"Cultural agency" refers to a range of creative activities that
contribute to society, including pedagogy, research, activism, and
the arts. Focusing on the connections between creativity and social
change in the Americas, this collection encourages scholars to
become cultural agents by reflecting on exemplary cases and thereby
making them available as inspirations for more constructive theory
and more innovative practice. Creativity supports democracy because
artistic, administrative, and interpretive experiments need margins
of freedom that defy monolithic or authoritarian regimes. The
ingenious ways in which people pry open dead-ends of even
apparently intractable structures suggest that cultural studies as
we know it has too often gotten stuck in critique. Intellectual
responsibility can get beyond denunciation by acknowledging and
nurturing the resourcefulness of common and uncommon agents. Based
in North and South America, scholars from fields including
anthropology, performance studies, history, literature, and
communications studies explore specific variations of cultural
agency across Latin America. Contributors reflect, for example, on
the paradoxical programming and reception of a state-controlled
Cuban radio station that connects listeners at home and abroad; on
the intricacies of indigenous protests in Brazil; and the
formulation of cultural policies in cosmopolitan Mexico City. One
contributor notes that trauma theory targets individual victims
when it should address collective memory as it is worked through in
performance and ritual; another examines how Mapuche leaders in
Argentina perceived the pitfalls of ethnic essentialism and
developed new ways to intervene in local government. Whether
suggesting modes of cultural agency, tracking exemplary instances
of it, or cautioning against potential missteps, the essays in this
book encourage attentiveness to, and the multiplication of, the
many extraordinary instantiations of cultural resourcefulness and
creativity throughout Latin America and beyond. Contributors.
Arturo Arias, Claudia Briones, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Denise
Corte, Juan Carlos Godenzzi, Charles R. Hale, Ariana
Hernandez-Reguant, Claudio Lomnitz, Jesus Martin Barbero, J. Lorand
Matory, Rosamel Millaman, Diane M. Nelson, Mary Louise Pratt,
Alcida Rita Ramos, Doris Sommer, Diana Taylor, Santiago Villaveces
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