First published in Spanish in 2010, Art beyond Itself is Néstor García Canclini's deft assessment of contemporary art. The renowned cultural critic suggests that, ideally, art is the place of imminence, the place where we glimpse something just about to happen. Yet, as he demonstrates, defining contemporary art and its role in society is an ever more complicated endeavor. Museums, auction houses, artists, and major actors in economics, politics, and the media are increasingly chummy and interdependent. Art is expanding into urban development and the design and tourism industries. Art practices based on objects are displaced by practices based on contexts. Aesthetic distinctions dissolve as artworks are inserted into the media, urban spaces, digital networks, and social forums. Oppositional artists are adrift in a society without a clear story line. What, after all, counts as transgression in a world of diverse and fragmentary narratives? Seeking a new analytic framework for understanding contemporary art, García Canclini is attentive to particular artworks; to artists including Francis Alÿs, León Ferrari, Teresa Margolles, Antoni Muntadas, and Gabriel Orozco; and to efforts to preserve, for art and artists, some degree of independence from religion, politics, the media, and the market.

This book is formed by various chapters studying the manner in which conflicts, changes and ideologies appear in contemporary Hispanic discourses. The contributions analyze a wide variety of topics related to the manner in which ideological and epistemological changes of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries are reflected in, and shape, Spanish language, literature, and other cultural expressions in both Spain and Latin America. The 19th century was conducive to various movements of independence, while, in Europe, radical changes of different types and in all contexts of life and knowledge occurred. Language was certainly affected by these changes resulting in new terminology and discourse strategies. Likewise, new schools of thought such as idealism, dialectic materialism, nihilism, and nationalism, among others, were established, in addition to new literary movements such as romanticism, evocative of (r)evolution, individualism and realism, inspired by the social effects of capitalism. Scientific and technological advances continued throughout the 20th century, when the women’s liberation movement consolidated. The notion of globalization also appears, simultaneously to various crises, despotism, wars, genocide, social exclusion and unemployment. Together, these trends give rise to a vindicating discourse that reaches large audiences via television. The classic rhetoric undergoes some changes given the explicit suasion and the absence of delusion provided by other means of communication. The 21st century is defined by the flood of information and the overpowering presence of mass communication; so much so, that the technological impact is clear in all realms of life. From the linguistic viewpoint, the appearance of anglicisms and technicalities mirrors the impact of post-modernity. There is now a need to give coherence to a national discourse that both grasps the past and adapts itself to the new available resources with the purpose of conveying an effective and attractive message to a very large audience. Discourse is swift, since society does not seem to have time to think, but instead seeks to maintain interest in a world filled with stimuli that, in turn, change constantly. Emphasis has been switched to a search for historical images and moments that presumably explain present and future events. It is also significant that all this restlessness is discussed and explained via new means such as the world-wide-web. The change in communication habits (e-mail, chats, forums, SMS) and tools (computers, mobile phones) that was initiated in the 20th century has had a net effect on the directness and swiftness of language.

La desilusión de la imagen. Arqueología, cuerpo(s) y mirada(s), plantea que las imágenes son vínculos entre distintas épocas y culturas, son síntomas e indicios que dejan huellas en el imaginario cultural. Son la elegíaca memoria como musa que deambula por los tiempos pero fuera de los tiempos (genealogía) o, en otros términos, las imágenes son Mnemosyne, es decir, la musa de todas las musas. Una arqueología de la imagen, implica considerar a la imagen desde la intermedialidad (entre-medios), los cuerpos y las miradas. Concebirla desde una crítica de la cultura en una contemporaneidad atravesada por la crisis. La pregunta ¿qué son las imágenes? que se formula desde la debilidad de cierta inocencia de la escritura, adquiere toda su dimensión desde el momento en que se confunde imagen con visualidad o imagen con medios audiovisuales, dejando por el camino todos los restos de imágenes que no son visuales. Aún más, ese debate se torna más complejo, cuando en su trasfondo está la «memoria» del holocausto (o de los holocaustos); las imágenes de la crisis política, económica y social o los miles de refugiados, en la paradigmática imagen de un niño muerto en la playa, deambulando por geografías europeas. La imagen es, en efecto, «nómada», viaja por territorios y culturas. Entonces, la inocencia de la pregunta se transforma en la imagen frágil de los que no tienen imagen. «La propuesta de Víctor Silva Echeto, es una de las mejor articuladas que conozco para pensar posibles alternativas a la situación de impasse a que parece abocarnos el mundo contemporáneo.» JENARO TALENS (escritor).

Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture is a collective reflection on the value of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work for the study of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture. The authors deploy Bourdieu’s concepts in the study of Modernismo, avant-garde Mexico, contemporary Puerto Rican literature, Hispanism, Latin American cultural production, and more. Each essay is also a contribution to the study of the politics and economics of culture in Spain and Latin America. The book, as a whole, is in dialogue with recent methodological and theoretical interventions in cultural sociology and Latin American and Iberian studies.

In this book, renowned Latin American intellectuals, Pablo Alabarces and Néstor García Canclini, bring us up to date on the changes in the status and role of the popular classes in Latin American democracies over the past two decades. Building on decades-long research and experience in the field of cultural studies, the authors ask how the digitalization and economization of society are changing the reality of political participation and social inequality in Latin America and beyond, leading to new forms of economic and cultural marginalization. García Canclini focuses on the rapid digitalization of our society and economies, ruminating over the future of political participation and democracy in the coming age of algorithms, transnationalization, and social precarity for growing swaths of the population. By contrast, Alabarces focuses on the disintegration and commodification of popular cultures throughout Latin America in the last two decades and discusses the consequences on democratic projects in the region. Both pieces approach the question of how democratic projects on a local, regional, national, and transnational level can deal with galloping social disintegration and accelerating political discontent as an increasing number of people within the course of this digital revolution gain voice: all this against the authoritarian or technocratic alternatives that have been gaining ground again. The introduction by Sarah Corona contextualizes the contributions and their authors in the academic and political debate. She connects their focus on popular cultures to broader questions regarding the future of nation-states and democracies facing multiple crises in the region and beyond. Post-Popular Cultures and Digital Capitalism in Latin America will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in political science, sociology, and cultural studies looking to freshen their views as well as develop an understanding of the Global South’s perspective on current global issues.

Crafting Identity goes far beyond folklore in its ethnographic exploration of mask making in central Mexico. In addition to examining larger theoretical issues about indigenous and mestizo identity and cultural citizenship as represented through masks and festivals, the book also examines how dominant institutions of cultural production (art, media, and tourism) mediate Mexican “arte popular,” which makes Mexican indigeneity “digestible” from the standpoint of elite and popular Mexican nationalism and American and global markets for folklore. The first ethnographic study of its kind, the book examines how indigenous and mestizo mask makers, both popular and elite, view and contest relations of power and inequality through their craft. Using data from his interviews with mask makers, collectors, museum curators, editors, and others, Pavel Shlossberg places the artisans within the larger context of their relationships with the nation-state and Mexican elites, as well as with the production cultures that inform international arts and crafts markets. In exploring the connection of mask making to capitalism, the book examines the symbolic and material pressures brought to bear on Mexican artisans to embody and enact self-racializing stereotypes and the performance of stigmatized indigenous identities. Shlossberg’s weaving of ethnographic data and cultural theory demystifies the way mask makers ascribe meaning to their practices and illuminates how these practices are influenced by state and cultural institutions. Demonstrating how the practice of mask making negotiates ethnoracial identity with regard to the Mexican state and the United States, Shlossberg shows how it derives meaning, value, and economic worth in the eyes of the state and cultural institutions that mediate between the mask maker and the market.