Latin American Languages and Societies Commons^™

Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Enslavement, colonization, and the systems that uphold racial injustice were and still are a series of new, unfathomable, and challenging experiences that prompt individuals within the diaspora to seek orientation. How does a human cope with centuries of attempts at the systematic destruction of their humanity, culture, and identity? How can they reclaim that identity, especially when so much of it seems lost? I address these questions by utilizing texts from the expansive body of work regarding ethnographic-historical-religious studies on Afro-spiritual practices to better analyze instances in literature in the ongoing practice of diasporic orientation. In this project, I argue …

Resistance Narratives: Storytelling Of Transnational Insurgencies In 1960-70s Us And Mexico, Tania Libertad Balderas

English Language and Literature ETDs

Resistance Narratives: Storytelling of Transnational Insurgencies in 1960-70s US and Mexico emphasizes how the narratives from the Mexican Insurgency, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the leftist faction of the Chicana/o Movement in the 1960s and 1970s articulate intersecting notions of resistance, liberation, and transnational solidarity. The comparative analysis of the testimonial novel Las mujeres del alba (2019) by Chihuahuan novelist Carlos Montemayor, the autobiographies Lakota Woman (1991) and Ohitika Woman (1993) by Sičháŋǧu Lakȟóta writer and AIM militant Mary Brave Bird (formerly Crow Dog), and the memoirs and plays by the San Diego-based group Teatro de las Chicanas, collected …

Del Ornitorrinco A La Radio Ambulante: La Nueva Crónica Latinoamericana En La Era Neoliberal, Ulises Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the presence of neoliberal hegemonic imaginaries in narrative journalism written in Latin America between 1995 and 2021.

There are strong connections between a period of decline in the readership of some of the authors of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the penetration of neoliberal economic policies in the region (with the privatization of State companies and the expansion of the telecommunications industry), and the renewed interest in non-fiction writing published by a number of print publications in the region during the last decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, as in magazines …

Defining Black Masculinities: Intersectional Analyses Of Gender, Race And Sexuality In Caribbean And Latin American Literature, 1955 To Present, Jerry Eugene Scruggs Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of my dissertation is to define and construct parameters for analyzing the Afro-descendant male experience in four specific texts: Mi compadre el General Sol [General Sun, My Brother] (1955), Adire y el tiempo roto [Adire and Broken Time] (1967), Sortilégio II: mistério negro de Zumbi redivivo [Sorcery 2: Black Mystery of Resurrected Zumbí] (1979), and Negro: Este color que me queda bonito [Black: This Color Looks Good on Me] (2013). Black masculinities are distinct and this study sets five parameters: 1) Sexual Prowess, 2) Contentious relationship with the White woman, 3) Violence and Toxic Masculinity, 4) Emotive Numbness, …

Ephemeral Elsewheres: Locating Narratives Of Resignation, Resistance, And Refusal In The Poetry Of Black Cuban And Black Brazilian Women, Aidan Keys

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay dissects the language of Latin American revolution and nationalism to locate the body of the black woman and the appropriation of her image. In two seemingly incommensurable radical movements—the Cuban Revolution (1952-1959) and the Brazilian Unified Black Movement (1978-)—the contributions of Black women are unevenly recognized. Reading the poetry of cubanas Nancy Morejón and Georgina Herrera and brasileiras Sônia Fátima and Esmeralda Ribeiro, this essay claims that in both contexts, the Black woman is marginalized to a geographic “elsewhere.” Expanding on this term, coined by scholar Carol Boyce Davies, this essay further identifies temporal and ephemeral “elsewheres.” The …

Las Voces Desde La Liminalidad Sino-Peruana: –Una Lectura Comparativa De Mongolia Y La Vida No Es Una Tómbola–, Jing Tan

LSU Master's Theses

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Peru in the mid-19th Century. Since then, the Sino-Peruvian community has lived through myriad vicissitudes. Today, despite its indisputable influence in Peru’s history, it is still largely invisible in society, just as the concept of an Asian Latin American identity remains elusive in the national consciousness. In the literary and academic world, the scarcity of a voice highlighting Chinese legacies in Peruvian literature is echoed by the dearth of such a voice in the criticism regarding works by Sino-Peruvian writers about Sino-Peruvian experiences.

This comparative analysis engages with two novels that evince deep parallelism with …

The Artist's Diary, Anamae Gilroy

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Traversing Paradigms: An Environmental Journey To Body And Mind, Martin Ceja Mejia

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Traumatic life experiences altered the way I perceive the world. As a result, I embark on a journey to reshape my relationship to self, the built and natural world; to environment. In this thesis I ask: How do I want to relate to the environment? Considering I am a doubly colonized agent, I also aim to decolonize my relationship to environment along the process. Therefore, this work aims to formulate a new, personal, relationship to environment through academic literature, history, psychology, Indigenous knowledge and science, and literary studies, among other fields of knowledge. This work is interdisciplinary in nature; life …

'Y Mi Rebelión Se Convirtió En Arte’ Raúl Salinas Y Su Poesía Política: Una Historia Literaria Chicana, Santiago Vidales

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I present a literary history of poet and revolutionary Raúl Salinas. Born in 1934, Salinas left a major legacy for Latinx and Chicanx letters. I focus on narrating, for the first time in Spanish, the relationship between his prison radicalism and his poetic production. The time Salinas spent as a political prisoner in Leavenworth Penitentiary (1967-1972) was foundational to his political transformation and (re)education. Along with members of the Black Panthers, AIM, Puerto Rican Nationalists, and other radicalized Chicanos, these inmates formed study groups, networks of support, and established a newspaper to both combat the oppressive conditions …

A World Of Infinite Possibilities: Recoding Popular Culture In Modern U.S. Ethnic Fiction, Todd Martinez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project examines how the U.S. ethnic authors Ralph Ellison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Díaz reflect the dynamic, reciprocal process of transculturation by decoding popular cultural forms. Using strategies made available by cultural studies, hemispheric theory and neoMarxism, critical attention will be directed to each author’s major literary work: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, and Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This dissertation further analyzes a hitherto overlooked area of U.S. multiethnic literary studies: the ethnic subject’s relationship to encoded popular culture forms and how they impact dentity formation. Recent scholarship has focused on the ethnic …

Framing The Border: Liminality In The Network Narratives Of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Muhammad Muzammal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores liminality conveyed as displacement before death in the network narrative films of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. Due to their depiction of existential crises and possibly fatal scenarios of several characters in different countries and regions, these network narrative films are colloquially referred to as the “Death Trilogy.” Therefore, rearranging the many strands of death-related abstractions and notions in these films around liminality becomes a jumping-off point to explore deeper layers of these works. Through interdisciplinary yet markedly film studies excavations, this thesis projects the liminal spaces of Iñárritu’s films onto border spaces. With borders considered as sites of …

Lana Sube Lana Baja, La Maquilladora Lo Trabaja, Davide De La Cruz

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

Hotel De Vagabundos: Reviewing African American Theatre Journey., Manuel Francisco Viveros

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This analysis examines how Hotel de Vagabundos, a play written by a black playwright from Colombia, fits into the core of definitions of Black Theatre in the United States. I will examine six documents I consider relevant to shape the idea of Black Theatre in the US from 1900 through 2005. The author's experience in New York during the 1940s inspires Hotel de Vagabundos. The author navigates the globalized ethos idea unleashing clashes about identity to criticize aspects of American culture about immigrants, poor people, and internalized racism within African American and Black diasporic communities. The play “like a …

Los Discursos Sociales En La Cuba Del Siglo Xx Y El Impacto De La Revolución: Raza, Clase Y Género En Las Obras De Antonio Benítez Rojo Y Sara Gómez, Eliza Petrie

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Cinegrafia: Literatura, Espectadores Y Cinefilia Contemporanea En Latinoamerica, Rojo Robles Mejias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The arrival of cinema in Latin America quickly produced an intermedial cultural landscape. To this day, experimental authors in the Hemisphere and the Caribbean write cinegraphic fiction as a way to deal with film’s socio-cultural repercussions. My work addresses the question of how cinema transforms and subverts the creation of fictional narratives in the last five decades. By considering a corpus of post-1968 literary works in Latin America, I argue that contemporary cinegraphic fiction, a concept I coined, shed light on filmic discourses, platforms, and artifacts and transpose film language into literary texts. Intending to rethink polycentric film production and …

The Man Who Had It All But Her: The Construction And Destruction Of The Macho Image In Four Mexican Novels, Adriana Marmolejo Soto

Masters Theses

The ideas of Mexican Machismo have been crystallized in the image of the Macho, a virile man who represents the ideals of masculinity in a determined time and space. This work aims to examine how four Mexican Novels (Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Elena Garro’s Los Recuerdos del Porvenir, Yuri Herrera’s Trabajos del Reino, and Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes) present their unique macho ideals, and how the male characters fail to fulfill them. Through a textual examination of the four novels, this work asks: how is a macho image formed in each pair of novels? And most importantly how …

Health Care In The Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis Between Cuba And Puerto Rico, Matheus Moreira Sanches Peraci

Honors Projects

The paper at hand focuses on comparing the differences of the Cuban and Puerto Rican health care (HC) system and conditions. As this is a comparative research analysis, this was done by reviewing many different reliable sources and compiling the relevant information from Cuba and Puerto Rico. The factors that were taken into account are: (a) Political and Health Care Systems, (b) Natural and Artificial Disaster and (c) Country’s Demographics and Health Statistics.

Sistematización De Cuentos/Relatos De La Comunidad Mocagua, Anderson Santos Ortega, Fredy Andrés Santos Toro

Sistemas de Información, Bibliotecología y Archivística

No abstract provided.

Ansiedades Épico-Criollas Y El Mecenazgo De Indias En El Arauco Domado De Pedro De Oña, Andrea L. Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Among the characteristics of epic poetry are the topic of war, love encounters, heroism of exemplary individuals, and the narration of events contemporary to the audience to reinforce a collective historical identity. Arauco domado by Pedro de Oña, born in Angol (modern Chile), reiterates these traditional expectations with its protagonist, characters, setting, and latter theatrical representations within the viceregal context. The poem was made possible by the sponsorship of García Hurtado de Mendoza y Manrique, IV Marquis of Cañete and Viceroy of Peru. If the title of “espíritu cesarino novelo” [Caesar’s new spirit] (V.76.3) corresponds to the patron, Pedro de …

Kiskeyanas Valientes En Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers And The Spaces Of Contemporary American Literature, Isabel R. Espinal

Doctoral Dissertations

We can learn and gain a lot by putting Dominican women writers at the center of our attention. Yet they rarely have that place. This dissertation looks at Dominican women authors who have lived and written in the United States —Josefina Báez, Marianela Medrano, Yrene Santos, Aurora Arias, Nelly Rosario, Annecy Báez, Ana Maurine Lara, Raquel Cepeda— and how they fit within the spaces of contemporary American society, and more broadly within world flows of peoples and cultural productions. I draw on the theories and methodologies of Gloria Anzaldúa and her generation of feminists of color, as well as subsequent …

Desire, Curiosity, And The Search For Truth In Proust, Moreno, And Bechdel, Santiago Parga Linares

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marcel Proust’s influence on twentieth century literature is broad and has been well documented. This dissertation attempts a comparative reading of À la recherche du temps perdu that places it in contrast with Colombian writer Marvel Moreno’s 1987 novel, En diciembre llegaban las brisas, and Alison Bechdel’s 2006 comic memoir, Fun Home. Starting from a Deleuzian reading of the Recherche, this dissertation proposes the notion of the “proustian truth seeker”, a thematic and stylistic phenomenon which can be traced in all three writers. The characteristics of the truth seeker can be used to understand the ways in …

Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …

Questioning Authority: An Exploration Of Montaigne And Borges, Keith Warren Roscoe

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Simulacrum And Post-Dictatorship Representation Of Violence In Argentina: Translation And Critical Reading Of Eduardo Pavlovsky’S Paso De Dos, Liliya Alexandrovna Galenkova-Riggs

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Ciudad Letrada Y Poder En La Novela Del Caribe Hispánico Contemporáneo: La Noche Oscura Del Nino Avilés, Bachata Del Ángel Caído Y La Cazadora De Astros, Amilkar Ernesto Caballero

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes Edgardo Rodríguez Julia’s La noche oscura del Niño Avilés, Pedro Antonio Valdez’s Bachata del ángel caído, and Zoé Valdes’s La cazadora de Astros from the perspective of the intersection between intellectuality and power. Its main thesis is that these three writers are “political” writers who postulate “possible worlds” to reconfigure the divisions of the Social world carried out by power vectors in their respective nations. These reconfigurations are based on “detour” strategies that attempt to deconstruct the canonical aesthetic forms and the discourses of truth established by those vectors. The first chapter analyzes the way the three …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

Uncommon Convergences: A Hemispheric And Comparative Approach To The Great Gatsby And Pedro Páramo, Ariel Jade Santos

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Over the past thirty years, American literary scholarship has shifted focus away from a national approach centered on the United States to a hemispheric methodology that includes all of the countries within this hemisphere. As scholars begin to break down the once iron-clad borders that stood between the American canon and the authors of our hemispheric neighbors, new opportunities have arisen for literary exploration. As an original contribution to this field of scholarship, my thesis project uses a hemispheric and comparative methodology to identify and examine the manifestations of reification and patriarchy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) …

Documenting The (Un)Documented: Diasporic Ecuadorian Narratives In Southern/Mediterranean Europe, Esther A. Cuesta

Doctoral Dissertations

For several decades, Ecuadorian, U.S. American, and European social scientists have studied Ecuadorian migration to the European Union. Yet little academic research has been devoted to the comparative study of literary and filmic representations of diasporic Ecuadorians. This disparity between social science and literary studies research is especially evident in scholarship published in English, a gap this dissertation proposes to fill. I investigate the discourses, cultural production, representations, and self-representations of diasporic Ecuadorians in Southern/Mediterranean Europe, specifically in Spain and Italy, where the largest diasporic communities of Ecuadorians in the European Union reside. I focus on a selection of works …

Correspondencias Tempestuosas: Tres Ensayos Para Acompañar A Sycorax Y Calibán, Santiago Vidales

Masters Theses

William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) theatrical work The Tempest was first performed in 1611 at the court of James I. Since the XVII century until today this work of art has travelled the world and has been (re)interpreted from the perspective of multiple ideologies. This thesis seeks to understand the representations and uses that Caliban has had in different spaces and historical moments. The anti-colonial interpretations of Roberto Fernández Retamar authorize us to read metaphorically the current socio-political situation of Latin immigrants in the United States through the perspective of The Tempest. The first chapter of this thesis studies and critically …

La Naturaleza En La Literatura Costarricense Pensada Desde La Eco-Culturalidad, Andrew M. Ray

Doctoral Dissertations

Though the topic of the environment in Costa Rican literature is relatively recent, it is by no means insubstantial. In fact, this particular theme is extremely pertinent in our current days of global warming, mass pollution, fracking, and oil spills, to name just a few issues directly relating to the environment. Therefore, as a hotbed of eco-tourism and environmental awareness, Costa Rica’s literature is a prime candidate for exploring the representation of nature, not as the result of a process of progress and modernization, but rather as a grave warning of the negative ecological effects of the coloniality of nature. …