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.

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.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. Representations of China in Latin American Literature (1987-2016) analyses contemporary Latin American novels in which China is the main theme. Using ‘China’ as a multidimensional term, it explores how the novels both highlight and undermine assumptions about China that have shaped Latin America’s understanding of ‘China’ and shows ‘China’ to be a kind of literary/imaginary ‘third’ term which reframes Latin American discourses of alterity. On one level, it argues that these texts play with the way that ‘China’ stands in as a wandering signifier and as a metonym for Asia, a gesture that essentialises it as an unchanging other. On another level, it argues that the novels’ employment of ‘China’ resists essentialist constructions of identity. ‘China’ is thus shown to be serving as a concept which allows for criticism of the construction of fetishized otherness and of the exclusion inherent in essentialist discourses of identity. The book presents and analyses the depiction of an imaginary of China which is arguably performative, but which discloses the tropes and themes which may be both established and subverted, in the novels. Chapter One examines the way in which ‘China’ is represented and constructed in Latin American novels where this country is a setting for their stories. The novels studied in Chapter Two are linked to the presence of Chinese communities in Latin America. The final chapter examines novels whose main theme is travel to contemporary China. Ultimately, in the novels studied in this book ‘China’ serves as a concept through which essentialist notions of identity are critiqued.

Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking takes as point of departure the insights of Antonio Benítez Rojo, Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant on how to conceptualize the Caribbean as a space in which networks of islands are constitutive of a particular epistemology or way of thinking. This rich volumetakes questions that have explored the Caribbean and expands them to a global, Anthropocenic framework. This anthology explores the archipelagic as both a specific and a generalizable geo-historical and cultural formation, occurring across various planetary spaces including: the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, the Caribbean basin, the Malay archipelago, Oceania, and the creole islands of the Indian Ocean. As an alternative geo-formal unit, archipelagoes can interrogate epistemologies, ways of reading and thinking, and methodologies informed implicitly or explicitly by more continental paradigms and perspectives. Keeping in mind the structuring tension between land and water, and between island and mainland relations, the archipelagic focuses on the types of relations that emerge, island to island, when island groups are seen not so much as sites of exploration, identity, sociopolitical formation, and economic and cultural circulation, but also, and rather, as models. The book includes 21 chapters, a series of poems and an Afterword from both senior and junior scholars in American Studies, Archaeology, Biology, Cartography, Digital Mapping, Environmental Studies, Ethnomusicology, Geography, History, Politics, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and Sociology who engage with Archipelago studies. Archipelagic Studies has become a framework with a robust intellectual genealogy.. The particular strength of this handbook is the diversity of fields and theoretical approaches in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences that the included essays engage with. There is an editor's introduction in which they meditate about the specific contributions of the archipelagic framework in interdisciplinary analyses of multi-focal and transnational socio-political and cultural context, and in which they establish a dialogue between archipelagic thinking and network theory, assemblages, systems theory, or the study of islands, oceans and constellations.

The year 1492 invokes many instances of transition in a variety of ways that intersected, overlapped, and shaped the emergence of Latin America. For the diverse Native inhabitants of the Americas as well as the people of Europe, Africa, and Asia who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific as part of the early-modern global movements, their lived experiences were defined by transitions. The Iberian territories from approximately 1492-1800 extended from what is now the US Southwest to Tierra del Fuego, and from the Iberian coasts to the Philippines and China. Built around six thematic areas that underline key processes that shaped the colonial period and its legacies – space, body, belief systems, literacies, languages, and identities – this innovative volume goes beyond the traditional European understanding of the lettered canon. It examines a range of texts including books published in Europe and the New World and manuscripts stored in repositories around the globe that represent poetry, prose, judicial proceedings, sermons, letters, grammars, and dictionaries.

The Routledge History of Latin American Culture delves into the cultural history of Latin America from the end of the colonial period to the twentieth century, focusing on the formation of national, racial, and ethnic identity, the culture of resistance, the effects of Eurocentrism, and the process of cultural hybridity to show how the people of Latin America have participated in the making of their own history. The selections from an interdisciplinary group of scholars range widely across the geographic spectrum of the Latin American world and forms of cultural production. Exploring the means and meanings of cultural production, the essays illustrate the myriad ways in which cultural output illuminates political and social themes in Latin American history. From religion to food, from political resistance to artistic representation, this handbook showcases the work of scholars from the forefront of Latin American cultural history, creating an essential reference volume for any scholar of modern Latin America.

This Handbook brings together essays from an impressive group of well-established and emerging scholars from all around the world, to show the many different types of violence that have plagued Latin America since the pre-Colombian era, and how each has been seen and characterized in literature and other cultural mediums ever since. This ambitious collection analyzes texts from some of the region's most tumultuous time periods, beginning with early violence that was predominately tribal and ideological in nature; to colonial and decolonial violence between colonizers and the native population; through to the political violence we have seen in the postmodern period, marked by dictatorship, guerrilla warfare, neoliberalism, as well as representations of violence caused by drug trafficking and migration. The volume provides readers with literary examples from across the centuries, showing not only how widespread the violence has been, but crucially how it has shaped the region and evolved over time.