Description
(Text)
The 18 essays collected in this volume explore the notion of cultural difference as it is expressed in spaces, communities, and discourses that extend from Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean to Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. The essays examine literary texts, films, television, performance art, murals, and music as well as language contact, political agendas, and indigenous rights. These paradigmatic case studies deepen and diversify our understanding of the ways in which spaces, communities, and discourses are constructed in the Americas, while also discussing the effects of those con-structions.At a time when "globalists" and "antiglobalists" seem doomed to ending their conflicts with each other in exhaustion, Spaces-Communities-Discourses leads out of the globalist impasse into a brilliant focus on (in Raab's words) "neither same nor separate," both America and Americas, individual talent and belonging. The contributors to this volume work forcefully in inter-hemi
(Table of content)
CONTENTS
SASKIA HERTLEIN AND JOSEF RAAB
Introduction: Spaces, Communities, and Discourses in Inter-American Studies 1
I. SPACES
JOSEF RAAB
Megacity Mazes: Tangles and Violence in Cidade de Deus,Amores perros, and Crash 23
MINNI SAWHNEY
Mexican-U.S. Border Literature and the Narco Novel 51
SOPHIA A. MCCLENNEN
Life in the Red Zone; Or, the Geographies of Neoliberalism 67
HORST TONN
"Can anyone tell me what time it is?"-Time and the Future
in Rubén Martínez's The Other Side 87
ANTJE DIETERICH
Conceptions of Indigeneity in the Border Space Mexico/USA-
Or, Becoming Indigenous in Aztlán 101
ALEXIA SCHEMIEN
"You people used to be conquistadors, for Christ's sake":
An Inter-American Perspective on Breaking Bad 117
II. COMMUNITIES
ALLAN SMITH
Conceptualizing Identitarian Complexity in the Geolinguistic Regions
of the Western Hemisphere: The Spanish-, Portuguese-, and
English-speaking Americas on Common Analytical Ground 139
GONZALO PORTOCARRERO
The Dynamcis of Cultural (Dis)Encounter: The Rise of Sendero Luminoso as a
Paradigmatic Case for a Dialogue Between the 'Global' and the 'Local' 179
MARGARITA LÓPEZ MAYA
Communal Councils: Analyzing the Perceptions of Participants in Caracas 187
KATHRIN LUCKMANN DE LOPEZ
The Role of Language for Indexing Ethnic Identity in Short Storiesby Mary Helen Ponce 205
INSA NEUMANN
Dropping the Hyphen: American Identity Construction inThe Hyphenated Family 233
BIRTE W. HORN
An Interview with Chicana Writer and Performer Monica Palacios 251
SASKIA HERTLEIN
Inter-American Identities in Contemporary Coming-of-Age Fiction 263
III. DISCOURSES
CARMEN MARTÍNEZ NOVO
The Twenty-first-Century Left in Latin America and Indigenous Rights 281
FRANK ERIK POINTNER
The Construction of a Latin American Diaspora in Gilbert Hernandez's
Graphic Novels 301
YOLANDA MELGAR PERNÍAS
Photographing Border Consciousness: Norma Elia Cantú's Canícula:
Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera 311
BREANNE ROBERTSON
Mayans, Maize, and the Middle West: Remaking U.S. Identity
in the Ames Mural Competition 329
BERNDT OSTENDORF
The Rise and Fall of Multicultural Theory and Practice: The Ideological
Contradictions of Belonging 349
CONTRIBUTORS 367
