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

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.

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 extinction. In the context of the Americas, programmes to protect the languages of indigenous and Afrodescendant populations were developed but rarely fully funded. The Garífuna of Central America and the

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. On the one hand, the article analyses to what end he directs his diatribes. On the other, it proposes a reading in which Vallejo’s animal rights tirades are distanced from the dialogic will that characterises

In 1982, Julio Cortázar 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 journey, four years in the making, was designed as a game that would allow the two to side-step, or interrupt, their regular lives. Los autonautas de la cosmopista, a book made up of the compilation of a

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

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

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

The subjective documentary genre emerged in the context of the “subjective turn” in Argentina (Sarlo 2005 Sarlo, Beatriz. 2005. Tiempo pasado: cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno. [Google Scholar]), 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

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

Santiago Gamboa’s Plegarias nocturnas (Night Prayers) (2012) depicts Álvaro Uribe’s years in power and the systematic stigmatisation of dissent perpetuated during his mandate (2002–2010). By offering a reading of the text, this article addresses the novel’s cultural representation of Uribismo, the set of beliefs, ideals, and ideological structures at the heart of Uribe’s power and rooted in two centuries

José Joaquín Jiménez (1911–1946), a journalist in Bogotá, embellished his ostensibly factual crónicas policíacas (police chronicles) with outrageous fictions. Scholars have debated how these chronicles should figure in the history of Colombian journalism. Instead, I study them in the context of Alfonso López Pumarejo’s first government (1934–1938), whose progressive program was known as the Revolution

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

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

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 history of digital cinema in Latin America. Then, it proposes a comprehensive analysis of the digital, in terms of film aesthetics, production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption. At the same time

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 analyses the challenges to the concept of “national cinema” implicit in the work of three filmmakers producing in those conditions: Laura Huertas Millán, Felipe Guerrero, and Camilo Restrepo. Such challenges

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 Paz’s anxiety about sexual positionality, in which he proposes that Mexico can either assume the position of the chingón (top; fucker) or the chingado (bottom; fucked), this article asks: What is at stake in

(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.

From early works such as Cuestiones estéticas (1911) up until the end of his prolific critical career, the figure of Oscar Wilde constituted a constant presence in the writings of Mexican intellectual Alfonso Reyes. In particular, during his formative years as a member of El Ateneo de la Juventud, Alfonso Reyes found in Wilde’s essayistic production an intellectual model that vindicated cultural critique

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

My article reexamines two chronicles by José Martí in which the Cuban intellectual discusses Oscar Wilde’s arrival in New York and his first public lecture there. I take a suspicious approach to these chronicles, proposing a critical reading of Martí’s decision to blindly cite the eccentric Irish dandy. Martí’s first chronicle about Wilde, which appeared in Caracas on 21 January 1882, can be read as

In the Americas, early responses to Oscar Wilde were frequently shaped by reactions to his transgressive appearance and personal scandals, which often eclipsed his critical merits. A significant exception is the Puerto Rican statesman and critic Miguel Guerra Mondragón, who from the 1910s championed Wilde’s critical thought and established a place for his ideas at the centre of Puerto Rican modernismo and

This article examines a dispute between two very different writers and translators in early twentieth-century Colombia, Guillermo Valencia and Bernardo Arias Trujillo. Valencia was a renowned conservative politician, writer, and translator, while Arias Trujillo was a gay, liberal bohemian who worked as a diplomat, poet, judge, columnist, and translator. Both men translated Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad

This article explores the reception and circulation of Oscar Wilde’s works and persona, including his sexuality and the news of his trial and imprisonment, among Brazilian writers at the turn of the century. Contrary to the readings of renowned Brazilian critics who have argued that Wilde’s impact can be reduced to a mystique, I trace the rapid translation and dissemination of Wilde’s work among Brazilian

Oscar Wilde came to be known in Mexico during his lifetime not as a talented writer but rather as an outrageous figure who was disgraced and imprisoned for his “depraved habits”. Soon after the initial scandal of his 1895 trials, a handful of Mexican intellectuals launched modest endeavours to reshape Wilde’s image by turning attention to his literary works, some of which they translated and made available

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

Scholars of Argentine cinema have engaged extensively with the oppositional politics of the Nuevo Cine of the 1960s and ’70s, but much less with the cinema of that time that offered support to more conservative politics. In the interest of better understanding such support in mass culture, this essay contextualises the films made between 1970 and 1975 that star the pop idol Ramón “Palito” Ortega and

In this essay, I read Puerto Rican pop star Luis Fonsi’s 2017 chart-topping single, “Despacito” (Slowly), as emblematic of dominant global trajectories. While “slowness” is here equated to maximising the pleasures of heterosexual male desire, it becomes in the remixed version with English-language pop star Justin Bieber a symbol of resistance to colonial endeavours. I identify the objectified female

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 social structures, taking land as an artistic and literary topos. Within Cildo Meireles’s Mission/Missions – How to build cathedrals (1987), there are points of intersection between artistic, philosophical

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, Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás premiered Balnearios at the MALBA, creating a new adjacent space for films. In 2006, Paz Encina’s La hamaca paraguaya was a watershed in this encounter between cinema and museums

In 2014, the Fénix 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 at promoting and disseminating contemporary Ibero-American cinema. This article analyses the strategies developed by these awards to conceptualize, market, and circulate Latin American, Portuguese, and Spanish

Two modes of transition are much discussed in contemporary film scholarship: geopolitical/affective (national to transnational) and technological (analogue to digital). While both movements are often taken as a given in film production and academic discourses, this article reads two recent Mexico-based independent productions that both embody and interrogate the digital transnationality of contemporary

El escarabajo de oro/The Gold Bug is a film made of detours. This commissioned film was conceived as an international North-South collaboration. The original intent nevertheless changed shape in the process, which produced a chain reaction of variations: this straying in turn shapes a narrative that proliferates endlessly through metonymical forms. The itinerary of making this film encapsulates the

This article explores the urban fabric of three cities in Chile based on the history of the cultural festivals held there in recent decades. Taking as a background a series of cultural milestones that marked public space in Santiago, Valparaíso, and Concepción in the transition to the twenty-first century, I investigate the broader city projects that have resulted in the Santiago a Mil International

This essay shows how colonial congregación, the concentration of ‘dispersed’ indigenous populations by missionaries into gridded cities, continued to influence prominent nineteenth-century liberals. By reading Nicolás Pizarro’s El monedero and Ignacio Altamirano’s La navidad en las montañas as more than liberal artefacts, I turn to both novels’ colonial roots to show how colonial constructions of race

(2019). Correction. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. I-I.

(2019). Introduction. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 1-2.

Praised for its value as a political and/or historical romantic novel, Amalia is also one of the first and most detailed novels of the period to offer modern readers a snapshot of how consumption in literature – in a very broad sense, from clothing to decorative items – played a central role not only in mapping the transition from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist order, but also in exposing the key

Since its appearance in 1879–1880, Juan Moreira has been read as an illiberal novel, casting its eponymous hero (the historical bodyguard and electoral henchman of the same name) as a metaphor for the plight of variously-defined subalterns in liberal and neoliberal Argentina, and a condemnation of the social order they brought about. Contrary to that assumption, and reading the novel in its original

This article seeks to reveal the knowledges about medicinal plants contained in a broad corpus of songs, tonadas, and poems from Chile-Wallmapu in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These texts establish a new textual and analytical category that we call the ‘lawen-poem’ (plant and medicine poems). These plants’ presence in the texts as remedy, sustenance, and culture, forms an ‘ecology of knowledges’

Unable to come to an agreement on where the border lay, Bolivia and Paraguay sought to define the boundaries of the northern Chaco in the 1932–1935 Chaco War. This article shows that the Chaco is a symptomatic case of the difficulty of defining borders and representing them textually. In particular, through an examination of classic Chaco War texts like Augusto Roa Bastos’s novel Son of Man and Augusto