First Published in 2016. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

This publication explores key themes in the current debate about Cuba's contemporary cultural and historical dynamics. Leading academics from Cuba, the United States, and Europe bring to light significant revisions of the artistic and literary canon and the historical archive, and reconsider often neglected subjects and dynamics in historiography as well as contemporary affairs.

Beginning in 1990, thousands of Spanish speakers emigrated to Japan. A Cultural History of Spanish Speakers in Japan focuses on the intellectuals, literature, translations, festivals, cultural associations, music (bolero, tropical music, and pop, including reggaeton), dance (flamenco, tango and salsa), radio, newspapers, magazines, libraries, and blogs produced in Spanish, in Japan, by Latin Americans and Spaniards who have lived in that country over the last three decades. Based on in-depth research in archives throughout the country as well as field work including several interviews, Japanese-speaking Mexican scholar Araceli Tinajero uncovers a transnational, contemporary cultural history that is not only important for today but for future generations.

Beginning in 1990, thousands of Spanish speakers emigrated to Japan. A Cultural History of Spanish Speakers in Japan focuses on the intellectuals, literature, translations, festivals, cultural associations, music (bolero, tropical music, and pop, including reggaeton), dance (flamenco, tango and salsa), radio, newspapers, magazines, libraries, and blogs produced in Spanish, in Japan, by Latin Americans and Spaniards who have lived in that country over the last three decades. Based on in-depth research in archives throughout the country as well as field work including several interviews, Japanese-speaking Mexican scholar Araceli Tinajero uncovers a transnational, contemporary cultural history that is not only important for today but for future generations.

Even though over the last three decades several books on Western-Eastern encounters have been published, this book offers a new approach to the way we look at current writers of Spanish and Portuguese and their vigor and creativity in guiding us towards a deeper understanding of Orientalism. The chapters in this volume explore novels, short stories, poems, essays and chronicles of prominent writers of the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian world through the lens of transmodernity in a way that blurs borders and gracefully blends fiction with our own perceived cultural and personal realities. The essays take us from images of China and Japan in the writings of Camilo Pessanha and Wenceslau de Moraes to the Orientalism in Grande sertao: veredas with refreshing approaches to the linguistic and thematic uniqueness of this influential Brazilian novel. Moreover, the book offers compelling observations of Spanish-Middle Eastern Orientalisms by looking at recent texts which include Mohamed Akalay's Entre Tanger y Larache as well as Maria Duenas' El tiempo entre costuras by recognizing the palpable historical, geographic and transnational connections that exist between Spain and the Middle East. Further, this study tackles the multifaceted nature of how twenty-first century novelists portray Asia by inviting us to look at ghosts and the human body in Mario Bellatin's most recent novels and to face the realities of cultural amnesia and self-discovery in Cristina Rivera Garza's Verde Shanghai. This book is essential to those who want to understand East-West encounters in a way that is striking, unique, and academically robust.

The practice of reading aloud has a long history, and the tradition still survives in Cuba as a hard-won right deeply embedded in cigar factory workers' culture. In El Lector, Araceli Tinajero deftly traces the evolution of the reader from nineteenth-century Cuba to the present and its eventual dissemination to Tampa, Key West, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. In interviews with present-day and retired readers, she records testimonies that otherwise would have been lost forever, creating a valuable archive for future historians.

Through a close examination of journals, newspapers, and personal interviews, Tinajero relates how the reading was organized, how the readers and readings were selected, and how the process affected the relationship between workers and factory owners. Because of the reader, cigar factory workers were far more cultured and in touch with the political currents of the day than other workers. But it was not only the reading material, which provided political and literary information that yielded self-education, that influenced the workers; the act of being read to increased the discipline and timing of the artisan's job.

Orientalismo en el modernismohispanoamericano, de Araceli Tinajero,es un novedoso estudio que analiza el modernismo en Latinoamerica desde unaperspectiva fresca y original. Lo que hace a este texto unico es su enfoque enlas representaciones de las imagenes, los artefactos culturales y el pensamientooriental (principalmente japones) en la escritura modernista. La autora hablajapones y conoce la cultura del Japon. Con su conocimiento nos acerca a losescritores modernistas que eran cronistas o corresponsales y lograron llegar alLejano Oriente donde inventaron/construyeron una forma de exotismo que derivapero difiere del Orientalismo que propone Edward Said. En Asia esos escritoresdescubrieron que habia un acercamiento cultural muy sutil (no europeo) entreLatinoamerica y el Oriente. El resultado de ese encuentro es unico porquepresenta un paradigma diferente, un Orientalismo que se aleja de una miradaeuropea. Basandoseen la etnografia, los estudios poscoloniales, la teoria literaria, la historiadel arte y la teoria de los relatos de viaje, Tinajero analiza diversos textosmodernistas y demuestra como la escritura "periferica" del modernismo escritadesde la modernidad occidental no es realmente marginal. El analisis de losartefactos culturales en los textos modernistas nos permite conocer el modernismomas a fondo y a comprender el encuentro cultural entre Oriente y Occidente. Esefenomeno sobre todo ofrece la alternativa de una vision del Oriente desde unaperspectiva enfaticamente hispanoamericana. ElOrientalismo que propone Tinajero basandose en el estudio del modernismohispanoamericano es innovador y representa una invaluable contribucion a losestudios criticos del modernismo latinoamericano. Araceli Tinajero's Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano falls within the present revisionist trend with respect to Spanish American modernism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The text's uniqueness stems from its focus on allusions to images, artifacts, and thought from the East - primarily Japan - found in central and peripheral writings within the Spanish American movement. The author knows the Japanese language and culture and brings her knowledge to bear in her discussion of modernist writers who, chiefly as chroniclers and correspondents, made their way to the East and there invented/constructed a form of exoticism (Orientalism, following but diverging from Edward Said), while discovering affinities between non-European tendencies within their own American environment and Eastern culture. The result of this encounter was a unique, non-European Orientalism. Drawing on ethnography, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, and travel theory, Tinajero analyzes a selection of modernist texts to show how writing at the margin of Western modernism-modernity is at once within and without the mainstream. The examination of Oriental cultural artifacts in modernista texts contributes to our understanding of modernism, of the East-West encounter, and of the culturally specific configurations of these phenomena in South America. Tinajero's concept of Orientalism focused on Spanish American modernism is a fresh approach and represents a valuable contribution to Spanish American modernist scholarship.

"Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico" offers a novel approach to Mexican studies by considering the complex relationship between technology, politics, society, and culture. While it is widely accepted by scholars that substantial changes in technology occurred in Mexico during the last century, very little has been written on these issues, perhaps because of a propensity to associate Mexico with tradition and folklore rather than technology, progress, and modernity. This diverse collection of chapters--written by historians, literary scholars, social scientists, and cultural critics--tells this long-neglected story of technological change. Contributors examine themes ranging from the introduction of new forms of travel (automobiles, buses, trains, and subways) to innovations in media (radio, film, and the Internet) to the relationships between technology, literature, art, and architecture. Covering the twentieth century and beyond, "Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico," edited by Araceli Tinajero and J. Brian Freeman, illustrates the invention, use, and adaptation of technology, as well as the diverse ways that technology itself is both shaped by and shapes culture. This interdisciplinary book points to new directions in the study of Mexico and makes an important contribution to Latin American Studies and the history of technology.

Contributors: Claudia Agostoni / Sandra Aguilar-Rodriguez / Edward R. Burian /Antoni Castells-Talens / J. Brian Freeman / Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante / Guillermo Guajardo / Joanne Hershfield / Anna Indych-Lopez /Lynda Klich / Viviane Mahieux / Carlos Monsivais / John Mraz /Ricardo Perez Montfort / Jose Manuel Ramos Rodriguez /Paolo Riguzzi / Erja Vettenranta / Juan Villoro / David M. J. Wood /Naief Yehya /