Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon analyzes the ways in which the Amazon has been represented in twentieth century cultural production. With contributions by scholars working in Latin America, the US and Europe, Intimate Frontiers reads against the grain commonly held notions about the region -its gigantism, its richness, its exceptionality, among other- choosing to approach these rather from quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The multinational, pluriethnic corpus of texts critically examined here, explores a wide range of cultural artifacts including travelogues, diaries, and novels about the rubber boom genocide, as well as indigenous oral histories, documentary films, and photography about the region. The different voices gathered in this book show that the richness of the Amazon lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness of its histories/stories in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.

Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon analyzes the ways in which the Amazon has been represented in twentieth century cultural production. With contributions by scholars working in Latin America, the US and Europe, Intimate Frontiers reads against the grain commonly held notions about the region -its gigantism, its richness, its exceptionality, among other- choosing to approach these rather from quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The multinational, pluriethnic corpus of texts critically examined here, explores a wide range of cultural artifacts including travelogues, diaries, and novels about the rubber boom genocide, as well as indigenous oral histories, documentary films, and photography about the region. The different voices gathered in this book show that the richness of the Amazon lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness of its histories/stories in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.

From the cabinets of wonder of the Renaissance to the souvenir collections of today, selecting, accumulating, and organizing objects are practices that are central to our notions of who we are and what we value. Collecting, both private and institutional, has been instrumental in the consolidation of modern notions of the individual and of the nation, and numerous studies have discussed its complex political, social, economic, anthropological, and psychological implications. However, studies of collecting as practiced in colonized cultures are few, since the role of these cultures has usually been understood as that of purveyors of objects for the metropolitan collector. Collecting from the Margins: Material Culture in a Latin American Context seeks to counter the historical understanding of collecting that posits the metropolis as collecting subject and the colonial or postcolonial society as supplier of collectible objects by asking instead how collecting has been practiced and understood in Latin America. Has collecting been viewed or portrayed differently in a Latin American context? Does the act of collecting, when viewed from a Latin American perspective, unsettle the way we have become accustomed to think about it? What differences, if any, arise in the activity of collecting in colonized or previously colonial societies? Spanning the period after the independence wars until the 1980s, this collection of ten essays addresses a broad range of examples of collecting practices in Latin America. Collecting during the nineteenth century is addressed in discussions of the creation of the first national museums of Argentina and Colombia in the post-independence period, as well as in analyses of the private collections of modernistas such as Enrique Gomez Carrillo, Ruben Dario, Jose Asuncion Silva, and Delmira Agustini at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The practice of collecting in the twentieth century is discussed in analyses of the self-described revolutionary practices of Oswald de Andrade, Augusto de Campos and the films of Ruy Guerra, as well as the polemical collections of Pablo Neruda, and the unsettling collections portrayed in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

From the cabinets of wonder of the Renaissance to the souvenir collections of today, selecting, accumulating, and organizing objects are practices that are central to our notions of who we are and what we value. Collecting, both private and institutional, has been instrumental in the consolidation of modern notions of the individual and of the nation, and numerous studies have discussed its complex political, social, economic, anthropological, and psychological implications. However, studies of collecting as practiced in colonized cultures are few, since the role of these cultures has usually been understood as that of purveyors of objects for the metropolitan collector. Collecting from the Margins: Material Culture in a Latin American Context seeks to counter the historical understanding of collecting that posits the metropolis as collecting subject and the colonial or postcolonial society as supplier of collectible objects by asking instead how collecting has been practiced and understood in Latin America. Has collecting been viewed or portrayed differently in a Latin American context? Does the act of collecting, when viewed from a Latin American perspective, unsettle the way we have become accustomed to think about it? What differences, if any, arise in the activity of collecting in colonized or previously colonial societies? Spanning the period after the independence wars until the 1980s, this collection of ten essays addresses a broad range of examples of collecting practices in Latin America. Collecting during the nineteenth century is addressed in discussions of the creation of the first national museums of Argentina and Colombia in the post-independence period, as well as in analyses of the private collections of modernistas such as Enrique Gomez Carrillo, Ruben Dario, Jose Asuncion Silva, and Delmira Agustini at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The practice of collecting in the twentieth century is discussed in analyses of the self-described revolutionary practices of Oswald de Andrade, Augusto de Campos and the films of Ruy Guerra, as well as the polemical collections of Pablo Neruda, and the unsettling collections portrayed in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Patricios en contienda explora las maneras en que los cuadros de costumbres fueron usados en Colombia, Ecuador y Venezuela para nacionalizar poblaciones heterogeneas y producir pueblos nacionales para estos tres paises tras la disolucion de la llamada Gran Colombia (1819-1831). Al situar los cuadros de costumbres en el contexto de las guerras civiles y reformas liberales, esta investigacion muestra como las antiguas elites orgullosas de su abolengo colonial--como Jose Maria Vergara y Vergara (1831-1872) o Fermin Toro (1806-1865)--los usaron para legitimarse frente a las nuevas elites que ascendian tras las guerras de Independencia, como es el caso del general Jose Antonio Paez (1790-1873), su hijo Ramon Paez (1810-1894) o Agustin Codazzi (1793-1859). Nuevos y viejos patricios eligieron escribir acerca de tipos sociales especificos y los compilaron en albumes, memorias o "museos literarios" con el fin de crear pueblos que reflejaran sus propias historias personales y proyectos politicos. Este proceso supuso reformular diversas experiencias historicas emergidas de las reformas liberales y homogeneizarlas en tipos pintorescos como el tabaquero o el llanero. En respuesta a estos mecanismos de inclusion y exclusion, miembros marginados de las nuevas elites--como Josefa Acevedo (1803-1861) o Dolores Veintimilla (1829-1857)--criticaron las divisiones entre patriciado y pueblo. Al escribir sobre miembros indeseables para la comunidad, como mendigos o presuntos criminales, estas escritoras revelaron los principios excluyentes que subyacian a la organizacion de pueblos nacionales. Gracias a la opcion metodologica de ubicar los cuadros de costumbres en el contexto de las publicaciones periodicas donde aparecieron por primera vez, Martinez-Pinzon logra una lectura en que los revalua en su calidad de herramientas politicas y los situa en su relacion con otras formas de representacion como las microbiografias de hombres ilustres o las novelas de folletin, generos con los que sus autores buscaron autodefinirse como representantes de un pueblo que, como ellos mismos, cambio durante la formacion de las republicas.

Revisitar el costumbrismo. Cosmopolitismo, pedagogias y modernizacion en Iberoamerica es una recopilacion de articulos cuyo foco de estudio es el costumbrismo del siglo XIX como discurso que vehiculo y respondio a los procesos de modernizacion en Latinoamerica. Los trabajos que aqui se incluyen se acercan al costumbrismo discutiendo problematicas esteticas, culturales y politicas de distintas tradiciones latinoamericanas - Argentina, Brasil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru y Venezuela -, entrando en dialogo tambien con Espana. Nuestro objetivo con este proyecto es volver al costumbrismo latinoamericano para restituirle todo su grosor historico y estetico, alineandolo con otros debates sobre el siglo XIX que han abordado este periodo desde los estudios culturales y la critica literaria.