A wide range of essays which provide new conceptualizations of popular culture while linking it to both its long history and some of its most exciting contemporary forms. Popular culture has always represented a fulcrum within social, cultural and anthropological discourses in Latin America. Often imagined as representing a challenge to the dominant cultural paradigms of the "lettered city", it has repeatedly been mapped onto political, economic and even libidinal boundaries - between country and city, between folk and street, between the "masses" and elite national/political structures. Yet at the turn of the 21st century, concepts such as the "folk", the "popular", the "mass" and the "multitude" have exploded in the face of new cultural and informational technologies, putting cinematic, televisual and cybernetic manifestations of popular cultureat the forefront of social processes. In order to address the fragile contemporaneity of popular culture in Latin America, the essays in this collection engage with a wide range of cultural phenomena, from forms of mass political experience in the Colonial and Independence periods, to the modern-day emergence of street art, blogs, comic books and television, as well as the recycling of refuse as art, the marketing of santeria to tourists, and the filming of poverty in the favela. In so doing, they explore the diverse regimes of affect that both sustain and destabilize national symbolic orders, and chart the novel mediations between the national and the global in a see-sawingclimate of conflicting economic and political ideologies. Geoffrey Kantaris is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Rory O'Bryen is a University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Contributors: Francisco Ortega, Joanna Page, Stephen Hart, Erica Segre, Jesus Martin Barbero, Lucia Sa, Chandra Morrison, Claire Taylor, Andrea Noble, Ed King.

The modern metropolis has been called 'the symbol of our times', and life in it epitomizes, for many, modernity itself. But what to make of inherited ideas of modernity when faced with life in Mexico City and Sao Paulo, two of the largest metropolises in the world? Is their fractured reality, their brutal social contrasts, and the ever-escalating violence faced by their citizens just an intensification of what Engels described in the first in-depth analysis of an industrial metropolis, nineteenth century Manchester? Or have post-industrial and neo-globalized economies given rise to new forms of urban existence in the so-called developing world?

Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and Sao Paulo investigates how such questions are explored in cultural productions from these two Latin American megalopolises, the focus being on literature, film popular music, and visual arts. The choice of these two cities in Mexico and Brazil has to do with their comparable sizes - they are the largest in Latin-America (about 20 million inhabitants in each metropolitan area), and figure among the five largest in the world. They are also the most globalized of all Latin American cities. They count on the largest investment of foreign capital (banks, offices of multinational companies, etc), and their severe social problems have been seen as symptomatic of wider trends in Latin America and the world. This book combines close readings of works with a constant reference to theoretical, anthropological, and social studies of these two cities, and builds on received definitions of the concept megalopolis

Life in the Megalopolis is the first book to combine urban-studies theories (particularly Lefebvre, Harvey, and de Certeau) with Benjaminian cultural analyses, and theoretical discussions with close-readings of recent cultural works in various media. It is also the first book to compare Mexico City and Sao Paulo.

The modern metropolis has been called 'the symbol of our times', and life in it epitomizes, for many, modernity itself. But what to make of inherited ideas of modernity when faced with life in Mexico City and Sao Paulo, two of the largest metropolises in the world? Is their fractured reality, their brutal social contrasts, and the ever-escalating violence faced by their citizens just an intensification of what Engels described in the first in-depth analysis of an industrial metropolis, nineteenth century Manchester? Or have post-industrial and neo-globalized economies given rise to new forms of urban existence in the so-called developing world? Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and Sao Paulo investigates how such questions are explored in cultural productions from these two Latin American megalopolises, the focus being on literature, film popular music, and visual arts. This book combines close readings of works with a constant reference to theoretical, anthropological and social studies of these two cities, and builds on received definitions of the concept megalopolis Life in the Megalopolis is the first book to combine urban-studies theories (particularly Lefebvre, Harvey, and de Certeau) with Benjaminian cultural analyses, and theoretical discussions with close-readings of recent cultural works in various media. It is also the first book to compare Mexico City and Sao Paulo.

'The Amazon' features eight essays by Euclides da Cunha, about his trip through the Amazonin in 1905, written to describe the Brazilian hinterlands to the urban citizens.

Native texts of the Amazonian rain forest have been viewed as myth or ethnographic matter-the raw material of literature-rather than as significant works in their own right. But in this unprecedented study, Lzcia Sa approaches indigenous texts as creative works rather than source material.

Disclosing the existence and nature of longstanding, rich, and complex Native American literary and intellectual traditions that have typically been neglected or demeaned by literary criticism, Rain Forest Literatures analyzes four indigenous cultural traditions: the Carib, Tupi-Guarani, Upper Rio Negro, and Western Arawak. In each case, Sa considers principal native texts and, where relevant, their publication history. She offers a historical overview of the impact of these texts on mainstream Spanish-American and Brazilian literatures, detailing comparisons with native sources and making close analyses of major instances, such as Mario de Andrade's classic Macunaima (1928) and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller (1986).

A redrawing of the lineage of Brazilian and Spanish-American literatures, this book advocates an understanding of the relationships between cultures as a process of "transculturation" rather than "acculturation"-a process that emphasizes the often-ignored impact of the peripheral culture on the one that assumes dominance.

Lzcia Sa is assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University.