Sirena Selena Vestida De Pena

Discovered by Martha Divine in the backstreets of San Juan, picking over garbage, drugged out of his mind and singing boleros that transfix the listener, a fifteen year old hustler is transformed into Sirena Selena, a diva whose uncanny beauty and irrisistable voice will be their ticket to fame and fortune. Auditioning for one of the luxury hotels in the Dominican Republic, Selena casts her spell over Hugo Graubel, one of the hotel's rich investors. Graubel is a powerful man in the Republic, married with children. Silena, determined to escape the poverty and abuse s/he suffered as a child, engages Graubel in a long seduction in this mordant, intensely lyrical tragi-comedy - part masque, part cabaret - about identity (class, race, gender) and "the hunger and desire to be other things.".

New and original collection of scholarly essays examining the literary complexities of the Atlantic world systemThis Companion offers a critical overview of the diverse and dynamic field of Atlantic literary studies, with contributions by distinguished scholars on a series of topics that define the area. The essays focus on literature and culture from first contact to the present, exploring fruitful Atlantic connections across space and time, across national cultures, and embracing literature, culture and society. This research collection proposes that the analysis of literature and culture does not depend solely upon geographical setting to uncover textual meaning. Instead, it offers Atlantic connections based around migration, race, gender and sexuality, ecologies, and other significant ideological crossovers in the Atlantic World. The result is an exciting new critical map written by leading international researchers of a lively and expanding field. Key FeaturesOffers an introduction to the growing field of Atlantic literary studies by showcasing current work engaged in debate around historical, cultural and literary issues in the Atlantic WorldIncludes 26 newly-commissioned scholarly essays by leading experts in Atlantic literary studiesFuses breadth of historical knowledge with depth of literary scholarshipConsiders the full range of intercultural encounters around and across the Atlantic Ocean.

In Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, the dead tell stories. Communicating with and through mediums’ bodies, they give advice, make requests, and propose future rituals, creating a living archive that is coproduced by the dead. In this book, Solimar Otero explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race. Otero argues that what she calls archives of conjure are produced through residual transcriptions or reverberations of the stories of the dead whose archives are stitched, beaded, smoked, and washed into official and unofficial repositories. She investigates how sites like the ocean, rivers, and institutional archives create connected contexts for unlocking the spatial activation of residual transcriptions. Drawing on over ten years of archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, Otero centers the storytelling practices of Afrolatinx women and LGBTQ spiritual practitioners alongside Caribbean literature and performance. Archives of Conjure offers vital new perspectives on ephemerality, temporality, and material culture, unraveling undertheorized questions about how spirits shape communities of practice, ethnography, literature, and history and revealing the deeply connected nature of art, scholarship, and worship..

In a provocative new approach toward understanding transnational literary cultures, this study examines the specter of the plantation, that physical place most vividly associated with slavery in the Americas. For Elizabeth Russ, the plantation is not merely a literal location, but also a vexing rhetorical, ideological, and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told. Through a series of precise, in-depth readings, Russ analyzes the discourse of the plantation through a number of suggestive pairings: male and female perspectives; U.S. and Spanish American traditions; and continental alongside island societies. To chart comparative elements in the development of the postslavery imagination in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, Russ distinguishes between a modern and a postmodern imaginary. The former privileges a familiar plot of modernity: the traumatic transition from a local, largely agrarian order to an increasingly anonymous industrialized society. The latter, abandoning nostalgia toward the past, suggests a new history using the strategies of performance, such as witnessing, reticency, and traversal. Authors examined include The Twelve Southerners, Fernando Ortiz, Teresa de la Parra, Eudora Welty, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, and Mayra Santos-Febres, among others. Applying sharp analyses across a broad range of texts, Russ reveals how the language used to imagine communities influenced by the plantation has been gendered, racialized, and eroticized in ways that oppose the domination of an ever-shifting "North" while often reproducing the fundamental power divide. Her work moves beyond the North-South dichotomy that has often stymied scholarly work in Latin American studies and, importantly, provides a model for future hemispheric approaches..

Studies of sexuality in Caribbean culture are on the rise, focusing mainly on homosexuality and homophobia or on regional manifestations of normative and nonnormative sexualities. The Cross-Dressed Caribbean extends this exploration by using the trope of transvestism not only to analyze texts and contexts from anglophone, francophone, Spanish, Dutch, and diasporic Caribbean literature and film but also to highlight reinventions of sexuality and resistance to different forms of exploitation and oppression. Contributors: Roberto del Valle Alcalá, University of Alcalá * Lee Easton, Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning * Odile Ferly, Clark University * Kelly Hewson, Mount Royal University * Isabel Hoving, Leiden University * Wendy Knepper, Brunel University * Carine Mardorossian, University at Buffalo, SUNY * Shani Mootoo * Michael Niblett, University of Warwick * Kerstin Oloff, Durham University * Lizabeth Paravisini, Vassar College * Mayra Santos-Febres, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras * Paula Sato, Kent State University * Lawrence Scott * Karina Smith, Victoria University * Roberto Strongman, University of California, Santa Barbara * Chantal Zabus, University of Paris 13.

Offering a comprehensive overview of Puerto Rico's history and evolution since the installation of U.S. rule, Cesar Ayala and Rafael Bernabe connect the island's economic, political, cultural, and social past. Puerto Rico in the American Century explores Puerto Ricans in the diaspora as well as the island residents, who experience an unusual and daily conundrum: they consider themselves a distinct people but are part of the American political system; they have U.S. citizenship but are not represented in the U.S. Congress; and they live on land that is neither independent nor part of the United States. Highlighting both well-known and forgotten figures from Puerto Rican history, Ayala and Bernabe discuss a wide range of topics, including literary and cultural debates and social and labor struggles that previous histories have neglected. Although the island's political economy remains dependent on the United States, the authors also discuss Puerto Rico's situation in light of world economies. Ayala and Bernabe argue that the inability of Puerto Rico to shake its colonial legacy reveals the limits of free-market capitalism, a break from which would require a renewal of the long tradition of labor and social activism in Puerto Rico in connection with similar currents in the United States..

Explores the dimensions of the coming-of-age novel in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Brazil, focusing on works by eight major Afro-Latin American writers.

Signifying "others" or signs of life? This book critically examines the ways in which crossing sex and gender is imagined in key cultural texts from contemporary Latin America. Unlike previous studies, Crossing Sex and Gender in Latin America does not hold that sexually diverse figures are always and only performative or allegorical and instead places the accent on questions of the presence or absence of an account of subjectivity in contemporary representation. Via analysis of selected films and literary works of Reinaldo Arenas, Mayra Santos-Febres, Pedro Lemebel, among others, the author reflects on the political implications of recent visions (1985-2005)..

Uniting critical writing on novels, poetry, painting, and ritual, this volume takes a regional approach to the cultures of the Caribbean Basin. Ranging across the linguistic spectrum of the area, it examines cultural production from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone islands, Suriname and the Guyanas, and 'Latin' and Central America. The interdisciplinary nature of the collection and the challenge it poses to the balkanization of the region within academic discourse will make it of especial interest to students and scholars of the Caribbean. Inspired by the category of the 'Other America' as developed by Édouard Glissant, the book offers a series of original and stimulating engagements with topics that include nationalism, migration and exile, landscape and the environment, gender and sexuality, and Postcolonial Studies and 'world literature'. In addition to contributions by leading scholars such as Peter Hulme, Theo D'haen, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, it contains interviews with two renowned novelists from the region, Lawrence Scott and Mayra Santos-Febres. Underpinning the collection is an interrogation of received ideas of the nation-state and a suggestion that regionalism might provide a better optic through which to view the circum-Caribbean – that national consciousness, in other words, must always also be a regional consciousness..

Fluid Bodies traces the intersections of global movement with transgender and queer identities from authors and artists of the Hispanic Caribbean. Utilizing the theme of fluidity and travel, Fluid Bodies analyzes novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art. These works demonstrate how transgender and queer bodies redefine belonging, particularly national belonging, through global movement and community making practices. Through these genres, the text follows the movement of transgender and queer identities from textual spaces to spaces of the body. The gradual movement from text to body—as it occurs in these genres—demonstrates the variety of representational strategies that dismantle binary readings of gender, sexuality, and nationality. Transgender visibility is a pressing social issue, and today’s transgender moment will be a social and political necessity for years to come. Of particular importance are representations of transgender and/or queer people of color. The field of transgender representation is growing, and Fluid Bodies adds to the visibility of transgender and queer identity from the Hispanic Caribbean. By investigating the relationship between novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art, Fluid Bodies emphasizes how each work plays on and against the separation of language and the body, and how Hispanic Caribbean authors and artists represent transgender and queer identity in order to redefine cultural and national belonging in various geographic spaces..

In the light of, and in response to, the popular perception of the Caribbean as an epitome of cultural hybridity and improvisation, this book seeks to further examine Caribbean cultural identities along the lines of race, class, nationalism, and history. Drawing on a variety of genres of literature and popular music, the present volume includes not only essays that stress the shaping and reshaping of Afro-Caribbean cultural identities and the significance of hybridization, but also those that think against the grain and pursue questions which have not received enough critical attention. This latter task can be seen in the attempt to probe the phenomenon that the Caribbean's image as a tropical getaway in metropolitan popular imaginations tends to eclipse its troubled pasts, traumatic memories, and current (and recurrent) problems which elude the rhetoric of cultural hybridity, presupposing instead a certain non-conflictual diversity or racial equality in the relatively innocuous realm of "culture." Although nuanced among themselves on certain issues, the individual chapters together highlight a body of work which is distinct from the bulk of Anglo-American academic productions on the Caribbean, as the majority of the textual and cultural materials treated here come from either the Hispanic or Francophone Caribbean..

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation offers an understanding of translation in Latin America both at a regional and transnational scale. Broad in scope, it is devoted primarily to thinking comprehensively and systematically about the intersection of literary translation and Latin American literature, with a curated selection of original essays that critically engage with translation theories and practices outside of hegemonic Anglo centers. In this introductory volume, through survey and case-study chapters, contributing authors cover literary and cultural translation in the region historically, geographically, and linguistically. From the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the chapters focus on issues ranging from the role of translation in the construction of national identities to the challenges of translation in the current digital age. Areas of interest expand from the United States to the Southern Cone, including the Caribbean and Brazil, as well as the impact of Latin American literature internationally, and paying attention to translation from and to indigenous languages; Portuguese, English, French, German, Chinese, Spanglish, and more. The first of its kind in English, this Handbook will shed light on different translation approaches and invite a rethinking of intercultural and interlingual exchanges from Latin American viewpoints. This is key reading for all scholars, researchers, and students of literary translation studies, Latin American literature, and comparative literature..

A Poetics of Relation fosters a dialogue across islands and languages between established and lesser-known authors, bringing together archipelagic and diasporic voices from the Francophone and Hispanic Antilles. In this pan-diasporic study, Ferly shows that a comparative analysis of female narratives is often most pertinent across linguistic zones..

This book explains neoliberalism as a phenomenon of the capitalist world-system. Many writers focus on the cultural or ideological symptoms of neoliberalism only when they are experienced in Europe and America. This collection seeks to restore globalized capitalism as the primary object of critique and to distinguish between neoliberal ideology and processes of neoliberalization. It explores the ways in which cultural studies can teach us about aspects of neoliberalism that economics and political journalism cannot or have not: the particular affects, subjectivities, bodily dispositions, socio-ecological relations, genres, forms of understanding, and modes of political resistance that register neoliberalism. Using a world-systems perspective for cultural studies, the essays in this collection examine cultural productions from across the neoliberal world-system, bringing together works that might have in the past been separated into postcolonial studies and Anglo-American Studies..

This bi-lingual collection illustrates the concept of ¿Warrior of the Imaginary,¿ as defined by Patrick Chamoiseau, in a multi-faceted corpus of texts by and on Caribbean writers. For obvious reasons, many of the contributions in French engage critically with this notion and how it surfaces in the Martinican writer's fiction..

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Into the Mainstream: Essays on Spanish American and Latino Literature and Culture is a direct outgrowth of Jorge Febles’s involvement with the annual conference of the American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association. In that sense, the compilation expands on a project initiated in 1993 by Helen Ryan-Ransom with her book Imagination, Emblems and Expressions: Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993). David William Foster, who penned a lengthy preface to that collection, justified its intent by underscoring: “The very fact that our approach to culture is dominated by categories based on high, academic, institutionalized phenomena poses from the very outset the question of how to deal with all those other cultural manifestations that do not comfortably assimilate to the accepted canon” (Ryan-Ransom 3). The past fourteen years, however, have witnessed a radical transformation of that so-called canon due to the widespread acceptance of ideas espoused by cultural theorists like García Canclini, Homi Bhabba, Said, Stuart Hall, Benhabib, Bourdieu and countless others. Therefore, the ambivalence regarding what constitutes culture identified by Foster is inoperative nowadays to a substantial degree. In fact, a fundamental component of the postmodern outlook resides in the ability to blend comfortably the high and the low, the elitist and the popular realms of production in a multiplicity of textual artifacts, creative as well as critical in nature. Hence, the essays that conform Into the Mainstream do not question barriers anymore, nor do they expound on the need to assign a discursive intellectual space to matters pertaining to popular culture. Thus, this collection espouses an inclusive approach in which a variety of analytical approaches coalesce to reflect on an equally kaleidoscopic textuality. Pursuant to its comprehensive nature, Into the Mainstream airs established as well as developing critical voices so as to reflect both ideological continuity and evolving viewpoints. Scholars who have compiled strong academic records like Hortensia Morell, Raquel Rivas Rojas, Elsa Gilmore, David Petreman and Benjamín Torres Caballero share a venue with younger critics like Corey Shouse Tourino, Roberto Vela Córdova, Stacy Hoult, Eduardo del Río, Bruce Campbell, Laura Redruello, Dinora Cardoso and April Marshall, as well as with two graduate students about to complete their academic preparation: Nuria Ibáñez Quintana and María Teresa Vera Rojas. The result is an eclectic compilation meant to elicit discussion on the basis of its variety. Into the Mainstream’s primordial objective is to place these provocative essays—which are expanded versions of papers presented during the annual gathering of the American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association in the period 2002-2005—along with the numerous subjects they treat in the academic mainstream where they rightfully belong..