Books

  Reinventar o social: movimentos e narrativas de resistência nas Américas 

edited by Isabel Caldeira, Maria José Canelo and Gonçalo Cholant, University of Coimbra University Press (2021)

(ebook: https://doi.org/10.14195/978-989-26-2126-5)

Based on an inter-American studies perspective, the case studies composing this volume look into the definition of the social, its traditional configurations and more recent reconfigurations in the wider context of the Americas. It also focuses on past and present crisis and social struggles alongside with the answers, movements, narratives and discourses of resistance they brought about. By exploring new territories, the present volume aims at contributing to the creation of a new grammar and pedagogy of the social deriving from epistemological and practical perspectives on the Americas. This study is interdisciplinary at core, intersecting history, sociology, and criticism on literature, film and music.

 
Human Rights in the Americas
Edited By María Herrera-SobekFrancisco Lomelí and Luz Angélica Kirschner
Copyright Year 2021
ISBN 9780367636913
Published March 9, 2021 by Routledge
334 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
This interdisciplinary book explores human rights in the Americas from multiple perspectives and fields. Taking 1492 as a point of departure, the text explores Eurocentric historiographies of human rights and offer a more complete understanding of the genealogy of the human rights discourse and its many manifestations in the Americas.
 
InterAmerican Perspectives in the 21st Century
Festschrift in Honor of Josef Raab
Edited by Olaf Kaltmeier and Wilfried Raussert
April 2021

270 pages

Paperback
ISBN: 9781608012114
Publishing Partner: Inter-American Studies
This collection of scholarly essays presents recent lines of research and results in the field of hemispheric InterAmerican Studies. The book also opens new perspectives for future research. The collection of essays is interdisciplinary and brings together historical, film, literary and cultural studies approaches to the Americas. Renowned scholars and young researchers make this book a cross-disciplinary anthology highly suitable for scholars and students.
Raussert, Wilfried (ed.). The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies. 2017.
An essential overview of this blossoming field, The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies is the first collection to draw together the diverse approaches and perspectives on the field, highlighting the importance of Inter-American Studies as it is practiced today. Including contributions from canonical figures in the field as well as a younger generation of scholars, reflecting the foundation and emergence of the field and establishing links between older and newer methodologies, this Companion covers:
– Theoretical reflections
– Colonial and historical perspectives
– Cultural and political intersections
– Border discourses More…
Raussert, Wilfried, Rozema, Brian; Campos, Yolanda, Littschwager, Marius (eds.). Key Tropes in Inter-American Studies from the “Forum for Inter-American Research (fiar).” 2016.
This book is a key text for scholars and students that study the Americas in a multilingual and transdisciplinary fashion. The dialogical paradigm that underlies any sincere Inter-American scholarship makes clear that no single scholarly positioning can capture the complexity of Inter-American connectivity. This is what Inter-American Studies share with Global Studies: A necessity to negotiate multiple and at times conflictive paradigms to tackle its objects of investigation. The volume introduces eight key tropes in Inter-American Studies, as they have emerged from the work of the IAS web publication platform fiar forum for inter-american research since the latter’s foundation in 2008. The editors have selected eight key tropes and regrouped essays from the period between 2008 and 2015 to highlight some of the most important paradigms for the pursuit of interdisciplinary Inter-American studies. More…
Breinig, Helmbrecht. Hemispheric Imaginations: North American Fictions of Latin America. 2017
What image of Latin America have North American fiction writers created, found, or echoed, and how has the prevailing discourse about the region shaped their work? How have their writings contributed to the discursive construction of our southern neighbors, and how has the literature undermined this construction and added layers of complexity that subvert any approach based on stereotypes? Combining American Studies, Canadian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Theory, Breinig relies on long scholarly experience to answer these and other questions. Hemispheric Imaginations, an ambitious interdisciplinary study of literary representations of Latin America as encounters with the other, is among the most extensive such studies to date. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars of American Studies. …More…
Kummels, Ingrid, Claudia Rauhut et al. Transatlantic Caribbean: Dialogues of People, Practices, Ideas, 2014
»Transatlantic Caribbean« widens the scope of research on the Caribbean by focusing on its transatlantic interrelations with North America, Latin America, Europe and Africa and by investigating long-term exchanges of people, practices and ideas. Based on innovative approaches and rich empirical research from anthropology, history and literary studies the contributions discuss border crossings, south-south relations and diasporas in the areas of popular culture, religion, historical memory as well as national and transnational social and political movements. …More
Raab, Josef (ed.) New World Colors: Ethnicity, Belonging, and Difference in the Americas. 2014
Focusing on developments of the past half century, this volume rediscovers the Americas as contested continents. Its twenty essays explore ethnicity, belonging, and difference in sites and contexts located throughout the Western Hemisphere—from Canada and the United States to Bolivia and Chile. They examine methods and motives for constructing identities and declaring affiliations in literature and other media, in communities and social movements, in national and transnational scenarios. …More
Raab, Josef, Alexander Greiffenstern (eds.) Interculturalism in North America: Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Beyond. 2013.
As the essays and interviews collected in this volume demonstrate, inter­culturalism has been and continues to be the American way of life. While this book concentrates on Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean—with some cross-references to Brazil—, interculturalism does not stop there. It is an inter-American and a global phenomenon, which calls for a transdisciplinary and transnational academic practice. This volume distinguishes three main ways of dealing with difference in intercultural scenarios: (1) a transcultural approach that focuses on the interaction of cultural practices, (2) a reinforcement of cultural distinctiveness that resists interpenetration and amalgamation, and (3) a return to spaces, communities, histories, or cultural practices that results in their rediscovery as different. …More
Kaltmeier, Olaf, ed. Transnational Americas: Envisioning Inter-American Area Studies in Globalization Processes. 2013.
The Americas are shaped by a multitude of reciprocal dynamics which have extensive, conflictive and at times contradictory consequences for society, culture, and politics. These processes are embedded within a history of interdependence and mutual observation between North and South, which originates in the conquest and simultaneous “invention” of America by European colonial powers and which extends into the recent processes of integration. The latter encompass diverse phenomena such as migration, political integration, cross-cultural production and translocal identity formations. This book focuses on the border-crossing dynamics of globalization processes and seeks to conceive of an inter-American space of entanglements as a new perspective in area studies. With 16 essays divided into four sections—“Inter-American Geopolitics,” “Migration, Diaspora, Translocal Communities,” “Globalization of Indigenous Identities,” and “Post-multicultural Identity Politics”—this volume seeks to contribute to a transnational understanding of the Americas.More
Raussert, Wilfried, Graciela Martínez-Zalce (eds.) (Re)Discovering ‘America’ / (Re)Descrubiendo ‘America’: Road Movies and Other Travel Narratives in North America / Road movie y otras narrativas de viaje en América del Norte. 2012.
This collection of essays in English and in Spanish is concerned with the travels of a genre and related issues of artistic, national, and transnational identities. In recent decades there has been a reemergence of road movies on a global scale. This volume is especially interested in the expansion of the genre in the Americas—with a particular focus on what we like to label new and alternative road movies that have come out of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. As scholars and critics we intend to rediscover ‘America’ through the lens of a transnational, inter-American approach. While, cinematically speaking, we certainly can and have to trace the filmic origins of road movies to the U.S. and Hollywood, we want to emphasize the importance of revisiting the genre within a North-South perspective and to explore how the genre has changed through the cultural flows of globalization in recent decades.More
Kirschner, Luz Angélica (ed.) Expanding Latinidad: An Inter-American Perspective. 2012. Latin@s/Hispanics constitute the largest and fastest-growing minority in the U.S.A. Constructions of an “illegal” and “disorderly” latinidad are common in public discourse, but the difficulty in pigeonholing Latin@s/Hispanics according to binary U.S. American racial categories and the allegedly low levels of race conflict in the otherwise politically and socioeconomically convoluted Latin American region have led some intellectuals to hail U.S. latinidad (also called mestizaje/mestiçagem in Latin America) as a revolutionary force that may change the way the U.S.A. talks and thinks about race, thus leading the way to a raceless democracy, where issues of race and ethnicity will be superseded…More
Gurr, Jens Martin, Wilfried Raussert (eds.) Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film. 2011.
‘Complexity’ has long been recognized as a key characteristic of urban life and has recently even been proposed as the key characteristic of the city suitable to serve as an integrating paradigm for urban research generally. However, despite a widely perceived affinity between the city and both the novel and film—and the wealth of research on the city in literature and film—, the specific issue of how literary texts represent urban complexity has received little explicit scholarly attention…More
Butler, Martin, Jens Martin Gurr, Olaf Kaltmeier (eds.) EthniCities: Metropolitan Cultures and Ethnic Identities in the Americas. 2011.
As highly complex and dynamic systems, cities in the Americas not only serve as habitats for the majority of people and constitute economic and political centers linking peripheral regions with globalizing markets; they also function as nuclei for the hybridization of cultures and as ‘labora-tories’ for the formation, reformation, and transformation of ethnic selves and communities…More
Raussert, Wilfried, Michelle Habell-Pallán (eds.) Cornbread and Cuchifritos: Ethnic Identity Politics, Transnationalization, and Transculturation in American Urban Popular Music. 2011.
With a nod to the recent shift to postnational and postnationalistic studies of the Americas the editors consider the study of popular music as paradigmatic for the shift from a purely national to transnational American Studies. After all, sounds travel fast, cross national and cultural boundaries constantly, and feed on cultural exchange both in processes of production and reception…More
Raab, Josef, Sebastian Thies, Daniela Noll-Opitz (eds.) Screening the Americas/Proyectando las Amércias: Narration of Nation in Documentary Film/Narración de la nación en el cine documental. 2011.
This collection of essays addresses the role of documentary film in negotiations of national identity throughout the Western Hemisphere. Twenty essays by scholars from Latin America, the U.S.A., and Europe analyze narrations of nation in this genre, focusing on documentary film as a political medium, representations of the margins of the nation, postmodern documentary aesthetics, the function of documentaries in terms of cultural memory, and recent revisions of documentary film history…More
Trutino, John (ed.). Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States. 2013.
Mexico and Mexicans have been involved in every aspect of making the United States from colonial times until the present. Yet this shared history is a largely untold story, eclipsed by headlines about illegal immigration and the drug war. Placing Mexicans and Mexico in the centre of American history, this volume elucidates how economic, social, and cultural legacies grounded in colonial New Spain shaped both Mexico and the United States, as well as how Mexican Americans have constructively participated in North American ways of production, politics, social relations, and cultural understandings.More
Aldama, Frederick Louis. The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature, 2013.
The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature presents the first comprehensive overview of these popular, experimental and diverse literary cultures. Frederick Luis Aldama traces a historical path through Latino/a literature, examining both the historical and political contexts of the works, as well as their authors and the readership. He also provides an enlightening analysis of: the differing sub-groups of Latino/a literature, including Mexican American, Cuban American, Puerto Rican American, Dominican American, and Central and South American emigre authors established and emerging literary trends such as the postmodern, historical, chica-lit storytelling formats and the graphic novel key literary themes, including gender and sexuality, feminist and queer voices, and migration and borderlands….More
Castellanos, M. Bianet, Lourdes Gutierrez Najera, Arturo J. Aldama (eds.). Comparative Indigeneities of the Americas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach. 2012.
The effects of colonization on the Indigenous peoples of the Américas over the past 500 years have varied greatly. So too have the forms of resistance, resilience, and sovereignty. In the face of these differences, the contributors to this volume contend that understanding the commonalities in these Indigenous experiences will strengthen resistance to colonial forces still at play. This volume marks a critical moment in bringing together transnational and interdisciplinary scholarship to articulate new ways of pursuing critical Indigenous studies.
Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas highlights intersecting themes such as indigenísmo, mestizaje, migration, displacement, autonomy, sovereignty, borders, spirituality, and healing that have historically shaped the experiences of Native peoples across the Américas….More
Bost, Suzanne, Frances Apricio (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature. 2012.
Latino/a literature is one of the fastest developing fields in the discipline of literary studies. It represents an identity that is characterized by fluidity and diversity, often explored through divisions formed by language, race, gender, sexuality, and immigration. The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature presents over forty essays by leading and emerging international scholars of Latino/a literature and analyses: Regional, cultural and sexual identities in Latino/a literature Worldviews and traditions of Latino/a cultural creation Latino/a literature in different international contexts The impact of differing literary forms of Latino/a literature The politics of canon formation in Latino/a literature. This collection provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of this literary culture….More
  Castillo, Debra A. Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture. 2012.
What would American literature look like in languages other than English, and what would Latin American literature look like if we understood the United States to be a Latin American country and took seriously the work by U.S. Latinos/as in Spanish? Debra A. Castillo explores these questions by highlighting the contributions of Latinos/as writing in Spanish and Spanglish. …More…
  Saldivar, Jose. Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico. 2011.
A founder of U.S.-Mexico border studies, Jose David Saldivar is a leading figure in efforts to expand the scope of American studies. In Trans-Americanity, he advances that critical project by arguing for a transnational, antinational, and “outernational” paradigm for American studies. …More…
Crandall, Britta H. Hemispheric Giants: The Misunderstood History of U.S.-Brazilian Relations. 2011.
Tracing the full arc of U.S.-Brazilian interaction, Hemispheric Giants thoroughly explores the enigmatic and often-misunderstood nature of the relationship between the two largest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Britta Crandall asks the crucial question of why significant engagement between the United States and Brazil has been so scarce since the inception of the bilateral relationship in the late 1800s. Especially, she critically examines Washington’s so-called “benign neglect”-a policy often criticized as unbefitting Brazil’s size and strategic importance. …More…
Langley, Lester D. America and the Americas: the United States in the Western Hemisphere. 2nd edition, 2010.
In this completely revised and updated edition of America and the Americas, Lester D. Langley covers the long period from the colonial era into the twenty-first century, providing an interpretive introduction to the history of U.S. relations with Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada. Langley draws on the other books in the series to provide a more richly detailed and informed account of the role and place of the United States in the hemisphere. In the process, he explains how the United States, in appropriating the values and symbolism identified with “America,” has attained a special place in the minds and estimation of other hemispheric peoples. …More…
  Benessaieh, Afef (ed.) Ameriques Transculturelles – Transcultural Americas. 2010.
Transculturality is a new way of viewing culture that sees cultures not as separate islands that are easily differentiated from one another, but as connected and interacting webs of meaning and practice. The Americas in particular offer many examples of transcultural identities that do not fit easily into one national or ethnic mold: Chicanos, Franco-Ontarians, Creoles, and second and third generation immigrants. From Quebec to Argentina, this volume explores these identities which create themselves in a space between sameness and difference. …More