Latin America has historically been a fertile ground where utopian projects, movements, and experiments could take root and thrive. Each of the thirteen authors in this collective volume address a particular case or specific aspect of Latin American utopianism from colonial times to the present day. The America that the Spanish and Portuguese discovered became, from the sixteenth century onwards, a space in which it was possible to imagine the widest variety of forms of human coexistence. Utopias in Latin America reconsiders the sense and understanding of utopias in various historical frames: the discovery of indigenous cultures and their natural environments; the foundation of new towns and cities in a vast colonial territory; the experimental communities of nineteenth-century utopian socialists and European exiled intellectuals; and the innovative formulae that attempts to get beyond twentieth-century capitalism.

Fabritio Caroso was dancing master to some of the greatest princely families of Italy, and Nobiltà di dame, his sumptuous collection of ballroom dances and their music, reflects an age that believed that the person of high rank should be a work of art, uniting strength and beauty. Caroso's detailed instructions (including rules for steps, style and etiquetter, and forty-eight actual choreographies) are unequalled by any contemporary manual in their specificity and clarity. Most dances are preceeded by an engraving showing the opening position and illustrating many aspects of dress, posture, and gesture. A full scholarly apparatus, giving new information unavailable elsewhere, makes the book even more valuable to dancers and to students of dance and music at the junction of the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

This inter-disciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory. In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent.

Flitter examines those narratives within the intellectual parameters that defined them, probing the conceptual strategies by which writers represented history.