressures during the latter part of the eighteenth century resulted in a re-definition and re-invention of the reading process as the modern book was being invented. New themes and genres appeared on the literary horizon that had as a goal the education of a new kind of reader. Goethes, Tiecks, and Novaliss novels, which were products of the paradigm shift in reading, did not, however, just embrace changes that were already in place. By engaging in the contemporary discussion about new and old reading behaviors, each of these works promoted a new kind of reading that in one way or another maintained older forms while still recognizing the revolution that the irreversible technological advances had initiated. Drawing on discussions by Engelsing and Schön on the history of reading, the dissertation shows that the three novels record new reading strategies by analyzing the epochal changes in terms of a three-fold movement from intensive to extensive reading, reading aloud to reading silently, and communal to solitary reading. Additionally, it shows how the novels investigate the relationship between the reception of textual and visual artifacts and, thereby, contribute to the contemporary discourse on changes in the aesthetic status of image and text. The three novels explore these shifts from different angles. The Lehrjahre thus analyzes the transition from intensive to extensive reading by placing these modalities between reading in a community and reading in solitude. Sternbald, less concerned with the complexities of this transition, focuses on the communal aspect of reading by exploring how a revitalized orality can affect a rapidly changing reading culture. Ofterdingen, by contrast, reflects on the inherent contradiction of efforts to enhance reading culture by restoring orality. For Novalis, the emergence of extensive solitary readers was final and irreversible.

My dissertation situates itself at the intersection of several fields: Soviet cultural studies, film genre theory, and masculinity studies. It investigates the articulation of genre categories in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema industries, with a specific focus on the cultural context within which the buddy film emerges in late Soviet culture. This genre is unique within contemporary Russian cinema for providing a visual and narrative structure within which the masculine crisisa topic widely written about by Russian sociologists and gender scholarsbecomes visible. This masculine crisis is more often than not masked by compensatory, hyper-macho images in other genres (e.g., war films, gangster films, historical epics). The buddy film, by contrast, exhibits a type of masculinity rarely glimpsed on screen; these characters are the disillusioned, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised men of late- and post-Soviet society. My argument is grounded in a thorough examination of male-centered Russian buddy films from 1970 until the present dayspecifically, I look at such films as A. Smirnovs Belorusskii vokzal (1970), P. Lungins Taksi-bliuz (1990), V. Abdrashitovs Vremia tantsora (1997), A. Rogozhkins Kukushka (2002), V. Todorovskiis Liubovnik (2002), and A. Muradovs Pravda o shchelpakh (2003). I also dedicate the final chapter to a consideration of several notable exceptions to the standard male buddy film: V. Todorovskiis Strana glukhikh (1998), S. Bodrov Jr.s Sestry (2001), F. Popovs Kavkazkaia ruletka (2002), and M. Liubakovas Zhestokost' (2007) in which two women substitute for the typical male pair. I draw on the work of Althusserian film genre theorist Rick Altman, who seeks out the source of genre components in social practice. Altman insists on acknowledging the historicism and subjectivity in the study of genre. Relying on such considerations of genre, my dissertation treats the buddy film from several perspectives: it looks at the genres antecedents from the Stalinist and Thaw periods, it tracks changes in the genre as cultural and ideological imperatives shift over the past seventy years, and it considers how gender representations adapt to these cultural and ideological transformations.

This dissertation aims to compare and contrast an aspect of the fin-de-siècle literature and history of anti-imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines. I focus my study on what may be the most prominent authors of the two contexts: José Martí (1853-1895) and José Rizal (1861-1896). Although scholars such as Benedict Anderson and Leopoldo Zea have already noted the obvious relations between Martí and Rizal, their anti-imperial texts have not been systematically compared. Caught between the two empires (Spain and the United States), their projects were equally overwhelming: while studying the history of the failed independence movement in their respective colonies, they attempted to transform the dilemmas of imperial culture into the building blocks for national liberation. Based on this historico-political premise, my study attempts to explore how Martí and Rizal employ different literary forms to articulate their discourse of protest and to what extent their political writings create the conditions of possibility for a transnational, inter-colonial form of resistance against imperial domination. One of the central contentions of this dissertation is that the two writers' anti-imperial texts construct the conceptual framework for the idea of what I call "global resistance." By this, I mean to indicate the ways in which Cubans and Filipinos shared certain anti-colonial ideas and struggles against common opponents in the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and historical study, I intend to examine both the possibilities and the limits of global resistance. The project involves diverse cultural points of reference, ranging from the Caribbean to Asia and seeking to participate in the ongoing debate within the field of Trans-Pacific Studies.

This work investigates the representation of domestic servants within mid-twentieth century novels of female development, which are written by middle class women. The comparison is between the following authors: Rosario Castellanos from Mexico, Jean Rhys from the West Indies, and Clarice Lispector from Brazil. Postcolonial women writers have needed to tackle hegemonic structures within their own fiction, as they confront the privilege of the modern writing subject who frames herself in opposition to the silence of colonized female characters. Working to rewrite history, and to develop texts that speak from the margins, there is a conscious effort to incorporate subaltern voices into their narratives. Nevertheless, anxiety arises within those texts of middle-class writers who are preoccupied with the management of differences, stemming from a realization that in fact there is no place within the privileged writing subjects text from which the subaltern can actually speak. Therefore the authors struggle to write within a masculine-centered literary tradition that privileges certain voices over others, while at the same time recognizing their complicity with that system that works through exclusions. While the servant is silenced, the writing also shields her from being appropriated and defined by the mistress who needs her as a caregiver while she pursues a personal growth and awakening. That is, silences are used to form a protective space in which the marginalized woman cannot be merely the embodiment of alterity for the narrators quest for subjectivity. An element of shame is therefore revealed by means of an implied author, which reminds them that they are expressing an ideal that they themselves have not lived up to. The marginal character becomes a negative element that points to the inability of the narrative to adequately represent her. It questions the model of solidarity through shared oppression that readings of womens and postcolonial writings often take, suggesting that new forms of community need to be imagined that take into account inequalities and injustices between women.

My project deals primarily with connections and conflicts between the three institutions that formed Mexicos model of national identity; these institutions are the State, the Church and literature. Since the processes of the conquest and colony almost cast away the pre-Columbian religious and cultural epistemological worldviews, we can say that the Mexican nation was actually established on an unprecedented foundation of Catholic faith, the Spanish language and imperial power. The later has been historically re-issued with every political regime that has governed Mexico, from the nineteenth century dictatorships to the long-lasting regime of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The project begins analyzing literary texts from the first half of the twentieth century, in which writers critique of the State and the Church aims to uncover the homogeneous identity model these institutions were trying to establish in Mexico. However, I argue that the literature of this period, even with its lucid historical review, was a cultural project in which the religious beliefs of the people were condemned to an ignominious place in regard to social and political life in Mexico. The extreme secularization implicit in their discourses made of religiosity a synonym for alienation, ignorance and superstition. In the last decades, popular religion along with reinforced pre-Hispanic rituals have shown how religion, in a wider sense, can be a way to repair the damaged identity of Mexican believers. The second part of the dissertations works with marginal literary representations from Mayan writers to popular testimonies where the faith and spiritual beliefs are part of a complex rearticulation of a moral agency formerly dismissed by the hegemonic cultural projects of the State and the Church. My analysis is focused in how these texts confront institutional discourses to create a space at the border of the national identity model, which still try to embrace a dogmatic Catholicism, on the one hand, and the anachronism of the Revolution period on the other.

This dissertation examines the relationship between literary writing and geographical discourse in Domingo Faustino Sarmientos Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (Argentina, 1845), Euclides da Cunhas Os Sertões (Brazil, 1902), and Rómulo Gallegoss Doña Bárbara (Venezuela, 1929). These narratives are often read as locating their authority in the discourse of science or within the didactic lessons of the national allegory. I contend that both readings simplify the legacies of these works and elide the significance behind the form coupled with their content. To fully understand the politics of these mixed forms, we must move from the general (empiricist science) to the particular (geographical discourse). I defend this move by demonstrating that Sarmiento, Cunha, and Gallegos emerge as literary figures alongside, and even participate in, the formation of politically oriented geographical institutions; between 1833 and 1910 over fifty geographical societies appear across the Americas, first in Mexico and later in Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela. This simultaneity between literary writing and institutional formation points to an understudied alignment between literature, geography, and politics in Latin America. I illustrate that, through a host of literary devices (e.g. metaphor, anaphora, alliteration, etc.), these writers give form to a consolidated nation-state by constructing a unifiedor potentially unify-ablegeographic space. By tracing how their narratives are informed by and in dialogue with previous non-Latin American land treatises (by, for example, Alexander von Humboldt, Henry Thomas Buckle, and Agustín Codazzi), I argue for the centrality of geographical discourse in literary, cultural, and social analysis. This project contributes to several conversations in the field, including the discourse of Eurocentrism, the issue of Amerindian versus Occidental epistemology, and the interconnectedness of race, inequality, and land distribution.

This dissertation examines counter-narratives of landscape in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru considering two moments of crisis and political discontent: 1929 and 1989. The main purpose is to understand how these counter-narratives invalidate the exhaustion of the notion landscape as studied by metropolitan scholars such as Danis E. Cosgrove and M.J.T Mitchell. Inspired by Peruvian Gamaliel Churata and British English John Berger, this study initially enters in dialogue with the deconstruction of the landscape and then, prioritizing current trends, locates the conflictive configurations and coexistence of counter-landscapes that politically empower alterity. A specific examination of the last-named scenario takes place along four ashyncronic case-studies or "acts". The first analyzes the Peruvian avant-garde publication referred as the 'journal with four names' (1926-7) where Magda Portal, among others, alters the dominant landscape in order to politically empower Lima's peripheries. The second investigates the avant-garde Colombian artist Pedro Nel Gomez's mural artwork, within the context of the indigenist group "Los Bachués", and how his widely criticized ugliness turns into defiance of cultural harmony and hegemonic perceptions of the landscape. The third act examines Los días azules (1985) by the Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo in which the landscape disrupts the physical sequence of the landscape through the act of remembering. Finally, the fourth act studies Blanca Wiethüchter's poem Madera viva y árbol difunto (1982), in order to explain how the Andean landscape ruptures a naturalistic tradition that attempted to dominate people and places. I argue that each of these four discarded counter-narratives of the landscape questions the colonially-tamed gaze, and its impulse to homogenize cultures and dissidences. As such, instead of dismantling the notion of the landscape, this study will reinstate its social and marginal imaginaries by recognizing the materiality of landscape, and, most importantly the political role of imagination in shaping the sense of the real.

This dissertation explores the ways in which contemporary Latin American narratives address the issue of marginal bodies and subjectivities by producing intricate aesthetic and ethical projects that, from a non-representational perspective, challenge the idea of one-dimensional meanings and clear-cut social and discursive identities. The argument arises from the hypothesis that these narratives articulate themselves to a contemporary historical moment marked by a social and epistemological crisis, a crisis that has to do with both current uncertainties about the future and what seems to be an historical impossibility of solving the social problems and deep economic inequalities that neoliberalism has brought to outrageous extremes. Establishing textual connections and thematic encounters between voices that emerge from different standpoints and enunciation sites, the narratives under discussion pay special attention to those impoverished and marginal bodies that dwell at the margins of our contemporary urban societies. These bodies are generally considered useless and disposable, when not contaminated and corrupted, from the point of view of the ideological prevailing system. They constitute spaces where unfixed identities are constantly being displayed and performed and where historical failure has inscribed painful scars and produced social and physical ruins. At the same time, these narratives are concerned with the problem of language and its capacity to depict a reality that cannot be completely contained by human knowledge and symbolizing devices. These narratives do not pretend simply to reflect an ongoing crisis and to represent the marginal bodies it has produced: they experiment with language in generating complex textual 'rhizomes' that impugn linear stories and contradict the normative space of fixed semantic oppositions. Language itself becomes a malleable dimension that establishes intriguing connections between textual compositions and marginal realities that, censored and usually silenced by the hegemonic and normative discourses, demand to be recognized, named and exposed by linguistic and literary forms that can interrupt 'normal' discourses and affect the comfortable stance of uncritical readers.

Identity has become a major interest for researchers in the areas of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. Recent understandings of identity emphasize its malleability and fluidity. This conceptualization of identities as malleable comes from the realization that speakers relate strategically to propositions and their interlocutors in order to achieve their communicative goals. This study is an exploration of the (co-)construction of identities in an institutional context, specifically in the Cerro Maravilla hearings. I examine the interactions between the Senates main investigator, Héctor Rivera Cruz, and five witnesses in order to explore how identities were created and how speakers managed the interactions. In chapter 2, I discuss the theoretical framework and the literature. The concepts of identity, linguistic ideologies, power, discourses, indexicalities, and stances are discussed. Chapter 3 is a literature review of studies concerned with language in the legal context, particularly in trials. In chapter 4, I provide a historical background to contextualize the Cerro Maravilla events and the Senate hearings. The next chapter is the methodology. In Chapter 6, I present the analyses of the interactions between Rivera Cruz and five witnesses. In chapter 7, I discuss the findings. Chapter 8 is the conclusion. The present study supports the notion that power is better understood as emergent in interactions, even when interactional resources are unequally available to speakers. However, it is not independent of discourses that assign value to ways of speaking and ways of interacting. I claim that speakers combine stances in creative and unexpected ways, constructing memorable identities. The overarching question that motivated this study was: Why did people talk about Rivera Cruzs performance and way of speaking? I argue that the answer lies in his creative stance taking through which he was able to provoke a clash of linguistic ideologies in an unexpected and unconventional way. I argue that Rivera Cruzs performance attests to the creativity and the immense possibilities that individuals have for creating identities, while this individuality is still connected with discourses that exist in the broad society.