Featuring canonical Spanish American and Brazilian texts of the 1920s and 30s, Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature is an innovative analysis of the body as site of inscription for avant-garde objectives such as originality, subjectivity, and subversion.

This book addresses a variety of regional humor traditions such as exploitation cinema, Brazilian chanchada, the Cantinflas heritage, the comedy of manners and light sexuality, iconic figures and characters, as well as a variety of humor registers evident in different Latin American films.

Spanning from the 1876 exposition in Philadelphia, through Paris 1889, and culminating in Paris 1900, this book examines how Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico forged the image of a modernizing Latin America at the moment of their insertion into the new visual economy of capitalism, as well as how their modern writers experienced and narrated these events by introducing new literary forms and modernizing literary language. Following these itineraries overseas and back, Uslenghi illuminates the contested, political, and transformative relations that emerged as images and material culture travelled from sites of production to those of exhibition, exchange, and consumption.

Through a collection of critical essays, this work explores twelve keywords central in Latin American and Caribbean Studies: indigenismo, Americanism, colonialism, criollismo, race, transculturation, modernity, nation, gender, sexuality, testimonio, and popular culture. The central question motivating this work is how to think—epistemologically and pedagogically—about Latin American and Caribbean Studies as fields that have had different historical and institutional trajectories across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.

Exploring the cultural politics of Cuba's epic military engagement in the Angolan civil war, this book narrates the transformation of Cuban national identity from Latin African to Caribbean through the experience of internationalism in Angola.

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.

This is the first book to comprehensively examine Latin America's literary response to the deadly HIV virus. Proposing a bio-political reading of AIDs in the neoliberal era, Lina Meruane examines how literary representations of AIDS enter into larger discussions of community, sexuality, nation, displacement and globalization.