During the latter part of the 19th century, the Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones peruanas, and the Cuban writer Julian del Casal's literary criticism, were widely read by many Latin Americans. Yet, some one hundred years later, Palma's work would be generally ignored by literary critics, though it would continue to be read and enjoyed by the general public. Del Casal's literary criticism would be completely forgotten, and the author himself would come to be viewed as an apolitical, anti-Cuban, escapist who accepted his country's colonial status without protesting. The present work constitutes a reevaluation of Palma's work and of del Casal's literary criticism, as well as of the latter's political involvement. A reading of Palma's Tradiciones peruanas based on the reading of Francois Rabelais' work carried out by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and His World, demonstrates that literary critics have been unjust with Palma by judging his work according to the canons and esthetics of refined, written literature, when in fact that work was meant to be popular, oral literature, with totally different literary characteristics and a totally different esthetic. Thus, the "defects" perceived by literary critics in Palma's work are really qualities and characteristics of popular, orally-oriented literature. Likewise, a reading of del Casal's "lost" critical prose, finally reedited in 1963 by the Cuban National Culture Council, demonstrates that he was very proud of being Cuban, much more political than is generally thought, and a patriot who risked his welfare by protesting his country's colonial condition. It also shows the excellence of his incisive and prophetic, modernist, literary criticism which called attention to the works of many new Latin American authors and made known to Latin Americans some of the most important European writers of his day.

The current study is a proposal that heads towards the vision of a polyphonic accompaniment of the evolution of allegory, journeying from a cavern, to the soul and out into the spheres of knowledge and representation. It examines the evolution of allegory from antiquity and goes deep into the study proposed by Walter Benjamin in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, allowing for the analysis that allegory falls into two fields of interpretation: first that of representation, and second that of the articulation. With its articulatory power of expression of a convention, allegory transgresses limits and spaces, becoming a tool of expression and verification of the past through the process of investigation and of research. So being, allegory, a discursive material for the laying out of the past, redirects the reader’s view towards a forgotten, ruined and decadent past that awaits its redemption and incorporation within the historicist discourse. With this in mind, I would argue that allegory in the works of Carpentier and Saramago, far from being a stylistic device seen by critics as a way of escaping censorship, is a poetics resulting from repositioning history through the displacement of what is already signified, bringing forth, as a crucial component of History the decadent, the displaced, the ruins and the marginalized. Allegory is a way of disrupting, transforming and subverting—through the very archival work carried out by both authors—, the temporal and territorial vocality of definitive histories and official languages, mythologies and the politics of inherited Manichean allegories that typify the rhetoric of nationhood and nationalism. Works such as El arpa y la sombra, Los pasos perdidos and “Viaje a la semilla” of Alejo Carpentier and Memorial do Convento, A Jangada de Pedra and A Caverna of José Saramago examine a circular vision of life and history and its discontinuities, the decadent phases of history that beg to be exposed in the decadent ruins of its reality. Allegory, in my analysis, is the means through which man and history are only saved by exposing the past, failures, and decadence from the time of the lost Paradise.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-258).

This dissertation examines the instrumental role played by race in the scientific conceptions of society at the turn of the Twentieth Century in Brazil and Cuba. The examination of scientific rhetoric in the work of Euclides da Cunha and Fernando Ortiz, as well as a large number of photographs, from this period of institutional modernization, identifies the racial variable as the conceptual locus of coexistence and struggle amongst multiple representational regimens produced by anthropology, sociology, literature and medicine. These diverse interdisciplinary matrices of meaning (set forth in texts and images) constructed the foundations of the concept of race through the equivalent notion of exoticism and anomaly as expressions of the axiom of difference. This ideological conceit was offered in countries marked by racial miscegenation as the means for cultural originality as well as the main threat to their political consolidation. This constituent relation of the racial difference, evident in Euclides da Cunha's masterpiece Os sertàµes (1902) or in Fernando Ortiz's early criminological work Los negros brujos (1906), prompted an alternative approach to the critical apparatus that has privileged the analysis of their aesthetic qualities. In addition, the design of ethnographic and medical portraits of the time evidenced a correlation between aesthetic value and biological description in disciplines such as criminal anthropology, tropical medicine or ethnology. This project sheds some light on the particular concern for governability and cultural legitimacy raised at the time by nationalistic ideology which influenced the racial hypothesis offered by Euclides da Cunha and Fernando Ortiz. Nonetheless this crucial aspect has been considered incidental to their intellectual careers. The work of these intellectuals has been canonized into Latin American contemporary history as models for cultural emancipation. Yet, the hypothesis of racial difference they helped to foster have explicitly or implicitly guided the implementation of state policies in culture, public health and police control in Brazil and Cuba. The analysis of the social and scientific uses of photography in the construction of the exotic and the anomalous as racial categories offers an alternative methodological approach indispensable for the reconsideration of photographic production in Latin America during the period of modernization.

This dissertation studies modernist translation spaces in Mexico City, a city that became an important hemispheric destination during the early twentieth-century. Although some earlier examples are provided for historical context, my analysis focuses primarily on architectural and editorial spaces that emerged in the city between 1917 and the late 1930s, the decades between the final years of the Mexican Revolution—during Venustiano Carranza’s administration, following the Queretaro Constitution—and the instauration of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana—founded by Lázaro Cárdenas in 1938. Modernism in Mexico City involved an international circuit of people—such as the poet Langston Hughes, the art historian Anita Brenner, the editor and anthropologist Frances Toor, the Indian activist, and founder of the communist party in Mexico M.N. Roy, and the photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston—all of whom traveled to or lived in Mexico City during the 1920s and 1930s. It also involved a series of Mexican writers, artists and intellectuals—among them, the poets Gilberto Owen, Salvador Novo and Xavier Villaurrutia, the writer and intellectual Alfonso Reyes, the muralist Diego Rivera, the architects Juan O’Gorman and Juan Segura, and the painters Dr. Atl and Nahui Olin—whose translation practices were instrumental for the making of Mexican modernism. I argue that these modernist actors played a key role as cultural translators and that it was ultimately through their work that Mexico City, among other so-called peripheral modernities, found a place in the cultural and geographical map of international modernism—a place, nonetheless, which modernist studies still tend to ignore or misrepresent. Drawing from translation theory, architectural history, transatlantic modernism, and the spatial semiology and hermeneutics, Translation Spaces maps the places, both cultural and physical, that these international modernists occupied or, in some cases, created. The five chapters study different architectural spaces—i.e. theaters, rooftops, houses, cinemas, and apartment buildings—and combine spatial analysis and architectural history of such spaces with analysis of specific translation practices that took place in them, such as literary translation, film dubbing and subtitling in modern sound cinemas, urban photography, adaptations of architectural languages to local needs, as well as literary representations and discussions of modern spaces. Taken together as different examples of modernist translation practices, the objects of study in this dissertation map modernist Mexico City as a space in a synchronic relationship to the larger map of international modernism.

In this dissertation, “Travelers, Traders, and Traitors: Mapping and Writing Piracy in England, Spain, and the Caribbean (1570-1620),” I contend that an array of early modern authors wrote about piracy in order to discuss the meanings of property, articulate jurisdictional boundaries of geographic space, and negotiate the limits of sovereignty. Drawing on a diverse corpus that includes historical accounts, literary texts, legal treatises, epistles, travelogues and maps, I argue that individuals and institutions used the term “the pirate” with constantly changing definitions to stage political, economic, and religious polemics. While following the course of the attacks carried out by the English Captain Francis Drake and primarily focusing on the language and vocabulary employed by national and colonial stakeholders to describe piracy, the project demonstrates that as piracy grew less ambiguous through legal and linguistic standardization, it lost its polemical utility. Challenging classical notions of the pirate as “the enemy of all,” I reexamine the construction of piracy as a social and transatlantic category that overlaps with political, religious and economic affairs. In this way, the project emphasizes the role of piracy as a tool of imperial narratives of power and the development of geopolitical identities in both sides of the Atlantic during the sixteenth century. The overarching narrative of my dissertation chronologically registers the process by which piracy went from being an unregulated phenomenon—evinced by the instability of the categories employed to refer it— to becoming a legally defined and controlled practice by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The first chapter, “The Plasticity of the Pirate,” addresses the unstable conceptualization of piracy, contraband, and ransom (rescate) in European legal documents, English, Spanish and Caribbean colonial accounts and literary production. The first part of this chapter analyzes Balthazar de Ayala’s De Iure et Officiis bellicis et disciplina militari (1584), Alberico Gentili’s Hispanicae advocationis (c1613) and Jean Bodin’s On Sovereignty (1576), while the second part studies the various meanings of “rescue” and “ransom” (rescate) in the Caribbean context that also account for piracy’s semantic flexibility. In Chapter 2, “Cruising Outer Spaces,” I put into dialogue the narrative and visual construction of Drake’s figure as a maritime knight—after his circumnavigation of the globe (1577-80)—with European territorial claims of possession displayed by the cartographical representation of the Caribbean archipelago. By analyzing the work of sixteenth-century Flemish, Italian, and Spanish cartographers and sailors—such as Giovanni Battista Boazio, Gerard Mercator, Juan Escalante de Mendoza, and Baltasar Vellerino de Villalobos—I reassess the role of piracy in depictions of Caribbean islands and identify contra-cartographies that dispute the Spanish Crown’s territorial order. Turning to the narrative representations of the Caribbean archipelago, the third chapter, “Setting Sails to Rhetorical Piracy: Francis Drake’s Caribbean Raid (1585-1586),” explores the mechanisms employed by Spanish, English, and colonial authors who at the time, took advantage of Drake’s attack to project varied collective and individual ambitions by appealing to and entwining the religious, economic, and political discourses. By exploring the relationship between piracy and entrepreneurship, found in English, Spanish Peninsular and colonial sources, such as Richard Hakluyt’s compilation, Principall Navigations (c1598-1600), Walter Bigges’s travelogue, A Summary (1589) and Juan de Castellanos’s heroic poem, Discurso del capitán Francisco Draque (c1587) among others, the first part of this chapter emphasizes the tensions and nuances of describing maritime predation as an economic transaction or as a multifaceted concept that moves across religious and political realms. By revisiting Spanish chroniclers of the Indies—such as Bernardino de Sahagún, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, and Bartolomé de las Casas—Dutch, English, and Portuguese jurists—such as Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Serafim Freitas—alongside Iberian legal documents, the second part of the chapter evaluates the debates and descriptions of piracy, in both Caribbean and European waters, to showcase the articulation of the terms “infection” and “infestation” as a means to either legitimize or condemn the right of maritime and territorial possession. Addressing the factual discrepancies, found in historical and literary texts about Drake’s Caribbean raid, the last part of this chapter showcases the production of polemical narratives of blame and their political repercussions in English, Spanish Iberian, and Caribbean scenarios. Chapter 4, “Dropping Anchors: Francis Drake’s Three Deaths and the Beginnings of an End,” tackles the moral, political, and economic considerations that structure the notions of libel and piracy, while also stressing their parallel processes of standardization and criminalization. Through the close-reading of literary texts and divergent historical reports that portray the defeat of King Philip II’s Armada (1588) and Drake’s last Caribbean raid (1595-96) alongside English legal treatises on libeling, the first two parts of this chapter trace the discursive overlapping of piracy and libeling driven by ulterior political and imperial aspirations. In this way, by analyzing Félix Lope de Vega’s La Dragontea (c1598), Henry Savile’s A Libell of Spanish Lies (1596), Thomas Maynarde’s Sir Francis Drake, his voyage (1595) among others, these two parts showcase the textual battles underpinned by English and Spanish disputes of power. Chronologically situated after Drake’s, Phillip II’s, and Elizabeth I’s deaths—1596, 1598, and 1603 respectively— and analyzing legal documents and other material evidence, such as the Treatise of London and Sir Henry Mainwaring’s text Of the Beginnings, Practices, and Suppression of Pirates (c 1617), the last part of this chapter highlights and registers the predominant role played by economic interests within the legal standardization of English libeling and the political agreement between Spain and England to criminalize piracy.

Studies of Latin American culture have returned time and again to the issue of how to capture the many conflicts and tensions inherent in national, group, and individual identities of the region. This dissertation examines an overlooked component of identity debates: the experience of being anonymous or unrecognized. In particular, I focus on late twentieth and early twenty-first century representations of anonymity in Argentina and Brazil. These countries share various key characteristics: emergence from recent military dictatorships; accelerating urbanization and globalization; rapid transformation of public spaces and media technologies that shape the possibilities of expressing an identity and having it recognized. Within these contexts, my dissertation considers a corpus of novels and films centered on attempts to either escape anonymity or become anonymous. Chapter 1 analyzes the decay of family and community bonds as a source of recognition and social value in Fernando Bonassiâ"u20ac™s Subúrbio and Guillermo Saccomannoâ"u20ac™s El oficinista. Chapter 2 examines media technology and the relationship between audiences and celebrities. I read Alejandro Lópezâ"u20ac™s La asesina de Lady Di and Ignácio de Loyola Brandãoâ"u20ac™s O anônimo célebre as depictions of individuals seeking mass-media fame as a form of large-scale, public recognition. Chapter 3 looks at two cinematic representations of the bus 174 hijacking in Rio de Janeiro. José Padilhaâ"u20ac™s Ã"u201dnibus 174 and Bruno Barretoâ"u20ac™s Última parada 174 show the challenge of preserving the disruptive potency of the hijackerâ"u20ac™s demand for recognition, and the danger of neutralizing it through conventional narrative tropes. Chapter 4 analyzes representations of â"u20acœdesired anonymityâ"u20ac"u009d in Sergio Chejfecâ"u20ac™s novel Mis dos mundos and Albertina Carriâ"u20ac™s film Los rubios. The first explores the freedom of anonymous wandering in cosmopolitan and digital spaces. The latter imagines the creation of a community in which the burden of post-dictatorship memory and identity can be de-individualized and shared. Taken together, these works illustrate the continued demand to identify oneself and be(come) recognized as a basis for everyday social-civil interactions. They also question the value and viability of expressing a clear identity or cohesive self-narrative in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian society. / Adam Demaray

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-199). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.