One of the important cultural responses to political and sociohistorical events in Latin America is a resurgence of urban photography, which typically blends high art and social documentary. But ...unlike other forms of cultural production in Latin America, photography has received relatively little sustained critical analysis. This pioneering book offers one of the first in-depth investigations of the complex and extensive history of gendered perspectives in Latin American photography through studies of works from Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala.David William Foster examines the work of photographers ranging from the internationally acclaimed artists Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, and Marcos López to significant photographers whose work is largely unknown to English-speaking audiences. He grounds his essays in four interlocking areas of research: the experience of human life in urban environments, the feminist matrix and gendered cultural production, Jewish cultural production, and the ideological principles of cultural works and the connections between the works and the sociopolitical and historical contexts in which they were created. Foster reveals how gender-marked photography has contributed to the discourse surrounding the project of redemocratization in Argentina and Guatemala, as well as how it has illuminated human rights abuses in both countries. He also traces photography's contributions to the evolution away from the masculinist-dominated post–1910 Revolution ideology in Mexico. This research convincingly demonstrates that Latin American photography merits the high level of respect that is routinely accorded to more canonical forms of cultural production.
El Eternauta, Daytripper, and Beyond examines the graphic narrative tradition in the two South American countries that have produced the medium’s most significant and copious output. Argentine ...graphic narrative emerged in the 1980s, awakened by Héctor Oesterheld’s groundbreaking 1950s serial El Eternauta. After Oesterheld was “disappeared" under the military dictatorship, El Eternauta became one of the most important cultural texts of turbulent mid-twentieth-century Argentina. Today its story, set in motion by an extraterrestrial invasion of Buenos Aires, is read as a parable foretelling the “invasion" of Argentine society by a murderous tyranny. Because of El Eternauta, graphic narrative became a major platform for the country’s cultural redemocratization. In contrast, Brazil, which returned to democracy in 1985 after decades of dictatorship, produced considerably less analysis of the period of repression in its graphic narratives. In Brazil, serious graphic narratives such as Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá’s Daytripper, which explores issues of modernity, globalization, and cross-cultural identity, developed only in recent decades, reflecting Brazilian society’s current and ongoing challenges. Besides discussing El Eternauta and Daytripper, David William Foster utilizes case studies of influential works—such as Alberto Breccia and Juan Sasturain’s Perramus series, Angélica Freitas and Odyr Bernardi’s Guadalupe, and others—to compare the role of graphic narratives in the cultures of both countries, highlighting the importance of Argentina and Brazil as anchors of the production of world-class graphic narrative.
The enlightened army David Toscana, Toscana; David William Foster, Foster
01/2019
eBook
Ignacio Matus is a public school history teacher in Monterrey, Mexico, who gets fired because of his patriotic rantings about Mexico's repeated humiliations by the United States. Not only did ...Mexico's northern neighbor steal a large swath of the country in the Mexican-American War, but according to Matus it also denied him Olympic glory. Excluded from the 1924 Olympics, Matus ran his own parallel marathon and beat the time of the American who officially won the bronze medal. After spending decades attempting to vindicate his supposed triumph and claim the medal, Matus seeks an even bigger vindication-he will reconquer Texas for Mexico! Recruiting an army of "los iluminados," the enlightened ones, Matus sets off on a quest as worthy of Don Quixote as it is doomed.David Toscana is one of Latin America's leading contemporary writers, and his books have won several prestigious awards, including the Casa de las Américas Prize for The Enlightened Army. The novel's treatment of the troubled relations between Mexico and the United States makes it highly topical at a time when immigration and border walls capture headlines, while its lyrical writing and humorous take on the absurdities of everyday life offer timeless pleasures.
Jorge Sáenz's (b.1958) photographic study of Paraguayan military schools for conscripts (1990-1996) was subsequently used by the Servicio de Paz y Justicia-Paraguay (SERPAJ-PY) in their political ...campaign to revise persistent practices of military conscription employed during the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989). This article examines the nature and strategies of those photographs, first published sporadically in the ABC daily and later gathered in the photobook Rompan filas (1996) as part of a more sustained engagement with military reform and the human rights record of (re)democratization in Paraguay.
Mexican-American life, like that of nearly every contemporary community, has been extensively photographed. Yet there is surprisingly little scholarship on Chicano photography.Picturing the ...Barriopresents the first book-length examination on the topic. David William Foster analyzes the imagery of ten distinctive artists who offer a range of approaches to portraying Chicano life. The production of each artist is examined as an ideological interpretation of how Chicano experience is constructed and interpreted through the medium of photography, in sites ranging from the traditional barrio to large metropolitan societies. These photographers present artistic as well as documentary images of the socially invisible. They and their subjects grapple with definitions of identity, as well as ethnicity and gender. As such, this study deepens our understanding of the many interpretations of the "Chicano experience."
This study presents an analysis of two works by Augusto Roa Bastos,El trueno entre las hojasandHijo de hombre. In his investigation of these texts, Foster traces the development of Roa Bastos's ...concern with the reality of his people and their history, and focuses on the mature techniques employed in the creation of a literary myth of a social reality.
First published in 1987 (this second edition in 1992), the Handbook of Latin American Literature offers readers the opportunity to explore this literary history in the English Language and ...constitutes an ideological approach to Latin American Literature. It provides both concise information concerning particular authors, works, and literary traditions of Latin America as well as comprehensive material about the various national literatures of the area. This book will therefore be of interest to Hispanic scholars, as well as more general readers and non-Hispanists.
Distinguishing figural or typological allegory -- a method adapted from the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament -- from the broader Hellenistic concept of allegory, this book examines its use in ...representative poems of early Hispanic literature. The author focuses on the thematic and structural employment of this originally nonliterary device and comments on the literary problems it posed and the artistic effects which were achieved by it. The development of this particular allegorical method in medieval Hispanic literature -- works in Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan -- he shows, was fully equal to that found in the medieval Latin, Italian, and English literatures, and an understanding of its use serves to clarify the interpretation of many individual poems.
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