This book addresses a variety of regional humor traditions such as exploitation cinema, Brazilian chanchada, the Cantinflas heritage, the comedy of manners and light sexuality, iconic figures and characters, as well as a variety of humor registers evident in different Latin American films.

Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America is the first sustained effort to present an alternative framework for understanding piracy and contemporary challenges to global discourses on intellectual property (IP) in the Americas. While piracy might just look like theft and derivative reproduction from the perspective of many right-holders, the contributors to this volume go beyond this economic-driven logic and show how practices of copying are in fact practices of reinvention that reflect the rich social networks and forms of creativity, authorship, commerce, and consumption that characterize informal economies. From a perspective informed by contemporary scenarios in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, and the United States, they engage in a discussion of alternatives that-predicated on the importance of protecting culture-allow for other ways of conceiving prosperity at local, national, regional, and global levels. Examples discussed include video games, clothing, trinkets, music, film, TV, and books. Designed to help understand the broader implications of IP and piracy for the field of Latin American studies, this book will be a major contribution to Global South studies, as well as to the growing bibliography on globalization, informal markets, and piracy.

Academic and research fields are moved by fads, waves, revolutionaries, paradigm shifts, and turns. They all imply a certain degree of change that alters the conditions of a stable system, producing an imbalance that needs to be addressed by the field itself. New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power offers researchers and students from different theoretical fields an essential, turn-organized overview of the radical transformation of epistemological and methodological assumptions in Latin American Studies from the end of the 1980s to the present. Sixteen chapters written by experts in their respective fields help explain the various ways in which to think about these shifts. Questions posited include: Why are turns so crucial? How did they alter the shape or direction of the field? What new questions, objects, or problems did they contribute? What were or are their limitations? What did they displace or prevent us from considering? Among the turns included are: memory, transnational, popular culture, decolonial, feminism, affect, indigenous studies, transatlantic, ethical, post/hegemony, deconstruction, cultural policy, subalternism, gender and sexuality, performance, and cultural studies.

Academic and research fields are moved by fads, waves, revolutionaries, paradigm shifts, and turns. They all imply a certain degree of change that alters the conditions of a stable system, producing an imbalance that needs to be addressed by the field itself. New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power offers researchers and students from different theoretical fields an essential, turn-organized overview of the radical transformation of epistemological and methodological assumptions in Latin American Studies from the end of the 1980s to the present. Sixteen chapters written by experts in their respective fields help explain the various ways in which to think about these shifts. Questions posited include: Why are turns so crucial? How did they alter the shape or direction of the field? What new questions, objects, or problems did they contribute? What were or are their limitations? What did they displace or prevent us from considering? Among the turns included are: memory, transnational, popular culture, decolonial, feminism, affect, indigenous studies, transatlantic, ethical, post/hegemony, deconstruction, cultural policy, subalternism, gender and sexuality, performance, and cultural studies.

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal�/“illegal,� and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.    

This book brings together some of the most prominent scholars working across the spectrum of Latin American and Latino studies to explore their changing intellectual undertaking in relation to global processes of change. Critical Latin American and Latino Studies identifies the challenges and possibilities of more politically engaged and theoretically critical modes of scholarly practice. One objective is to provide a brief critical history of the study of various Latin American cultures--Latino, Chicano, Puerto Rican, among others. But these essays also serve to assess the roles of ethnic and area studies in light of changing scholarly trends, from emphases on gender and sexuality to a focus on postcoloniality and globalization. The result is an important contribution to current debates on the conditions of contemporary knowledge production.

Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America is the first sustained effort to present an alternative framework for understanding piracy and contemporary challenges to global discourses on intellectual property (IP) in the Americas. While piracy might just look like theft and derivative reproduction from the perspective of many right-holders, the contributors to this volume go beyond this economic-driven logic and show how practices of copying are in fact practices of reinvention that reflect the rich social networks and forms of creativity, authorship, commerce, and consumption that characterize informal economies. From a perspective informed by contemporary scenarios in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, and the United States, they engage in a discussion of alternatives that-predicated on the importance of protecting culture-allow for other ways of conceiving prosperity at local, national, regional, and global levels. Examples discussed include video games, clothing, trinkets, music, film, TV, and books. Designed to help understand the broader implications of IP and piracy for the field of Latin American studies, this book will be a major contribution to Global South studies, as well as to the growing bibliography on globalization, informal markets, and piracy.

This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive Latin American perspective on the role of humor in the Spanish- and Portuguese-language internet, highlighting how the production and circulation of online humor influence the region’s relation to democracy and civil society and the production of meaning in everyday life. Several case studies consider memes, including discussions of political cartoons in Mexico and imagery that portrays the mismanagement of natural disasters in Puerto Rico. Essays on Brazil examine how memes are shared on WhatsApp by Jair Bolsonaro supporters and how the Instagram account Barbie Fascionista offers memes as political commentary. Other case studies consider video content, including the sketches of Argentinian comedian Guillermo Aquino, the short-form material of Chilean vlogger Germán Garmendia, and a satirical YouTube column created by journalists in Colombia. Contributors also offer new methodologies for studying the laughable on social media, including a model for analyzing fake Twitter accounts. Internet, Humor, and Nation in Latin America demonstrates that internet humor can generate novel means of public interaction with the political and cultural spheres and create greater expectations of governmental accountability and democratic participation. This volume shows the importance of paying serious attention to humorous digital content as part of contemporary culture. Contributors: Eva Paulina Bueno | Juan Poblete | Alberto Centeno-Pulido | Damián Fraticelli | Juan Carlos Rodríguez | Viktor Chagas | Paul Alonso | Ulisses Sawczuk da Silva | Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste | Alejandra Nallely Collado Campos | R. Sánchez-Rivera | Mélodine Sommier | Fábio Marques de Souza

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal�/“illegal,� and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.    

This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive Latin American perspective on the role of humor in the Spanish- and Portuguese-language internet, highlighting how the production and circulation of online humor influence the region’s relation to democracy and civil society and the production of meaning in everyday life. Several case studies consider memes, including discussions of political cartoons in Mexico and imagery that portrays the mismanagement of natural disasters in Puerto Rico. Essays on Brazil examine how memes are shared on WhatsApp by Jair Bolsonaro supporters and how the Instagram account Barbie Fascionista offers memes as political commentary. Other case studies consider video content, including the sketches of Argentinian comedian Guillermo Aquino, the short-form material of Chilean vlogger Germán Garmendia, and a satirical YouTube column created by journalists in Colombia. Contributors also offer new methodologies for studying the laughable on social media, including a model for analyzing fake Twitter accounts. Internet, Humor, and Nation in Latin America demonstrates that internet humor can generate novel means of public interaction with the political and cultural spheres and create greater expectations of governmental accountability and democratic participation. This volume shows the importance of paying serious attention to humorous digital content as part of contemporary culture. Contributors: Eva Paulina Bueno | Juan Poblete | Alberto Centeno-Pulido | Damián Fraticelli | Juan Carlos Rodríguez | Viktor Chagas | Paul Alonso | Ulisses Sawczuk da Silva | Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste | Alejandra Nallely Collado Campos | R. Sánchez-Rivera | Mélodine Sommier | Fábio Marques de Souza