New Books in Latin American Studies

By showing how a wide, and surprising, range of Caribbean writers have contributed to the crafting of a supple and inclusive erotic repertoire across the second half of the twentieth century, the readings in Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2021) aim to demonstrate that a recognition of creolized and pluralized sexualities already exists within the literary imagination. Professor Alison Donnell and I talk about her writing process and inspiration, the importance of place, and the ways this book might help us rethink the queer Caribbean. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas (Columbia University Press, 2022), Ellen C. Jones centers not just translation but multilingualism as both an artistic practice and scholarly lens through which to examine the production and reception of literature across the Americas. Focusing on writers who use mixed language forms such as “Spanglish,” “Portunhol,” and “Frenglish,” she shows how these authors and their translators use multilingualism to disrupt binaries and hierarchies in language, gender, and literary production itself.  In this episode of NBN, Ellen Jones discusses the complex relationship and perceived tensions between translation and multilingualism, the sociopolitical forces that have shaped the status of multilingualism within the United States, her experience translating Susana Chávez-Silverman’s multilingual writing, multilingualism as queer practice in Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing! and Tess O’Dwyer’s English-only translation of Yo-Yo Boing!, indigenous multilingualism in Wilson Bueno’s Mar Paraguayo and its public life as an art exhibition by Andrew Forster in collaboration with translator Erín Moure, the collaborative joy of editing special issues on multilingualism for the literary journal Asymptote, and more. Tune in to learn about all this and more!Ellen C. Jones is a literary translator, writer, and editor based in Mexico City.Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and data analyst based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2020), Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas focuses on the parenting practices of Latin American urban elites to analyze how everyday experiences of whiteness, privilege, and inequality reinforce national and hemispheric idioms of anti-corruption and austerity. Ramos-Zayas shows that for upper-class residents in the affluent neighborhoods of Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro) and El Condado (San Juan), parenting is particularly effective in providing moral grounding for neoliberal projects that disadvantage the overwhelmingly poor and racialized people who care for and teach their children. Wealthy parents in Ipanema and El Condado cultivate a liberal cosmopolitanism by living in multicultural city neighborhoods rather than gated suburban communities. Yet as Ramos-Zayas reveals, their parenting strategies, which stress spirituality, empathy, and equality, allow them to preserve and reproduce their white privilege. Defining this moral economy as “parenting empires,” she sheds light on how child-rearing practices permit urban elites in the Global South to sustain and profit from entrenched social and racial hierarchies.Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is Professor of American Studies; Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He can be found on Twitter @arman_c. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. In Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard UP, 2022), Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.Jeremy Friedman is Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. The former Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University, he is the author of Shadow Cold War: The Sino–Soviet Competition for the Third World.Thomas Kingston is currently a Huayu Enrichment Scholar, studying Mandarin Chinese at National Cheng Kung University, as he finds himself in post MPhil and pre PhD limbo. He holds an MA in Pacific Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London and an MPhil in Philosophy from Renmin University of China. His research interests focus on the political and intellectual histories of nationalism(s), imaginaries and colonialism in the East and Southeast Asian context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

For centuries, slavery was prominent, driving economies and defining cultures. But in today’s socio-economically liberal world, it seems to have retreated into the shadows: where can it be found?In the second episode of our new themed series In Chains, we speak with Dr Alexis Jonathan Martig, Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta, Instructor at MacEwan University, and author of the article “Slaving Zones, Contemporary Slavery and Citizenship: Reflections from the Brazilian Case”.Dr Martig explores modern day slaving zones, their relation to socio-economic precariousness, and what their existence means for citizenship in the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Rickson Gracie is one of the most fascinating professional athletes in the world. It is not hyperbole to call him a "living legend". A scion of a famed family of professional fighters, he was arguably the greatest Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner of his time. He went on to fight professional mixed martial arts in Japan where he retired undefeated and achieved a level of fame that is difficult to imagine. Despite being born into an elite family in Rio de Janeiro and blessed with an incredible physique and striking good looks, Rickson Gracie has seen more than his share of difficulties. In Breathe: A Life in Flow, he reflects upon his life, including his father's unorthodox parenting decisions and how he overcame the horrific loss of his first-born son. Peter Maguire, who holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and has published several books on the Nuremberg trials and the Khmer Rouge genocide, has been a Jiu Jitsu student and friend of Rickson since the early 1990s. Together they co-authored, Breathe: A Life in Flow (Dey Street, 2021).Peter is a wonderful conversationalist and quite the storyteller. As we are both historians, surfers, and students of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and as well have both spent a fair amount of time in Cambodia and Hawai’i, I always enjoy any opportunity to chat with him. This podcast (Peter’s third appearance on the New Books Network) was no exception. We discussed the book, Rickson’s amazing life, and a range of other topics such as his interviews with survivors and perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge genocide, my brief modeling career, and the ways in which martial arts offers opportunities for personal growth.Peter Maguire is the author of several books, including of Law and War, Facing Death in Cambodia, and Thai Stick. Maguire has taught history, law, theory of war, and the history of surfing at Columbia University, Bard College, and University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He founded the Fainting Robin Foundation which provides financial support to independent scholars, writers, and thinkers whose work falls outside the mainstream. It is a scholar-led, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that rewards genuinely independent intellectual work.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

How can you integrate archaeology and photography with ethnographic research to understand the experiences of clandestine migrants? Today we talk with Jason de Leon, professor of Anthropology and Chicano/a Studies at UCLA, Director of the Undocumented Migration Project. Jason talks about how he drew on a mixture of ethnography, interviews, forensics, and archaeology of the objects left behind by migrants to write The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (U California Press, 2015). He then explains how he shifted to studying Honduran human smugglers for Soldiers and Kings, his current project. Finally, he talks about how he integrated photography into this more recent research, reflecting on the potential for integrating still images into ethnographic work. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region.Through use of wide-ranging sources including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy shows how this watery borderland became a center of broader imperial experimentation, contestation, and reform. British and French officials dispatched to Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago after 1763 encountered a creolized society that repeatedly frustrated their attempts to transform the islands into productive plantation colonies. By centering the stories of Kalinagos who asserted continued claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who insisted on their right to own land and enslaved people, Murphy offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies like Jamaica and Barbados.By looking outward from the eastern Caribbean chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes central to understanding early American and Atlantic history, including European usurpation of Indigenous lands, the rise of slavery and plantation production, and the creation and codification of racial difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (University of California Press, 2021), Joshua Frens-String explores the modern history and political economy of food in Chile, from World War I to the rise and fall of the Allende socialist regime in the 1970s. Drawing together a diverse cast of characters and weaving together a wide range of sources, Frens-String demonstrates that the struggles to create a more just food system shaped modern Chile and its expansive social welfare state prior to the Pinochet’s coup d’état and the implementation of the Chicago Boys’ economic neoliberalization policies. In addition to the dynamics of class and gender in the consumption politics of Chile, Hungry for Revolution is particularly attentive to the different problematics of feeding the urban working classes and dismantling rural estates, and of creating durable socialist regimes and systems of food justice.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In this new episode about Digital Humanities at the New Books Network podcast channel we talk about digital projects, the use of Machine Learning technologies, and how they intersect with the Humanities. Albert A. Palacios, Digital Scholarship Coordinator at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections (University of Texas at Austin), guides us through the different projects he is involved in. Specifically, he shares with us his experience at the “Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Indigenous and Spanish American Historical Collections” initiative, “the Spanish Paleography and Digital Humanities Institute” program, and a partnership project with the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. Topics discussed include the use of digital tools like Transkribus and how it is used to read and transcribe early modern colonial documents. We also talk about how people can participate and become part of any of these initiatives. Join us and learn more!Marcus Golding. News Book Network and News Book Network en Español host and collaborator.Marcus Golding. Colaborador y anfitrión de News Book Network and News Book Network en Español. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies