Is there a Latin American thought? What distinguishes it from the thought of other regions, particularly from European thought? What are its main expressions in political, cultural, and social life? How has it evolved historically? As the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea Aguilar stated: "hardly any other society has so zealously sought for the features of its own identity." In Misplaced Ideas?, Elías J. Palti examines how Latin American identity has been conceived across different epochs and diverse conceptual contexts. Palti approaches these ideas from a historical-intellectual perspective, unraveling the theoretical foundations on which the very interrogation on Latin American identity has been forumulated and re-formulated. While he does not endorse or refute any particular perspective, Palti discloses the historical and contingent nature of their foundations. Ultimately, Misplaced Ideas? highlights the problematic dynamics of the circulation of ideas in peripheral regions of Western culture, which raises, in turn, broader theoretical questions regarding the ways of approaching complex historical-intellectual processes.

Misplaced Ideas spans the 19th and 20th centuries, and examines the life and work of Brazil's most influential novelist, Machado de Assis, as well as Brazilian film, poetry, theatre and music. Among the themes that run through the text are the dangers of nationalism, the West's attraction for exotic backwardness and the notion of Third World literature.

Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories gathers a collection of scholarly and creative voices—spanning design, art, and architectural history; design studies; curation; poetry; activism; and social sciences––to interrogate the intersections of design and displacement. The contributors foreground objects, spaces, visual, and material practices and consider design’s role in the empire, the state, and various colonizing regimes in controlling the mass movement of people, things, and ideas across borders, as well as in social acts that resist forced mobility and immobility, or enact new possibilities. By consciously surfacing echoes, rhymes, and dissonances among varied histories, this volume highlights local specificity while also accounting for the vectors of displacement and design across borders and histories. Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories shows displacement to be a lens for understanding space and materiality and vice versa, particularly within the context of modernity and colonialism. This book will be of interest to scholars working in design history, design studies, architectural history, art history, urban studies, and migration studies.

DIVA translation of Schwarz's study of the work of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839-1908)./div

In Shakespearean Cultures, René Girard’s ideas on violence and the sacred inform an innovative analysis of contemporary Latin America. Castro Rocha proposes a new theoretical framework based upon the “poetics of emulation” and offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding the asymmetries of the modern world. Shakespearean cultures are those whose self-perception originates in the gaze of a hegemonic Other. The poetics of emulation is a strategy developed in situations of asymmetrical power relations. This strategy encompasses an array of procedures employed by artists, intellectuals, and writers situated at the less-favored side of such exchanges, whether they be cultural, political, or economic in nature. The framework developed in this book yields thought-provoking readings of canonical authors such as William Shakespeare, Gustave Flaubert, and Joseph Conrad. At the same time, it favors the insertion of Latin American authors into the comparative scope of world literature, and stages an unprecedented dialogue among European, North American, and Latin American readers of René Girard’s work.

Focusing on literary and cultural texts from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, Patrick R. O'Malley argues that in order to understand both the literature and the varieties of nationalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland, we must understand the various modes in which the very notion of the historical past was articulated. He proposes that nineteenth-century Irish literature and culture present two competing modes of political historiography: one that eludes the unresolved wounds of Ireland's violent history through the strategic representation of a unified past that could be the model for a liberal future; and one that locates its roots not in a culturally triumphant past but rather in an account of colonial and specifically sectarian bloodshed and insists upon the moral necessity of naming that history. From myths of pre-Christian Celtic glories to medieval Catholic scholarship to the rise of the Protestant Ascendancy to narratives of colonial violence against Irish people by British power, Irish historiography strove to be the basis of a new nationalism following the 1801 Union with Great Britain, and yet it was itself riven with contention.

The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory expounds the development of critical theory from its founding thinkers to its contemporary formulations in an interdisciplinary setting. It maps the terrain of a critical social theory, expounding its distinctive character vis-a-vis alternative theoretical perspectives, exploring its theoretical foundations and developments, conceptualising its subject matters both past and present, and signalling its possible future in a time of great uncertainty. Taking a distinctively theoretical, interdisciplinary, international and contemporary perspective on the topic, this wide-ranging collection of chapters is arranged thematically over three volumes: Volume I: Key Texts and Contributions to a Critical Theory of Society Volume II: Themes Volume III: Contexts This Handbook is essential reading for scholars and students in the field, showcasing the scholarly rigor, intellectual acuteness and negative force of critical social theory, past and present.