Throughout his political and military career, Omar Cabezas fought to transform Nicaragua, to implement the ethics that had led him to participate in the armed struggle against Anastasio Somoza’s regime, and to be active during the 1980s and 1990s as a member of the National Congress. Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the Narrative of Liberation: To the Revolution and Beyond surveys the foundations of liberation discourse as it relates to the work of Omar Cabezas. It examines themes associated with Nicaraguan and Latin American culture and literature, considering key issues of national liberation and identity in the wake of the Sandinista revolution. By contextualizing the research within a continental and national perspective and using concepts such as utopia, orality, and humor to frame the discussion on national liberation , Mantero shows the symbiotic relationship between the work of Cabezas and the reformulation of Nicaraguan identity in the post-revolution.

Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the Narrative of Liberation considers themes of liberation, utopia, orality, and humor in the works of Omar Cabezas as they relate to national and cultural identity in Latin America. It assesses the symbiotic relationship between the works of Cabezas and the post-revolutionary reformulation of Nicaraguan identity.

Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America examines the seminal influence that Latin American writers had on the style, subject matter, and ideology of literature in the Global South from 1900 to the late 1930s. Gorica Majstorovic challenges the historical and racial logic of interwar Latin American literary studies by introducing the solidarity relations between the global decolonial movements and placing anti-imperialism, Blackness, and indigeneity at the center of decolonial analysis. Following Mignolo, de Sousa Santos, and Cheah, the texts under analysis subvert the processes of European colonial worlding and show modernity itself as pluralized. Drawing on these works, Majstorovic bridges the gap between aesthetics and politics while shifting the focus onto the Latin American transnational modernist networks and situating the analysis within the theoretical frameworks of the Global South. While examining the idea of globality through its different conceptualizations (cosmopolitanism, immigration, and travel), Majstorovic analyzes avant-garde magazines of the 1920s, Mexican petrofiction, urban proletarian, and decolonial travel narratives of the 1930s, calling into question modernism’s usual framing as an Anglo-American interwar phenomenon. Majstorovic constructs a new genealogy of Latin American literature by examining the asymmetrical relations within its multiple modernities and offers a new understanding of Latin American interwar literature through the lens of the Global South.

Octavio Paz: Ontology and Surrealism discusses poet Octavio Paz (1914–1998), one of Mexico´s most controversial intellectuals. Over several decades, Paz has been celebrated for his impact on literature and culture as a poet as well as an essayist, and he is recognized as a great thinker and as a student of German ontology and phenomenology. Roberto Sanchez Benitez analyzes in detail Paz’s training within the European philosophical thinking of the twentieth century, as well as in the artistic avant-garde, to illustrate the way in which philosophical, anthropological, linguistic, sociological, literary, and artistic proposals enriched his work and Mexican culture during the post-revolutionary period. Sanchez Benitez posits that Paz moved from a phenomenological ontology to a historicism of the human condition, wherein morality, politics, and the arts all reside in an ideological context where dogmatisms where impose in the face of a lack of internal criticism. This book explores the themes of the poetic act that Paz associated with his ontological and surrealist readings, leading up to when they were transformed by his experience in India and the assimilation of Eastern philosophies, along with going through a set of Western proposals relating to love, eroticism, and art. Scholars of literature, philosophy, Latin American Studies, and history will find this book particularly useful.

A current member of the Sandinista government recalls his personal experience as a guerrilla fighter.

Students played a critical role in the Sandinista struggle in Nicaragua, helping to topple the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979—one of only two successful social revolutions in Cold War Latin America. Debunking misconceptions, Students of Revolution provides new evidence that groups of college and secondary-level students were instrumental in fostering a culture of insurrection—one in which societal groups from elite housewives to rural laborers came to see armed revolution as not only legitimate but necessary. Drawing on student archives, state and university records, and oral histories, Claudia Rueda reveals the tactics by which young activists deployed their age, class, and gender to craft a heroic identity that justified their political participation and to help build cross-class movements that eventually paralyzed the country. Despite living under a dictatorship that sharply curtailed expression, these students gained status as future national leaders, helping to sanctify their right to protest and generating widespread outrage while they endured the regime’s repression. Students of Revolution thus highlights the aggressive young dissenters who became the vanguard of the opposition.

In 1899, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) was officially incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, beginning an era of economic, diplomatic, and military interventions in Central America. This event marked the inception of the struggle for economic, political, and cultural autonomy in Central America as well as an era of homegrown inequities, injustices, and impunities to which Central Americans have responded in creative and critical ways. This juncture also set the conditions for the creation of the Transisthmus—a material, cultural, and symbolic site of vast intersections of people, products, and narratives. Taking 1899 as her point of departure, Ana Patricia Rodríguez offers a comprehensive, comparative, and meticulously researched book covering more than one hundred years, between 1899 and 2007, of modern cultural and literary production and modern empire-building in Central America. She examines the grand narratives of (anti)imperialism, revolution, subalternity, globalization, impunity, transnational migration, and diaspora, as well as other discursive, historical, and material configurations of the region beyond its geophysical and political confines. Focusing in particular on how the material productions and symbolic tropes of cacao, coffee, indigo, bananas, canals, waste, and transmigrant labor have shaped the transisthmian cultural and literary imaginaries, Rodríguez develops new methodological approaches for studying cultural production in Central America and its diasporas. Monumental in scope and relentlessly impassioned, this work offers new critical readings of Central American narratives and contributes to the growing field of Central American studies.