This book examines the modes of representation of the East in Argentinean literature since the country’s independence, in works by canonical authors such as Esteban Echeverría, Juan B. Alberdi, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Lucio V. Mansilla, Pastor S. Obligado, Eduardo F. Wilde, Leopoldo Lugones, and Roberto Arlt. The East, which has always fascinated intellectuals and artists from the Americas, inspired the creation of imaginary elements for both aesthetic and political purposes, from the depiction of purportedly despotic rulers to a genuine admiration for Eastern history and millennial cultures. These writers appropriated the East either through their travels or by reading chronicles, integrating along the way images that would end up being universalized by the Argentinean dichotomy between civilization and barbarism, all the while assigning the negative stereotypes of the exotic East to the Pampa region. With time, the exoticism of the Eastern world would shed its geopolitical meaning and was ultimately integrated into the national literature, thus adding new elements into the Argentinean imaginary.

This volume is a collection of essays dealing with the critical dialogue between the cultural production of the Hispanic/Latino world and that of the so-called Orient or the Orient itself, including the Asian and Arab worlds. As we see in these essays, the Europeans’ cultural others (peripheral nations and former colonies) have established an intercultural and intercontinental dialogue among themselves, without feeling the need to resort to the center-metropolis’ mediation. These South-to-South dialogues tend not to be as asymmetric as the old dialogue between the (former) metropolis (the hegemonic, Eurocentric center) and the colonies. These essays about Hispanic and Latino cultural production (most of them dealing with literature, but some covering urban art, music, and film) provide vivid examples of de-colonizing impetus and cultural resistance. In some of them, we can find peripheral subjectivities’ perception of other peripheral, racialized, and (post)colonial subjects and their cultures.

Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History19 (CMR 19), covering Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean in the period 1800-1914, is a further volume in a general history of relations between the two faiths from the 7th century to the early 20th century. It comprises a series of introductory essays and the main body of detailed entries. These treat all the works, surviving or lost, that have been recorded. They provide biographical details of the authors, descriptions and assessments of the works themselves, and complete accounts of manuscripts, editions, translations and studies. The result of collaboration between numerous new and leading scholars, CMR 19, along with the other volumes in this series, is intended as a basic tool for research in Christian-Muslim relations. Section Editors: Ines Aščerić-Todd, Clinton Bennett, Luis F. Bernabé Pons, Jaco Beyers, Emanuele Colombo, Lejla Demiri, Martha Frederiks, David D. Grafton, Stanisław Grodź, Alan Guenther, Vincenzo Lavenia, Arely Medina, Diego Melo Carrasco, Alain Messaoudi, Gordon Nickel, Claire Norton, Reza Pourjavady, Douglas Pratt, Charles Ramsey, Peter Riddell, Umar Ryad, Cornelia Soldat, Charles Tieszen, Carsten Walbiner, Catherina Wenzel

This book proposes an innovative conceptual framework to explore cultural organizations at a multilateral level and cultural mediators as key figures in cultural and institutionalization processes. Specifically, it analyzes the role of Ibero-American mediators in the institutionalization of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures in the first half of the 20th century by means of two institutional networks: PEN (the non-governmental writer’s association) and the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (predecessor to UNESCO). Attempting to combine cultural and global history, sociology, and literary studies, the book uses an analytical focus on intercultural networks and cultural transfer to investigate the multiple activities and roles that these mediators and cultural organizations set in motion. Literature has traditionally studied major figures and important centers of cultural production, but other regions and localities also played a crucial role in the development of intellectual cooperation. This book reappraises the place of Ibero-America in international cultural relations and retrieves the lost history of key secondary actors. The book will appeal to scholars from international relations, global and cultural history, sociology, postcolonial Studies, world and comparative literature, and New Hispanisms. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429299407, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The book you hold in your hands is an interdisciplinary study on diaspora literacy in Afro-Central America. An exploration through various imaginings of times past, this study is concerned with how oxymoron, metonymy, and multilingualism deploy pluricentrical belonging. By exploring the interlocking of multiple roots that have developed on account of routes, rhizomatic historical imaginations are unearthed here so as to imagine an other Costa Rica. A Black Costa Rica.