Mester

Mester v. 42

In the twenty-first century, Latina/o visual culture has taken a refreshing turn in the representation of Latina desire, sexuality, and freedom as a new generation of actresses and directors contributes to this medium in cultural and film studies. In particular, film directors have created alternative models for Latinas who migrate within cities in the U.S. and across transnational borders signifying a domestic and global expansion of Latinidad. This study focuses on Chicanas’ and Latinas’ journeys to control their bodies and minds in the context of urban migrations between the cultures of Latin America and the United States in two cinematic narratives. In the post-2000 decade, two critically acclaimed independent films, Real Women Have Curves (2002) and María Full of Grace (2004), have depicted Latina adolescents coming of age in transnational cities, Bogotá, Los Angeles, and New York, to demonstrate how the politics of the body and mind can affect the dynamics of family relationships and the division of labor within the larger scheme of globalization.

This study explores the concept of hemispheric intersection by analyzing language ideologies that have shaped the linguistic construct of the Judeo-Spanish language. Given the abundance of languages that have influenced the overall linguistic strata of Judeo-Spanish over the past five centuries, the primary questions of this study are: (1) what are the hegemonic factors that have been imposed on Judeo-Spanish speaking communities and (2) how are such factors representative of linguistic change within the language? This article, therefore, commences by providing a brief historical development of the Judeo-Spanish language so that readers understand how this language may be considered a language rich in global interaction and construction. In order to address the main questions of this study, I describe a similar phenomenon occurring in three Judeo-Spanish communities worldwide: Israel, Turkey and the United States. I then describe what are to be considered the reasons for linguistic assimilation, language modification and language shift in the context of each setting. Analysis of these dynamics will guide the examination of Judeo-Spanish metalinguistic practices and choices based on the global dwelling of the language and its speaker. I then conclude by reviewing the central elements that are factored into contemporary Judeo-Spanish linguistic constructs and suggest expansion of this research.

This article examines the rhetorical use of the notions of infancy and childhood in the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios Reales. Garcilaso's own childhood and the Inca customs surrounding childhood are deployed as rhetorical resources to increase the author's credibility; to recreate his genealogy along with the story of the Incas; to negotiate legitimacy and social mobility and; in the end, to claim an inheritance, both in the literal and in the figurative sense.

Born of political repression, censorship and torture, the novel Zero: romance pré-histórico by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão was revised in congruence with the intensity of repression in Brazil. In 2001, a new edition integrated pages that had been previously excluded from the novel. In this essay, I borrow narratological terms from Gérard Genette and David Herman to examine the most politically charged sections from the missing pages. A close reading sheds light on the relationship between what Herman calls the storyworld, that is, the fictional world of Latíndia-America that Loyola created, and what we think of as the real world in which Loyola was writing. I analyze how the content of the missing pages challenges the hegemonic ideology of the regime that banned Zero in its construction of a meta-commentary on neocolonial relations between Brazil and the United States. By employing Elaine Scarry’s work on the structure of torture, I argue that censorship and torture operate both textually and extra-textually in Zero. The missing pages illuminate this relationship in their criticism of a regime characterized by its dependence on censorship and torture to maintain its illegitimate and flagging power.

This submission includes a brief critical introduction and translation of contemporary Brazilian writer Luiz Ruffato's 2013 speech presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

An excerpt from they were many horses by Luiz Ruffato, Translation by Rebecca Lippman with an introduction by Peter Lehman

Una entrevista con Sara Sefchovich

An Interview with scholar John Beverley.

Carla Guelfenbein es la autora de las novelas El revés del alma (2003), La mujer de mi vida (2006), El resto es silencio (2009) y Nadar desnudas (2012) y es uno de los autores bestsellers en Chile y Latinoamérica. Sus cuatro novelas han sido traducidas a más de una docena de idiomas. Su obra tiene un alcance verdaderamente global y por lo tanto se relaciona estrechamente con el tema—las intersecciones hemisféricas—de esta edición de Mester. Cuando Guelfenbein vino a UCLA para dar una conferencia sobre su novela más reciente, Nadar desnudas, aprovechamos la ocasión para entrevistarla sobre su obra, su relación con la literatura chilena y el mercado literario transnacional.

This book review evaluates the lates publication of comparative inter-American scholar José David Saldívar.

The relationship between Mapuche indigenous people and the Chilean state has been the focus of an increasing number of books within Chile and abroad, all of which probe how the Mapuche have responded to past and present government policies. These publications are written by Mapuche and non-Mapuche academics, trained in the disciplines of anthropology, history, literature and sociology and, unlike previous historiography, they focus on Mapuche actors’ political negotiations with the state. The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History by Joanna Crow dialogues with these publications and adds a new dimension to them by focusing on identity debates and cultural politics.

Gustavo Faverón Patriau retoma en su libro apreciación de la literatura latinoamericana como alegoría nacional para ofrecer una notable teoría alternativa: la literatura decimonónica como contragoría. Faverón Patriau define la contragoría como un discurso que, pese a su afán totalizador, contiene elementos contradictorios que develan la presencia  de una disidencia que se infiltra en la trama alegórica, quebrando así sus pretensiones de unidad. Para sostener su argumento, Faverón Patriau divide su libro en seis capítulos en los cuales analiza textos como Las memorias de Túpac Amaru de Juan Bautista Túpac Amaru, Sab de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, María de Jorge Isaacs y Peregrinación de Luz del Día de Juan Bautista Alberdi.