Latin American Languages and Societies Commons^™

Dark Networks And Pathogens Undermining Democracies: Guillermo Del Toro And Chuck Hogan’S The Strain, Carmen A. Serrano

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

As economies and cultures morph due to technoscience, vampire entities also mutate so as to still provoke fear ‒their bodies change, their populations grow and their networks expand; yet the way to annihilate them becomes less obvious. Responding to these modern day changes, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s television series The Strain (2014-2017) uncannily echoes, or perhaps foreshadows, the social realities under an informational, networked, and epidemiological paradigm. The filmmakers here present viewers with hybrid monsters and environments that are highly interconnected and pathogenic, reflecting contemporary social fears regarding failing democracies and global pandemics. Drawing from Guillermo del Toro’s …

Activismo, Literatura Y Cambio Social En El Caribe Hispano: Aproximación En Tres Movimientos, Maria Alejandra Aguilar Dornelles

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Este ensayo convoca a la reflexión de los vínculos entre literatura, activismo y cambio social en el Caribe hispano privilegiando ciertas intervenciones lideradas por mujeres, las cuales han contribuido a la defensa de mejores condiciones de vida y a un pacto social más equitativo. Teniendo en cuenta la diversidad y movilidad que caracteriza a la región caribeña, esta reflexión comienza examinando las organizaciones feministas autónomas que surgieron en la década del 70 en Puerto Rico para luego desplazarse hacia el trabajo de cuestionamiento a la historia planteado por la poesía de Aída Cartagena Portalatín en República Dominicana, concluyendo con una …

Heroísmo Y Conciencia Racial En La Obra De La Poeta Afro-Cubana Cristina Ayala, Maria A. Aguilar

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the poetry of Cuban writer Cristina Ayala emphasizing the political value of her use of a rhetoric of heroism, a discursive device that masks her demands for recognition of women’s rights and those of Afro-Cubans. The analysis of her poetry suggests that the symbolic manipulation of the “hero” and the representation of “colored” women as intellectuals and “heroes” expressed her desire to intervene in the public arena. By positioning herself within a political discourse that reconstructed slavery’s past, she narrated the revolutionary vicissitudes and created a utopian vision of the future for the Afro-Cuban community. Ayala expresses …

Critical Travels, Discursive Practices: Foucault In Tunis (1966-1968), Ilka Kressner

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

In the extensive research on the oeuvre and life of Michel Foucault, the years he spent in Tunisia do not occupy a prominent role. More precisely, they have been mentioned only in passing. David Macey's six-hundred-page English biography, The Lives of Michel Foucault, discusses the time in Tunisia only briefly. In his biography in French, Didier Eribon dedicates some scarce seven pages to the time Foucault worked as visiting professor of philosophy at Tunis University. Eribon introduces his account as follows: "Why Tunis? This was, once again, a strange set of co-occurrences.""

Revamping Dracula On The Mexican Silver In Fernando Méndez’S El Vampiro, Carmen Serrano

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores Mexican vampire movies of the 1950s and follows the vampire’s journey from the Americas to Europe and back in order to analyze the ways in which the monster is articulated in each cultural context. The specific Mexican articulation of the vampire in Fernando Méndez’sEl vampiro is modeled after Hollywood films, yet the film carries nuanced meaning having to do with national identity and borders. In this film, the vampire is a menacing figure that arrives seeking to infect, invade, and conquer. At the same time, he is potentially a subversive other that transgresses borders and threatens …

El Esclavo Y El Letrado: Máscaras De La Auto-Representación En La Temprana Narrativa Antiesclavista Cubana, Maria A. Aguilar-Dornelles

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Los tres textos aquí discutidos, Autobiografía de un esclavo,Francisco y Sab,narran la experiencia de la esclavitud desde la perspectiva del esclavo.Sinembargo, laperspectiva del narrador de Autobiografía de un esclavopermite establecer una distancia ideológica con la imagen del esclavo creada por Suárez y Romero y Gómez de Avellaneda. A pesar de que Autobiografíafue editada y alterada para adecuarla a la norma lingüística de la ciudad letrada, es posible identificar estrategias de negociación y desafío a la autoridad de los intelectuales que intentaron controlar sus condiciones de emisión y difusión.A este respecto, elnarradorno enfatiza lavictimizacióndel esclavo, como síhacen Suárez y Romero y …

Spanish In Contact With Arabic, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Spanish and Arabic have been in contact for long periods and in different regions. While this is largely due to the geographical proximity of the Iberian Peninsula to western North Africa, a set of historical, political and social developments helped bring both languages into close contact. Of remarkable significance was the presence of Arabic in Iberia from 711 to 1492 and, at least, for several more decades after the Reconquista was completed. This fact, as is often mentioned, led to heavy lexical borrowing from Arabic into Spanish and other Ibero-Romance languages. Also important was the introduction of Spanish into North …

El Vampiro En El Espejo: Elementos Góticos En Yo El Supremo, Carmen A. Serrano

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Con la fi ccionalización de la vida del dictador paraguayo José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1766-1840) en Yo el Supremo (1973), Augusto Roa Bastos establece un espacio en el que fuentes históricas, literarias y mitológicas se mezclan y se confunden creando un personaje de carácter sobrenatural que mantiene una sutil pero fi rme relación, aún no explorada, con la novela gótica y, en concreto, con la imagen del vampiro.

Gracias a esta intertexualidad que se establece al combinar elementos propios de la mitología y del folklore guaraníes con personajes históricos tales como el Marqués de Sade, Alfonso X el Sabio …

Hibridaciones Corpóreas: Los “Ejemplares Raros” De Botánica Del Caos De Ana María Shua, Ilka Kressner

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Los cuerpos humanos, sus procesos paulatinos y cambios repentinos, sus misterios, espantos y goces forman una tematica central en la narrativa de Ana Maria Shua. En casi todas sus novelas, cuentos y mini-cuentos, la fabuladora argentina nos invita a asistir a espectaculos textuales de lo corporeo en transformacion--a menudo ilogicos, semi-surrealistas, grotescos y exuberantes. Sus protagonistas transitorios enfrentan aventuras proteticas que cuestionan tanto las diferenciaciones sexuales como las taxonomias de diferentes especies como las categorizaciones de lo humano, lo animal y lo botanico. Hasta refutan la division entre lo animado y lo inanimado. Tambien la ultima coleccion de mini-cuentos de …

Bargaining In Two Languages: Conversational Functions Of Transactional Code-Switching, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Studies on the pragmatic functions of code-switching, in opposition to its macro sociolinguistic significance or syntactic structure, have been largely influenced by Gumperz's pioneering classification presented in the chapter he dedicated to this topic in his 1982 book, Discourse strategies. Many other taxonomies followed Gumperz's initial proposal (Appel and Muysken 1987, Poplack 1988, Romaine 1989, Heller 1992) in spite of the usually claimed difficulty in interpreting and predicting the exact functions of code-switching in any given bilingual context. Their purpose has been to identify the sociopragmatic motivation for the occurrence of a particular code-switched utterance and ultimately classify it under …