From its sweaty beats to the pulsating music on the streets, Latin/o America is perceived in the United States as the land of heat, the toy store for Western sex. It is the territory of magical fantasy and of revolutionary threat, where topography is the travel guide of desire, directing imperial voyeurs to the exhibition of the flesh. Jose Quiroga flips the stereotype upside down: he shows how Latin/o American lesbians and gay men have consistently eschewed notions of sexual identity for a politics of intervention. In Tropics of Desire, Quiroga reads hesitant Mexican poets as sex-positive voices, he questions how outing and identity politics can fall prey to the manipulations of the state, and explores how invisibility has been used as a tactical tool in opposition to the universal imperative to come out. Drawing on diverse cultural examples such as the performance of bolero and salsa, film, literature, and correspondence, and influenced by masters like Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and a rich tradition of Latin American stylists, Quiroga argues for a politics that denies biological determinism and cannibalizes cultural stereotypes for the sake of political action.

Miami is widely considered the center of Cuban-American culture. However vital to the diasporic communities’ identity, Miami is not the only—or necessarily the most profound—site of cultural production. Looking beyond South Florida, Ricardo L. Ortíz addresses the question of Cuban-American diaspora and cultural identity by exploring the histories and self-sustaining practices of smaller communities in such U.S. cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. In this wide-ranging work Ortíz argues for the authentically diasporic quality of postrevolutionary, off-island Cuban experience. Highlighting various forms of cultural expression, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America traces underrepresented communities’ responses to the threat of cultural disappearance in an overwhelming and hegemonic U.S. culture. Ortíz shows how the work of Cuban-American writers and artists challenges the heteronormativity of both home and host culture. Focusing on artists who have had an ambivalent, indirect, or nonexistent connection to Miami, he presents close readings of such novelists as Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto G. Fernández, Achy Obejas, and Cristina García, the playwright Eduardo Machado, the poet Rafael Campo, and musical performers Albita Rodríguez and Celia Cruz. Ortíz charts the legacies of sexism and homophobia in patriarchal Cuban culture, as well as their influence on Cuban-revolutionary and Cuban-exile ideologies. Moving beyond the outdated cultural terms of the Cold War, he looks forward to envision queer futures for Cuban-American culture free from the ties to restrictive—indeed, oppressive—constructions of nation, place, language, and desire. Ricardo L. Ortíz is associate professor of English at Georgetown University.

A young Frenchman, Joseph Timar, travels to Gabon carrying a letter of introduction from an influential uncle.

Disciplining the Holocaust examines critics' efforts to defend a rigorous and morally appropriate image of the Holocaust. Rather than limiting herself to polemics about the "proper" approach to traumatic history, Karyn Ball explores recent trends in intellectual history that govern a contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust. She examines the scholarly reception of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the debates culminating in Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Lyotard's response to negations of testimony about the gas chambers, psychoanalytically informed frameworks for the critical study of traumatic history, and a conference on feminist approaches to the Holocaust and genocide. Ball's book bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power in order to highlight the social implications of traumatic history.