(2021). Archives. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Correction. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Ahead of Print.

Following the thematic arc of the essays in this collection, and adding the author’s own reminiscences about fieldwork in Cuba, this afterword reflects on what a material semiotic approach towards a world of things thrown into disarray can reveal about what Malinowski once called “the imponderabilia of actual life” in Cuba during the “Special Period in Times of Peace”.

This paper takes as its starting point memories of an encounter which saw a Jamaican dancehall queen perform on a locally produced television show in Santiago de Cuba at the height of the Special Period economic crisis. I propose that this encounter was a harbinger of subsequent experiences of popular culture consumption in contemporary Cuba, while also drawing from histories of regional connection

In the mid-nineteenth century, Cuban authorities produced an unprecedented volume of documentation concerning the conspicuous appearance of fetal remains, infant cadavers, and abandoned infants in public places across the island. Although the physical presence of these bodies and tissue was not new to the mid-nineteenth century, the evolution of the law and a rapidly shifting urban landscape made the

This introductory article briefly surveys the most recent approaches to material culture in Cuban studies.

The disintegration of the Cuban sugar industry after the Soviet Union’s demise, as depicted in the film Melaza (dir. Carlos Lechuga, 2012 Lechuga, Carlos. 2012. Melaza. [Google Scholar]), serves as a point of departure for a more general analysis of the materiality of Cuba’s post-sugar afterlife. Against the backdrop of sugar mills shuttered as a result of the 2002 “restructuring”, I analyse the film’s

This article traces the transformation of Dominican colonial ruins into racialised and mediated symbols of “the nation” in consumer culture from the emergence of local nation-building in the 1870s through the country’s first US occupation (1916–1924). It re-examines the work of renowned criollo painter Alejandro Bonilla to show that while the nationalisation of ruins through consumer culture in La

This essay explores how the classic narrative of Haitian zombification is refashioned within a postcolonial Haitian-Dominican context as a passing narrative in Pedro Cabiya’s 2011 Cabiya, Pedro. 2011. Malas hierbas. New York: Zemí Book. [Google Scholar] science fantasy novel Malas hierbas. In its depiction of a nameless zombie scientist who pretends to be a living being and successfully assimilates

Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé challenges conventional articulations of the materiality of the body and its interaction with the natural environment. The protagonists do not merely inhabit the environment, rather, the environment inhabits them and challenges their separation from the natural world. In this article, I argue that by reading La mucama de Omicunlé through a lens of queer materiality

This study analyses Adalberto Ortiz’s novel Juyungo (1943) and proposes that, in Juyungo, Ortiz succeeds in articulating an Ecuadorian Blackness by recuperating the legacy of resistance and solidarity of the multi-ethnic and multiracial community of Esmeraldas. The novel’s protagonist, Ascensión Lastre, also known as “Juyungo”, represents both the ancestral ties that have characterised the common experiences

This article examines interculturality as a call to unlearn traditional Western colonial modes of thinking so as to relearn and embrace a kind of thinking otherwise which will enable readers of literature to confront their own colonial biases that inevitably lead to an arbitrary hierarchical canon of exclusion. To that end, the article focuses on reading Ecuadorian literature decolonially.

The following article deals with the intersections of the linguistic, the literary, and the political in Roberto Bolaño’s “The Part about the Crimes”, the fourth chapter of his novel 2666. Building on Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, Argentinean anthropologist Rita Segato, and American scholar David Kurnick, I propose that Bolaño engages with what I call “symbolic unintelligibility”, using it

Roberto Bolaño’s working friendship with Sergio González Rodríguez has been often addressed in recent scholarship, and it is well-known that the former was in correspondence with the latter about the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez in order to write “The Part About the Crimes” in 2666. This study provides a comparative analysis between “The Part About the Crimes” and González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el

This article analyses filmic representations of the Chilean presidential palace (La Moneda), an emblematic site at which narratives of past violence, national exceptionalism and emancipatory anticipation intersect. I build on a growing corpus of work that uses film analysis to explore the spatiality of dictatorship memories and legacies in the Southern Cone. Unlike more conventional “sites of memory”

In this article we will analyse a series of speeches commemorating the Malvinas War, delivered by Néstor Kirchner during his presidency. Using the theoretical framework of Speech Analysis, we will observe how a re-foundational spirit and the construction of a collective memory intersect in these speeches in a special way. In contrast with other pronouncements by the Argentine leader, his attempts to

(2021). Correction. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 161-161.

(2021). Correction. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. I-I.

This introduction contrasts contemporary disappearances with the original disappearances typically framed by the state. With a particular focus on spatialities, the authors suggest that the contemporary disappearances can best be understood as part of an ecology. These reflections are a prologue to the dossier “Ecologies of Disappearance Today”.

The Costanera Sur Ecological Reserve is located on the central shore of Buenos Aires city, along the Río de la Plata. The foundations of this site are the product of the accumulated rubble that was deposited there by the city council during Argentina's last dictatorship (1976–1983), mainly with the purpose of settling a terrain for the construction of a new municipal Administrative Centre. However

In this article, I wish to bring Davi Kopenawa's and Bruce Albert's The Falling Sky (first published in French in 2010) into dialogue with the two canonic genres of political memory in Latin America: on the one hand, the witnessing – in survivors’ accounts but also in verbal, visual, and architectural forms of monumentalisation – of the dictatorial state’s clandestine system of abducting, torturing

Different narratives in Colombia show how the apparition of mutilated and unidentified corpses in rivers – as an outcome of decades of war and violence – has reorganised national geography, as well as the affective relationships with space and death. Based on literary sources and testimonies, this article analyses how the presence of human remains has affected the ways of life in territories marked

The concept of state of exception has been key for explaining the spaces of enforced disappearances in the 1970s and 1980s in the Southern Cone, to the point that it has become a trope. This article takes up that concept, but revisits and alters it. It turns it around, proposing for what we call the “new disappearances” the concept of “inverted exception”. It does so through the examination of two

This article examines the ways in which the work of the Argentine artist Antonio Berni (1905–1981) proposes renewed forms of realism engaged both with aesthetics and the socio-political order. Through the examination of Berni’s trajectory and with a special focus on Berni’s monsters made from reclaimed waste, this study draws on Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus to argue that art and politics

In this article, I investigate how Blackness as spectre – a deathly presence – underlies contemporary life in the Pampas through artistic representations of the “Negrinho do Pastoreio” folktale in the work of Italian-Brazilian painter Aldo Locatelli (Bergamo, 1915 – Porto Alegre, 1962). These pieces folklorise Blackness and fix Black haunting in the Pampas through visual motifs of placelessness, timelessness

This review article examines two recent books, Verónica Gago’s La potencia feminista o el deseo de cambiarlo todo (Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón, 2019) and Diego Sztulwark’s La ofensiva sensible: Neoliberalismo, populismo y el reverso de lo político (Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, 2019). Both works approach the crisis of neoliberal governance in Argentina, and the new forms of collectivity that it has produced

This review examines two recently published studies about decolonial struggles in the Americas, Anne Garland Mahler’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South (Duke University Press, 2018) and George Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke University Press, 2017). The volumes reexamine current decolonial upheavals from two different perspectives. Mahler traces the cultural and aesthetic

In this essay I consider the politics and aesthetics of racialised acoustics throughout the Americas through debates generated by two recent innovative books in Latin American and Caribbean sound studies, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and The New Neighborhood of the Americas by Tom McEnaney and Audible Geographies in Latin America: Sounds of Race and Place by Dylon Lamar Robbins. These two

In this article, I investigate how Blackness as spectre – a deathly presence – underlies contemporary life in the Pampas through artistic representations of the “Negrinho do Pastoreio” folktale in the work of Italian-Brazilian painter Aldo Locatelli (Bergamo, 1915 – Porto Alegre, 1962). These pieces folklorise Blackness and fix Black haunting in the Pampas through visual motifs of placelessness, timelessness

The concept of state of exception has been key for explaining the spaces of enforced disappearances in the 1970s and 1980s in the Southern Cone, to the point that it has become a trope. This article takes up that concept, but revisits and alters it. It turns it around, proposing for what we call the “new disappearances” the concept of “inverted exception”. It does so through the examination of two

In 1927, Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade encountered in the Amazon a perceptual state provoked by malaria. The malarial gaze was a type of enduring, inactive, and embodied gaze that he imagines as a mode of resistance against capitalist modernity – a trope that finds its way into the critical discourse on national identity. Dialoguing with film theory and queer phenomenology, the article closely

This article examines a fictional radio programme from the Peruvian Amazon as a response to extractivism in the region. Etsa Nantu: Pasión en la Amazonía (2012) resulted from a six-month collaboration among Peruvians deeply concerned with how the media had portrayed Indigenous opposition to extractivism after the 2009 Baguazo, a violent struggle between the Peruvian national police (PNP) and protestors

Beginning in the 1990s, governments as well as international entities, such as UNESCO, heeded the alarm from scholars and community activists that many of the world’s languages were on the road to ...

This article focuses on the animal rights diatribes included by Fernando Vallejo in Peroratas (2013), a volume that contains speeches and editorial texts published in both Spain and Latin America. ...

In 1982, Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop commenced a thirty-three-day journey from Paris to Marseille in which they promised to never leave the autoroute and to stop at every single rest stop. The ...

(2020). Correction. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. I-I.

The present paper analyses the reform of the National Museum of Colombia between 1880 and 1886. It argues that during this period, the museum developed a visual project that joined the nation-building process by providing an imagery that mirrored the representations that intellectuals and politicians were using to describe the country. Moreover, it demonstrates that the National Museum of Colombia

Santiago Gamboa’s Plegarias nocturnas (Night Prayers) (2012) depicts Alvaro Uribe’s years in power and the systematic stigmatisation of dissent perpetuated during his mandate (2002–2010). By offeri...

In this article, I seek to demonstrate how the 1986 massacre of nearly 250 inmates at El Frontón and Lurigancho prisons can shed light on the political and social exclusion faced by Shining Path militants, during and since Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000). I will analyse how Peruvian prisons have been historically used as sites of exclusion for political opponents of the Peruvian state. Then

This article analyses three artistic projects that contribute to a transnational artistic memorialisation of Operation Condor: João Pina’s project Condor (2005–2014), the documentary film by Pedro Chaskel, De vida y de muerte, testimonios de Operación Condor (2000–2015), and Voluspa Jarpa’s En nuestra pequeña región de por acá (2016/2017). Situated at the crossroads of the study of the role of art

The subjective documentary genre emerged in the context of the “subjective turn” in Argentina (Sarlo 2005), when testimony became the main instrument to mobilise memory. In these films, the narrative of truth is driven by a subjective identity rather than an objective observer, focussing on introspective and private narratives rather than social and political realities. These documentaries have largely

This essay considers Leopoldo Brizuela’s 2012 novel Una misma noche’s contribution to existing fiction about Argentina’s dictatorship. Focusing on the novel’s engagement with Argentina’s then (2010) Kirchnerist leadership, this analysis argues that the novel offers a consideration of the present as much as the past. The analysis focuses on the contemporary political commentary suggested by the novel’s

On 3 March, the Health Ministry publicly acknowledged the first case of coronavirus in Chile. By that point, it had been almost five months since the beginning of one of the largest social revolts in the country’s history. This extensive popular uprising has been characterised by the eruption of multiple national protests, and by the appearance and strengthening of diverse, non-traditional political

This article introduces in a few words the complexity of the pandemic wrought by the novel coronavirus COVID-19 in Brazil. It highlights the pandemic’s impacts on the Black population, from my perspective as a Black woman and a resident and critical observer of the city of Salvador, Bahia.

This essay reads Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad (1950) as a fundamental text that describes the tensions between modern expressions of Mexicanness and sexual behavior. Taking seriously Pa...

(2019). Oscar Wilde’s Forgotten Legacy in Latin America. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 321-328.

(2019). Correction. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. I-I.

(2019). October 2019: Social Uprising in Neoliberal Chile. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 483-491.

This article traces how poverty emerged culturally in mid-century Buenos Aires. It does so by examining two contrasting models: (1) the state’s, revealed in the plans it prepared for the eradication of villas miseria (the local term for slums), (2) that of a corpus of cultural objects depicting slums between 1957 and 1963. My basic claim is that the politically motivated conceptual erasure of the slum

Various accounts and representations of the last generation of active cangaceiros, or Northeastern Brazilian bandits, (ending with the killing of Lampião’s lieutenant, Corisco, in 1940) have emphasised and popularised a unique aesthetic developed by Lampião’s group. This aesthetic was divulged to the public, and documented for subsequent generations, with the help of the photographic and cinematic

This article analyses the disputes over images related to indigeneity and plurinationalism in the post-electoral crisis in Bolivia, focusing mainly on the realm of social media. It pays particular attention to how images such as memes, photographs, and videos produced and circulated by the movement for “democracy” opposed to Evo Morales and by sectors of the Right, project ideals of national unity

This article examines the under-studied film productions known in Peronist Argentina as “docudramas”. Placing documentary elements within a fictional plot, docudramas marked a significant change in the state propaganda machine and were used as a new vehicle to influence social habits. I focus particularly on Soñemos [Let’s Dream], a short film directed in 1951 by Luis César Amadori to showcase urban

Mexican post-revolutionary cultural institutions excelled at implementing Mexican art and popular arts as key elements in cultural diplomacy. However, while there is abundant research regarding these arts and their inclusion in international exhibitions during the first part of the twentieth century, there is little research on their role in international cultural diplomacy during the second half of

This article analyses the visual figuration of children during the Chilean Popular Unity government (1970–1973) in a diverse archive of photographs, posters, album covers, magazines, and comics. First, it reads the realist representation of children in photography, which emphasises the dramatics of poverty as a form of establishing a photographic “civil contract” (Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography

The series of technological advances clustered under the label “the digital age” (internet, streaming platforms, etc.) suggest a paradigm shift in our conception of Latin American cinema, arguably ...

This article introduces the dossier of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies devoted to the study of digital cinema in Latin America. First, the text addresses the lack of research on the ...

Taking Cildo Meireles’s installation, Mission/Missions – How to build cathedrals, as a starting point, this article will discuss artistic procedures in the artist’s work and their enunciations in s...

The importance of the global co-production market had a considerable impact on Colombia with a significant number of filmmakers working transnationally or residing in other countries. This paper an...

The new century has seen many filmmakers exhibit their images in museums in the form of installations through which these artists rethink their aesthetic in a different spatiality. In 2001, Argenti...

In 2014, the Fenix Ibero-American Awards for Cinema and the PLATINO Awards for Ibero-American Cinema were launched. Created by Mexican and Spanish organizations respectively, both platforms aimed a...