Latin American Literature

8 Key excerpts on "Latin American Literature"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Companion to Latin American Studies

  • Philip Swanson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5

  Latin American Literatures

  Elzbieta Sklodowska  

  The remarkably vast and diverse domain of the literatures of Latin America does not lend itself to easy overviews. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify a variety of criss-crossing movements, tropes and categories that link the literary production of the region (Mexico, Central America, Hispanic Caribbean islands, South America, including Portuguese-speaking Brazil). At the same time, the stylistic and thematic coordinates shared by national literatures – such as common language, artistic movements, colonial legacy and the nation-building experiences of the nineteenth century – should not let us de-emphasize regional differences, nor should they obliterate diverse creative expressions of indigenous people. Large portions of South and Central America (the Andean region, Mexico, Guatemala, Paraguay) continue to be influenced by the legacy of the great pre-Colombian cultures of the Inca, the Aymara, the Nahua, the Maya and the Guaraní. On the other hand, the African-based cultures of the enslaved have undergone a violent ‘hybridization’ or ‘transculturation’ with European elements in the crucible of plantation economy in Brazil and the Hispanic Caribbean. Finally, various countries of South America (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile) have been most significantly shaped by European immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To provide a meaningful picture of Latin American Literatures means to recognize all facets of its richness and diversity, including the works of women writers and the growing literary output of Latino/a authors in the USA. This task also requires a reassessment of the traditional notion of the ‘literary’ by bringing into focus forms of writing previously excluded from the canon (travel accounts; confessions and other autobiographical forms; journalism; testimonial narrative).

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  Information Resources in the Humanities and the Arts

  • Anna H. Perrault Ph.D., Elizabeth S. Aversa, Sonia Ramirez Wohlmuth, Cynthia J. Miller, Cynthia F. Miller(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Libraries Unlimited

    (Publisher)

  6-49 Literature of Latin America. Rafael Ocasio. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. This volume is part of the Literature as Windows to World Culture series. It deals primarily with major themes in Latin American Literature from the nineteenth century to the present: the indigenous legacy, the emergence of modern Latin America and its literature, the “Boom,” and women writers. The tensions between traditionalism and modernity seen in contemporary Latin American Literature are treated in Latin America Writes Back: Postmodernity in the Periphery (An Interdisciplinary Perspective). In terms of genre, focus is on theatre and the narrative (Emil Volke, ed. Routledge, 2002). 6-50 Literatures of Latin America: From Antiquity to the Present. Willis Barnstone, ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Literature by Region or Country • 191 This anthology of Latin American Literature (translated to English) was previously published as part of Literatures of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (1999). The present volume is organized chrono- logically and thematically. It begins with a section on Native American literature extending from pre-Colombian times to the present. The next section includes texts from the periods of discovery, conquest, and colonization. This is followed by the final section that covers 19th and 20th centuries. Literary Cultures of Latin America (Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir, eds. Oxford University Press, 2004) is a three-volume set of individual essays which provide an overview and comparison of the literatures of Latin America from the period of discovery and conquest to the present. The essays offer important historical perspectives within the framework of different literary currents and theories. Each article offers an extensive bibliography. 6-51 Words of the True Peoples: Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Indigenous-Language Writers. Carlos Montemayor and Donald Frischmann, eds. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004– 2007.

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  Inside the Latin@ Experience

  A Latin@ Studies Reader

  • N. Cantú, M. Franquiz, N. Cantú, M. Franquiz(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Latin@ literature, which encompasses many more authors, who are equally as well as less prolific, and far more themes that represent the diversity of U.S. Latin@ literature. As this field of literature grows, expands, and develops, it is also important to note that several Latin@ writers have passed away. We have put to rest many of the pioneering writers who first COINED CONTRIBUTIONS OF LATIN@ LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES 189 fought for the rights to establish a new borderland as Gloria Anzaldúa has done for literature. In particular, the perception of women and young adults is specifically shaped by the melding of cultures in the metaphori- cal and ideological interstices of the United States, Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as these literatures evolve in U.S. literary colors. Latin@ writers have particularly influenced the thematics of U.S. literature and expanded as well as Latinoized and Barrioized its sensitivities toward topics like death, identity, destiny, immigration, migration, sexuality, nationalism, exile, feminism, and social class. Notes 1. I am using the term “Latino” to include literature by the descendants of immi- grants from Latin America, including Mexico. This includes Brazilians and indigenous groups tracing their ancestry back to Latin America. 2. Jim Sagel, “Sandra Cisneros Interview,” Publishers Weekly (1991): 74. 3. Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo (New York: Vintage, 2002). 4. Graciela Limón, In Search of Bernabé (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993); Limón, The Memories of Ana Calderón (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994); Limón, Song of the Hummingbird (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996); Limón, The Day of the Moon (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1999); and Limón, Erased Faces (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001). 5. Limón, Erased Faces. 6. Pat Mora, Chants (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1984); and Mora, A Library for Juana: The World of Sor Juana Inez (New York: Knopf Books, 2002).

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  Literature and Subjection

  The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America

  • Horacio Legras, Horacio Legrás(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Pittsburgh Press

    (Publisher)

  This takes me to the next point. The Historical Project of Latin American Literature The universalization of literature that offered a rationale for cataloging any product of the imagination as “literature” is a relatively recent develop-ment. In the case of Latin America, it was not until the first decades of the twentieth century that the emergence of representative national-popular states fostered the need to map all the vast and disparate products of the imagination and incorporate them into a broad concept of national litera-ture (with subdivisions like “folklore,” “traditional folk tales,” “oral litera-ture,” “urban narrative,” etc.). The institutionalization achieved by popular forms and materials entailed recognition as much as co-optation. If these forms were incorporated into a larger and prestigious framework (that of literary expression), they entered into this arrangement in a subordinated position where their former plasticity is lost, insofar as the cultural appara-tus that brought them recognition favors the perpetuation of certain traits deemed idiosyncratic to their poetic disposition. In this process, literature is simply playing along with larger sociopoliti-cal forces. The process of incorporating peripheral voices into the store of “national” expression coincided with a vast redefinition of the notion and function of culture, a redefinition that, while severing the idea of culture from that of civilization, led to the popularization of the so-called anthro-pological notion of culture as referring to the totality of a society’s material and spiritual life. This shift granted an enormous purchase to anthropologi-cal discourses in the process of the imaginary constitution of modern Latin America. Its giants include figures like Manuel Gamio in Mexico, Gilberto Freyre in Brazil, and of course Fernando Ortiz in Cuba—who coined the most influential term in the history of Latin American cultural criticism: transculturation.

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  The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader

  • Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, Abril Trigo, Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, Abril Trigo(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  On the continent whose most profound and enduring cultural stamp ties it inexorably to Spain and Portugal, the drive for independence has been so tenacious as to develop a literature whose autonomy, with respect to Iberian sources, is glaring. This occurs because Latin American litera-ture forged alliances to other foreign Western literatures, rather than to its own Iberian ones. Spanish and Portuguese mother-literatures were unable to make the bonds of a common past hold sway over their colonial counterparts. These literatures were ineffective in fulfilling such a struc-tural capacity or identifying presence in Latin American Literature, be-cause the Iberian societies out of which they arose clung fiercely to a pre-modern, Counter-Reformation dynamic. 1 In other words, a shifting and capricious internationalist impulse is the driving force behind the originality of Latin American Literature. But this impulse masks another more vigorous source of nurture; that is, the cultural peculiarity emerging in the continent’s heartlands, not the work of literary elites alone, but rather, the tremendous striving of vast socie-ties in the construction of their symbolic languages. The historical moment of Latin America’s uneven and haphazard political emancipation, now recognizable as such, placed the indepen-dent literatures (founded with scant backing from the Enlightenment) squarely in the mainstream of the bourgeois ideology nurturing a trium-phant romantic art. Within this current, the literatures of Latin America were stamped with the tenets of romanticism’s major Dio ´scuro s, its twin gods of originality and representativeness, situated on a dialectical his-torical axis. Given that these literatures belonged to nations that had bro- 122 angel rama ken the ties to their motherlands in rebellion against the colonial past (where colonial offenses were still a living testimony), it was of utmost importance that literary works be original with respect to their sources.

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  Relocating Identities in Latin American Cultures

  • Elizabeth Montes Garces(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • University of Calgary Press

    (Publisher)

  0 In Latin America, the essay genre arose as an urgent response to a threat of danger, particularly during the periods of independence and early nation building. To say something on the political, ethnic, racial, or cultural challenges of Latin America became a pressing, compelling act for the essayist, who took | 7 The Latin American Intellectual Redefining Identity it upon himself/herself to use the versatility of the essay and its multiple possibilities to intervene in affairs so dear to his/her country. We may ask, then, in the beginning of this new century, what is the urgency that triggers Latinoamericanos ? What is its challenge? The challenge is globalization. Globalization has become the urgent, pressing issue to contend with, and in Latinoamericanos García Canclini poses the following questions: “What does it mean to be a Latin American?” (2002, 2); “What is left of Latin American narratives?” (7); “Who wants to be a Latin American?” (23); and “What does one understand today by Latinity ?” (68).  By positing these questions, the essayist attempts to capture the ambivalence, uncertainties, and contradictions of Latin America within the context of global capitalism. He describes how the region operates with its cultural products, the massive migration phenomenon in the past two decades of the twentieth century, and the increase in external debt. In earlier works, like La globalización imaginada (García Canclini 999) and “La épica de la globalización y el melodrama de la interculturalidad” (García Canclini 2000), he analyzes globalization with field work carried out on the US-Mexican border, 2 whereas in Latinoamericanos his focus is more on arguing for strategies and policies that would protect the local market of cultural goods.

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  Multicultural Literature and Response

  Affirming Diverse Voices

  • Lynn Atkinson Smolen, Ruth A. Oswald Ph.D., Lynn Atkinson Smolen, Ruth A. Oswald Ph.D.(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Libraries Unlimited

    (Publisher)

  Suggest different kind of anthologies: riddles, songs, rhymes, or folktales. • Ask students to read a traditional story from any of the books mentioned in this section in the chapter. Provide an opportunity to share the stories they read and what they learned from the text. Have them compare and contrast the tale with others they have read. Transmitting History, Cultural Achievements, and Everyday Life from Spain and Latin America The limits between Latin America and the world of Latinos are not always easy to trace, particularly because there have been historical changes in the physical bounda- ries. Two-thirds of what was originally Mexico are now the west and southwest of the United States. Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony, but instead of becoming an indepen- dent nation as Cuba and the Dominican Republic did, it is part of the U.S. Common- wealth, which also includes Guam and the Mariana Islands. The individual lives of MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE AND RESPONSE 206 the Latinos may also have developed between two worlds: born and raised in their countries of origin or many of the authors included in this chapter now live and publish in the United States. It is not surprising that these authors would like to enrich the lives of Latino children and their knowledge of the history and cultural achievements of Latin Americans and Spaniards as well as provide a better understanding of their everyday life. The works in this category appear in different genres: Historical Narratives Whereas there is still a scarcity of narratives of this kind, some are very significant. Before We Were Free by Julia A ´ lvarez (2002) explores the difficult topic of the dictator- ships that have plagued Latin American history. This topic had also been the theme of the excellent books by Jyll Becerra de Jenkins, The Honorable Prison (1988) and So Loud a Silence (1996).

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  Writing across Cultures

  Narrative Transculturation in Latin America

  • Angel Rama, David Frye(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Literature has served many functions on the continent (and in the world). In colonial times, it formed the basis for Westernization; after independence, it formed the basis for nationhood. In this century, it might well become the basis for cultural messages, en- 62 Chapter Two dowing them with the homogeneity of its discourse. We have already noted that literature has gobbled up other disciplines that are much more distant from it than anthropological monographs, which are created by transcribing oral literatures and are therefore given to freer construc-tions of the imaginary. Regions Steeped in Isolation The peculiarities of the conquest and colonization of Latin America gave rise to the many regions that slowly developed there with few ties to their colonial capitals. The markedly separatist, or at least isolationist, tenden-cies of these regions led them to develop cultural patterns of their own, which were often quite archaic and frequently the product of unique syncretisms. These patterns, in turn, served as a basis for strong local-ist tendencies. The immense territory of the Americas was subjugated in just half a century, but colonial dominion was consolidated in cities that ruled in turn, and only with difficulty, over their own neighboring hinterlands. This left almost untouched vast stretches where colonization was confined to extractive exploitation and the growing haciendas. This was especially the case during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries up to the Bourbon and Pombaline reforms—the long incubation period of regionalism and separatism.

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