This dissertation explores the proliferation of novels written in Latin America over the past quarter century that feature translators as protagonists, asserting that the mobilization of this figure in fiction allows contemporary writers a means to reflect on the place and shape of literature in the context of shifting paradigms of cultural production and consumption, to address the uneven distribution of cultural capital still prevalent in discussions of World Literature, and to present dynamic, reciprocal notions of creativity over and against hierarchical models of intellectual influence. In my analysis of the metaphorical weight of the literary figure of the translator, I examine the engagement of three central tropes of translation theory in contemporary fiction, setting close readings of the corpus in the context of both the region's longstanding tradition of translation--epitomized in the last century by, but not limited to, the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Haroldo de Campos--and theories of translation and cultural exchange presented by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Lawrence Venuti, and Silviano Santiago, among others. Following an introduction that situates my dissertation within the broader discussion of World Literature and early reflections on the literary representation of translators in the field of translation studies, the study's second chapter explores the metaphor of translation as reproduction in both a biological sense, as seen in Luis Fernando Verissimo's Borges e os orangotangos eternos (2000), and a biogenetic one, in the form of the conflation of cloning and translation in César Aira's El congreso de literatura (1999), to explore the extent to which these works go beyond the simple inversion of the discursive hierarchy inherent to the notion of influence to posit a non-linear model of cultural exchange. The third chapter defends what I describe as translation's right to untranslatability--a mode of translational reading grounded in the recognition of cultural specificity--as it appears in narratives centered on translation failure at the level of the cognate, those terms in which two languages would appear to be at their closest; in this analysis, I focus on Salvador Benesdra's El traductor (1998) and Alan Pauls's El Pasado (2003). The fourth chapter looks at the mobilization of the textual space of the translator's footnote in Mario Bellatin's El jardí­n de la señora Murakami (2000), in relation to precursors such as the writings of Rodolfo Walsh and Moacyr Scliar, to argue that Bellatin adopts the persona of the translator as a means of destabilizing traditional notions of authorship and originality. Finally, a coda proposes two avenues for future research: one based on an extended analysis of the topographical space occupied by the translator in these narratives, and another on the alignment of translation with new models of authorship and creativity that have emerged in the digital age. In this way, the study both establishes a connection between Latin American cultural studies and translation theory, and expands the "fictional turn" of translation studies--which tends to analyze the narrative representation of translators in relation to the concrete realities of the practice--to include the symbolic mobilization of translation as a commentary on broader cultural dynamics.

This dissertation studies Chilean communists’ public and private lives. It examines the experience of being a communist and the Communist Party of Chile’s efforts to shape that experience, both in the street and at home. To what extent did communists follow party principles regarding public and private life? To what extent did communism succeed in challenging the public-private divide so dear to liberalism? These are the questions I seek to answer in this dissertation. I argue that communism was lived quite intensely, but that it would be an exaggeration to claim that most party members lived and breathed communism. Communists lived a bifurcated life: one life lived to the fullest in the public sphere and another life lived less intensely at home. This dissertation provides a detailed portrait of communist men and their relations, both at home and in the street, in order to understand how they came to inhabit and expand the Chilean political sphere. Communist ideology and activism helped men reaffirm their masculine sense of self and claim a space in the public arena, but self-sovereignty came at the cost of family life. Communism strengthened the gendered public-private divide by pulling men from their homes and imbuing them with a strong sense of mission. Communist men’s intense involvement in public affairs was to the detriment of their wives, who ended up confined to the domestic realm. Notwithstanding communist discourse, the practices fostered by the party led communist men to think of public and private as separate spheres.

Indigenous people have not disappeared, yet the myth of the vanished native persists as an ideological feature of settler politics and identities today. This dissertation examines the social mechanisms of this common settler narrative through an ethnographic study among settler colonists in Argentina who identify as primeros pobladores (“first inhabitants”) despite having built their economy on local indigenous land and labor. Based on field results, I argue that settlers sustain an identity as founders by turning indigenous locals into strangers from elsewhere—a mode of racialized role-reversal that I call “native estrangement.” My argument draws on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among settler, creole and indigenous Qom populations in the Argentine cotton belt—a subtropical lowland region of the Gran Chaco conquered from the Qom and other natives by the Argentine military in 1911 for European immigrant settlement. The dissertation focuses on three case studies of “native estrangement” developed in three parts: “Labor,” “Space” and “Race.” The two chapters of Part I – entitled Labor – argue that racialized regimes of plantation labor have been central to indigenous dispossession and resistance in Chaco historically, and that they continue to shape settler imaginaries of territorial primacy to this day. The first chapter revisits the early 20th century history of joint land and labor conquest, exemplified by the state-run Napalpí reservation: designed to keep conquered natives off settler-colonized land, the reservation also sought to both exploit and “civilize” them through de-Indianizing field labor in conditions that led to a native strike, culminating in a genocidal massacre. The second chapter turns to the present, showing that today’s settlers continue to discount indigenous primacy on the land through racialized religious distinctions between the “sacrificial labor” of settler cotton farming, and the mere “gathering” of cotton-picking labor, deemed an inherent distinction of evolutionary aptitudes between sedentary and hunter-gathering peoples. Part II – Space – argues that settlers turn natives into strangers spatially by imagining them as an influx from elsewhere. A chapter examines what I call the settlers’ “imagined geographies of native origin,” which includes both nationwide Argentine patterns of attributing foreign provenance to indigenous people near the borderlands, as well as smaller-scale settler tendencies to imagine natives as migrants from a locus beyond the space and time of settler “founding.” The following chapter examines the effect of this racialized estrangement on those estranged, through a comparison between two ethnically similar Qom slums outside the settler colony that are respectively racialized as more “savage” or more “civilized.” Through archival and oral history, the precursors of this difference are traced to the “savage” slum’s ancestral ties to the colony’s terrain itself, from which they were repeatedly removed or ousted in several stages over the past century. Part III – Race – complicates the settler-native binary by exploring how criollization contributes to indigenous dispossession, through a case study of racialized ghost-stories and segregated deathways in the traditional Qom territories of Napalpí. The chapter traces criollo rumors about white settler ghosts at the inauguration of a settler landmark near a segregated gringo-criollo cemetery, all of which is built on an original Qom “burial ground”. While the state-funded landmark was meant to sacrilize a settler myth of founding, these criollo rumors disrupt that official narrative with a phantasmagoric backstory of white devil worship that highlights the ongoing segregation between the groups. Although the creoles’ segregated class position is premised on their visible indigenous trace, their rumors of resistance nevertheless disavow a third indigenous Qom deathway. Racialized rifts between dominant “melting pot” and repressed “creole” renditions of national territorial belonging generate and sustain a native absence from both narratives. A process which, as I demonstrate, is not able to eradicate the ongoing assertions to sovereignty that indigenous claims to these territories represent.

This dissertation was designed using a qualitative research mode of inquiry that utilized a mixed methodology approach. This dissertation was an ethnographic narrative study tracking eight young women who were “aging out” or forced to leave their orphanage in Peru, where most of them had spent a majority of their lives. The study examined the way in which a collaborative art community could support the participants as they narrated their lives over a 16-month period of time through photojournaling and social media outlets. This study relied upon interviews, on-site observations, personal journaling, and photographing, in addition to an overall thematic analysis of the output of each of the eight participants and two nuns. From these data, six key themes emerged concerning the outcomes of each young girl’s continuing life at the Hogar and their endeavors outside of the orphanage. The focal points of this study were community building via art making and building of personal aesthetic, community engagement, reflection on self-identity, cross-cultural art education, and shared experience via photo-art narratives and social media. This research also examined the role of collaborative art experiences in helping these young women structure new identities and form collaborations with their peers designed to sustain them into their future lives. This dissertation studied not only the formation of singular identities but how these functioned within a collaborative identity that supported the young participants as they moved out of their orphanage and forward into the outside world.

Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo analisar a questão da circulação de ideias e a construção de identidades na América Latina a partir de três ensaios produzidos entre fins do século XIX e inícios do século XX: El porvenir de las naciones hispanoamericanas (1899), do mexicano Francisco Bulnes (1847-1924); A América Latina: males de origem (1905), do brasileiro Manoel Bomfim (1868-1932) e Les democraties latines de lAmerique (1912), do peruano Francisco García Calderón (1883-1953). Por meio desses textos, este trabalho procura discutir as concepções sobre o fazer intelectual presente em cada um desses autores, o processo de elaboração e circulação das ideias no subcontinente em relação aos paradigmas europeu e norte-americano e a variedade de projetos identitários existentes na América Latina no umbral do século XX. O cotejo desses três ensaios permite que se explicite um conjunto de temas e problemas comuns que permeavam o pensamento político na América Latina da época, entre os quais é importante ressaltar a discussão sobre o lugar do subcontinente no mundo diante da expansão do capitalismo e do imperialismo entre fins do século XIX e inícios do século XX. / I intend to analyze in this research three major essays produced in Latin America in the beginning of the 20th Century: El porvenir de las naciones hispanoamericanas (1899), by Mexican Francisco Bulnes (1847-1924); A América Latina: males de origem (1905), by Brazilian Manoel Bomfim (1868- 1932) and Les démocraties latines de lAmerique (1912), by Peruvian Francisco García Calderón (1883-1953). I will emphasize the problems around the circulation of ideas and the building of identities in the subcontinent. The comparison among these three essays will allow me to discuss a whole set of common themes and issues related to political ideas in Latin America at that time and to think about Latin Americas place during the so called Age of Empire.

During the Guatemalan civil war (1962-1996), different forms of anonymity enabled members of the organizations of the social movement, revolutionary militants, and guerrilla combatants to address the popular classes and rural majorities, against the backdrop of generalized militarization and state repression. Pseudonyms and anonymous collective action, likewise, acquired political centrality for revolutionary politics against a state that sustained and was symbolically co-constituted by forms of proper naming that signify class and racial position, patriarchy, and ethnic difference. Between 1979 and 1981, at the highest peak of mass mobilizations and insurgent military actions, the symbolic constitution of the Guatemalan state was radically challenged and contested. From the perspective of the state’s elites and military high command, that situation was perceived as one of crisis; and between 1981 and 1983, it led to a relatively brief period of massacres against indigenous communities of the central and western highlands, where the guerrillas had been operating since 1973. Despite its long duration, by 1983 the fate of the civil war was sealed with massive violence. Although others have recognized, albeit marginally, the relevance of the politics of naming during Guatemala’s civil war, few have paid attention to the relationship between the state’s symbolic structure of signification and desire, its historical formation, and the dynamics of anonymous collective action and revolutionary pseudonymity during the war. Even less attention has received the affective and psychic dynamics between proper naming, state violence, and the symbolic formation of the Guatemalan state. This dissertation addresses that relationship and dynamic. Following a historical-anthropological perspective, I argue that, from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s decade, prior to the beginning of the civil war, the Guatemalan state took the form of a finca-state. The Guatemalan finca-state functioned by inscribing, in the form of proper names, lineages and inheritance of colonial and post-colonial origin that came to signify wealth, whiteness, renown, and surplus of pleasure or jouissance, in the form of White-European patronymics, by virtue of which, indigenous proper names were forced to occupy the position of loss. This form of inscription, I argue, produced the foreclosure of the indigenous other. For the indigenous pueblos, nonetheless, state enforced inscription established forms of interpellation that desubjectivized the conditions of their own institutions of proper naming by turning them into mere objects of identification. The politics of pseudonymity and anonymity that proliferated between 1979 and 1981, especially among indigenous people of the Guatemalan highlands, was a refusal of a form of state that excluded the possibility of their recognition beyond identification. In a deep sense, anonymity and pseudonymity enabled revolutionary militants to become truly others, a condition that disorganized previous forms of state identification. In their inability to respond to a sense of crisis under conditions of anonymous collective action and revolutionary pseudonymity, the Guatemalan army responded with massive violence as an attempt at eliminating their sense of threat. I pay particular attention to the Ixil region, where the UN sponsored Guatemalan truth commission concluded that the Guatemalan army perpetrated acts of genocide against indigenous communities of Ixil descent. This dissertation is based on extensive archival research conducted between the months of October 2014 and May 2015, extensive collective and individual interviews carried out between 2004 and 2007, and ethnographic observation in the Ixil region between May and October of 2015. Its methodology follows the routes of collaborative research, archival reading, and ethnographic participant observation.

My thesis explores the social construction of identity of 50 second generation migrant-Australian women aged 17 to 28 years using a qualitative methodology. I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 25 women from Latin American backgrounds and 25 women from Turkish backgrounds. My study investigated the intersections of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and nationality. I found that the Latin women constructed their ethnic culture in reference to their country-of-origin traditions, and that they also identified with a pan-ethnic Latin culture that included migrants from other South and Central America countries. I found that the Turkish women constructed Turkish culture in reference to their religious practices, and they saw themselves as �Muslim-Turks� who identified with an Islamic pan-ethnic culture that included Muslim migrants from different national backgrounds. The women in both groups drew upon Anglo-Australian culture when it came to their gender and sexuality constructions. The Latin and Turkish women did not see themselves as �typical� women from their migrant communities. Instead, their sense of femininity was informed by what they saw as Australian egalitarianism. The women in both groups saw Anglo-Australians� gender relationships as an ideal, and as one woman said of Anglo-Australians, �how much more equal can you can get?� The women�s social construction of the nation was equally influenced by multiculturalism and an Anglo-Australian identity. They highly valued their Australian citizenship and felt positive about their lives in Australia. At the same time, they had faced ongoing racism and they reported that other people judged their Australian identities through racial characteristics. One woman said that in order for people to be accepted as Australian, �you have to be Anglo and not look like me�. Despite this sense of social exclusion, the majority of my sample held hybrid migrant-Australian identities. I develop a threefold typology of the women�s identities, and I found that 13 women did not see themselves as Australian, 36 women saw themselves as partly-Australian, and one woman held an exclusively Australian identity. I argue that narratives of multiculturalism and Anglo-Australian identity influenced the women�s social construction of identity. Their belief that Australian identity was multicultural was at odds with their experiences of racism and their own self identities, and so I examine the women�s beliefs in reference to an �ideology of multiculturalism�. This ideology supported the women�s contribution to the nation as second generation migrants, and ultimately, they expressed an unwavering support for Australian multiculturalism.

This study researched the effect of a basic computer course on the comfort level with computers and Internet on 17 Spanish-speaking, non-computer literate adults. It also identified any increase of the participants’ integration of computers and Internet into employment related activities. Five male and twelve female Hispanic adults completed a four-day basic computer literacy training course. Data collected through pre and post content exams; pre, post, and follow-up comfort and use surveys, and attendance records at the training center showed positive results. The short-term training course was effective in reducing participants’ fears about using a computer. The training course also proved effective in stimulating the participants to utilize computers and Internet for personal and/or professional benefit. / Thesis (M.Ed.)--Wichita State University, College of Education, Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction. / "May 2006." / Includes bibliographic references (leaves 40-43).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 25, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Anthropology, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 259-270).