Pablo Baler studies the ruptures and continuities linking the de-centered dynamics of the 17thcentury to the logic of instability that permeates 20th century visual and literary production in Latin America. Bringing philosophy, literary interpretation, art criticism, and a poetic approach to the history of ideas, Baler offers a new perspective from which to understand the uncanny phenomenon of baroque distortion. This interdisciplinary inquiry not only leads to a more specific formulation regarding the singularity of the reappropriations of the baroque in Spanish America, but also allows for a more comprehensive assessment of its historical reach in the broader context of the representational crisis of modernity.

The Baroque is back in contemporary culture. The ten essays authored by international scholars, and three interventions by artists, examine the return of the baroque as Neo-Baroque through interdisciplinary perspectives. Understanding the Neo-Baroque as transcultural (between different cultures) and transhistorical (between historical moments) the contributors to this volume offer diverse perspectives that suggest the slipperiness of the Neo-Baroque may best be served by the term ‘Neo-Baroques’. Case studies analysed reflect this plurality and include: the productions of Belgian theatre company Abattoir Fermé; Claire Denis’ French New Extremist film Trouble Every Day; the novel Lujuria tropical by exiled El Salvadorian Quijada Urias; the science fiction blockbuster spectacles The Matrix and eXistenZ; and the spectacular grandeur of early Hollywood movie palaces and the contemporary Las Vegas Strip. Contributors: Jens Baumgarten, Marjan Colletti, Bolívar Echeverría, Rita Eder, Hugh Hazelton, Monika Kaup, Peter Krieger, Patrick Mahon, Walter Moser, Angela Ndalianis, Richard Reddaway, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Saige Walton.

For many, the advent of globalization brought with it an end to the way that the world had been viewed previous to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Among the many endings the one that most concerns my book is the perceived foreclosure of any alternatives to the capitalistic ideology that structures globalization. Even criticisms of globalization are bounded by its limits since the critical models they use cannot conceive of a space outside its homogenizing discourse. Against the final limits that shape most interpretations of globalization, I show how writers on the periphery of the globalizing north, through the development and deployment of neo-baroque imaginings, offer a different possibility to monological globalism. I show that the baroque has been a way of resisting and reconfiguring the colonial gaze in Latin America since the time of the first encounter to the present.

Gathering a group of internationally renowned scholars, this volume presents cutting-edge research on the complex processes of identity formation in the transatlantic world of the Hispanic Baroque. Identities in the Hispanic world are deeply intertwined with sociological concepts such as class and estate, with geography and religion (i.e. the mixing of Spanish Catholics with converted Jews, Muslims, Dutch and German Protestants), and with issues related to the ethnic diversity of the world’s first transatlantic empire and its various miscegenations. Contributors to this volume offer the reader diverse vantage points on the challenging problem of how identities in the Hispanic world may be analyzed and interpreted. A number of contributors relate earlier processes and formations to Neo-Baroque and postmodern conceptualisations of identity. Given the strong interest in identity and identity-formation within contemporary cultural studies, the book will be of interest to a broad group of readers from the fields of law, geography, history, anthropology and literature.

At the same time, the book discusses different issues in Hispanic cultural history that influenced Lezama's reading of Joyce, describing a period of Joycean enthusiasm that arose in Hispanic American letters on the publication of the first Spanish translation of Ulysses."--BOOK JACKET.

In a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of modern and postmodern literature, film, art, and visual culture, Monika Kaup examines the twentieth century's recovery of the baroque within a hemispheric framework embracing North America, Latin America, and U.S. Latino/a culture. As "neobaroque" comes to the forefront of New World studies, attention to transcultural dynamics is overturning the traditional scholarship that confined the baroque to a specific period, class, and ideology in the seventeenth century. Reflecting on the rich, nonlinear genealogy of baroque expression, Neobaroque in the Americas envisions the baroque as an anti-proprietary expression that brings together seemingly disparate writers and artists and contributes to the new studies in global modernity.