Download or read book Imagining the Americas in Print written by Michiel van Groesen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Imagining the Americas in Print, Michiel van Groesen reveals the variety of ways in which publishers and printers in early modern Europe gathered information about the Americas, constructed a narrative, and used it to further colonial ambitions in the Atlantic world (1500–1700). The essays examine the creative ways in which knowledge was manufactured in printing workshops. Collectively they bring to life the vivid print culture that determined the relationship between the Old World and the New in the Age of Encounters, and chart the genres that reflected and shaped the European imagination, and helped to legitimate ideologies of colonialism in the next two centuries.
Download or read book The Venetian Discovery of America written by Elizabeth Horodowich and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few Renaissance Venetians saw the New World with their own eyes. As the print capital of early modern Europe, however, Venice developed a unique relationship to the Americas. Venetian editors, mapmakers, translators, writers, and cosmographers represented the New World at times as a place that the city's mariners had discovered before the Spanish, a world linked to Marco Polo's China, or another version of Venice, especially in the case of Tenochtitlan. Elizabeth Horodowich explores these various and distinctive modes of imagining the New World, including Venetian rhetorics of 'firstness', similitude, othering, comparison, and simultaneity generated through forms of textual and visual pastiche that linked the wider world to the Venetian lagoon. These wide-ranging stances allowed Venetians to argue for their different but equivalent participation in the Age of Encounters. Whereas historians have traditionally focused on the Spanish conquest and colonization of the New World, and the Dutch and English mapping of it, they have ignored the wide circulation of Venetian Americana. Horodowich demonstrates how with their printed texts and maps, Venetian newsmongers embraced a fertile tension between the distant and the close. In doing so, they played a crucial yet heretofore unrecognized role in the invention of America.
Download or read book Imagining Baseball written by David McGimpsey and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... McGimpsey displays erudition, clever insights and a knack for the wickedly funny wisecrack (several of which are aimed at his beloved, and beleaguered, Montreal Expos). Literary baseball may be a drastically over-analyzed subject, but, like an overachieving rookie, McGrimpsey produces a far better book on it than one would have ever thought possible." --Louis Jacobson, Washington Post "This is the most important critical book on baseball literature in many years." --Murray Sperber, author of Onward to Victory From Field of Dreams to The Natural, from baseball cards to highbrow fiction, this book explores the place of baseball in American popular culture.
Download or read book The Interethnic Imagination written by Caroline Rody and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rody proposes a new paradigm for understanding the changing terrain of contemporary fiction. She claims that what we have long read as ethnic literature is in the process of becoming 'interethnic'. Examining an extensive range of Asian American fictions, she offers readings of three especially compelling examples.
Download or read book The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination written by Elizabeth Christine Russ and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a provocative new approach toward understanding transnational literary cultures, this study examines the specter of the plantation, that physical place most vividly associated with slavery in the Americas. For Elizabeth Russ, the plantation is not merely a literal location, but also a vexing rhetorical, ideological, and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told. Through a series of precise, in-depth readings, Russ analyzes the discourse of the plantation through a number of suggestive pairings: male and female perspectives; U.S. and Spanish American traditions; and continental alongside island societies. To chart comparative elements in the development of the postslavery imagination in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, Russ distinguishes between a modern and a postmodern imaginary. The former privileges a familiar plot of modernity: the traumatic transition from a local, largely agrarian order to an increasingly anonymous industrialized society. The latter, abandoning nostalgia toward the past, suggests a new history using the strategies of performance, such as witnessing, reticency, and traversal. Authors examined include The Twelve Southerners, Fernando Ortiz, Teresa de la Parra, Eudora Welty, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, and Mayra Santos-Febres, among others. Applying sharp analyses across a broad range of texts, Russ reveals how the language used to imagine communities influenced by the plantation has been gendered, racialized, and eroticized in ways that oppose the domination of an ever-shifting "North" while often reproducing the fundamental power divide. Her work moves beyond the North-South dichotomy that has often stymied scholarly work in Latin American studies and, importantly, provides a model for future hemispheric approaches.
Download or read book Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence written by Lia Markey and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length study of the impact of the discovery of the Americas on Italian Renaissance art and culture, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence demonstrates that the Medici grand dukes of Florence were not only great patrons of artists but also early conservators of American culture. In collecting New World objects such as featherwork, codices, turquoise, and live plants and animals, the Medici grand dukes undertook a “vicarious conquest” of the Americas. As a result of their efforts, Renaissance Florence boasted one of the largest collections of objects from the New World as well as representations of the Americas in a variety of media. Through a close examination of archival sources, including inventories and Medici letters, Lia Markey uncovers the provenance, history, and meaning of goods from and images of the Americas in Medici collections, and she shows how these novelties were incorporated into the culture of the Florentine court. More than just a study of the discoveries themselves, this volume is a vivid exploration of the New World as it existed in the minds of the Medici and their contemporaries. Scholars of Italian and American art history will especially welcome and benefit from Markey’s insight.
Download or read book Imagining Our Americas written by Sandhya Shukla and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-20 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This rich interdisciplinary collection of essays advocates and models a hemispheric approach to the study of the Americas. Taken together, the essays examine North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific as a broad region transcending both national boundaries and the dichotomy between North and South. In the volume’s substantial introduction, the editors, an anthropologist and a historian, explain the need to move beyond the paradigm of U.S. American Studies and Latin American Studies as two distinct fields. They point out the Cold War origins of area studies, and they note how many of the Americas’ most significant social formations have spanned borders if not continents: diverse and complex indigenous societies, European conquest and colonization, African slavery, Enlightenment-based independence movements, mass immigrations, and neoliberal economies. Scholars of literature, ethnic studies, and regional studies as well as of anthropology and history, the contributors focus on the Americas as a broadly conceived geographic, political, and cultural formation. Among the essays are explorations of the varied histories of African Americans’ presence in Mexican and Chicano communities, the different racial and class meanings that the Colombian musical genre cumbia assumes as it is absorbed across national borders, and the contrasting visions of anticolonial struggle embodied in the writings of two literary giants and national heroes: José Martí of Cuba and José Rizal of the Philippines. One contributor shows how a pidgin-language mixture of Japanese, Hawaiian, and English allowed second-generation Japanese immigrants to critique Hawaii’s plantation labor system as well as Japanese hierarchies of gender, generation, and race. Another examines the troubled history of U.S. gay and lesbian solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Building on and moving beyond previous scholarship, this collection illuminates the productive intellectual and political lines of inquiry opened by a focus on the Americas. Contributors. Rachel Adams, Victor Bascara, John D. Blanco, Alyosha Goldstein, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, Ian Lekus, Caroline F. Levander, Susan Y. Najita, Rebecca Schreiber, Sandhya Shukla, Harilaos Stecopoulos, Michelle Stephens, Heidi Tinsman, Nick Turse, Rob Wilson
Download or read book Imagining Asia in the Americas written by Zelideth María Rivas and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, Asian immigrants have been making vital contributions to the cultures of North and South America. Yet in many of these countries, Asians are commonly viewed as undifferentiated racial “others,” lumped together as chinos regardless of whether they have Chinese ancestry. How might this struggle for recognition in their adopted homelands affect the ways that Asians in the Americas imagine community and cultural identity? The essays in Imagining Asia in the Americas investigate the myriad ways that Asians throughout the Americas use language, literature, religion, commerce, and other cultural practices to establish a sense of community, commemorate their countries of origin, and anticipate the possibilities presented by life in a new land. Focusing on a variety of locations across South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the United States, the book’s contributors reveal the rich diversity of Asian American identities. Yet taken together, they provide an illuminating portrait of how immigrants negotiate between their native and adopted cultures. Drawing from a rich array of source materials, including texts in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Gujarati that have never before been translated into English, this collection represents a groundbreaking work of scholarship. Through its unique comparative approach, Imagining Asia in the Americas opens up a conversation between various Asian communities within the Americas and beyond.
Download or read book Imagining Modernity in the Andes written by Priscilla Archibald and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-06 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining Modernity in the Andes is an interdisciplinary work that deals with the intersection of projects of modernity with constructions of race and ethnicity in the Andes. This book focuses initially on Indigenismo, attempting to recuperate the intellectual energy of writers and artists from the twenties who rewrote political and cultural discourse in an irreversible manner, and concludes with a consideration of the new configurations of indigeneity that are emerging today not only in the Andes but across the globe. The multidisciplinary work of José Marìa Arguedas occupies a privileged place in this study and his anthropological work is analyzed in the context of an ideological climate. In addition to considering sociological and anthropological accounts, Archibald examines representations of urbanization and social informality by four Peruvian novelists, pointing to the prevalence of the troupe of the grotesque as a metaphor for the unmanageability associated with cities of the South. Finally, Imagining Modernity in the Andes analyzes the implications of the emergence of new visual media in a culture context long defined by the oral-textual divide, and considers the continued relevance of the concept of transculturation in a transnational and post-literary context.
Download or read book Haiti and the Uses of America written by Chantalle F. Verna and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-19 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to popular notions, Haiti-U.S. relations have not only been about Haitian resistance to U.S. domination. In Haiti and the Uses of America, Chantalle F. Verna makes evident that there have been key moments of cooperation that contributed to nation-building in both countries. In the years following the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), Haitian politicians and professionals with a cosmopolitan outlook shaped a new era in Haiti-U.S. diplomacy. Their efforts, Verna shows, helped favorable ideas about the United States, once held by a small segment of Haitian society, circulate more widely. In this way, Haitians contributed to and capitalized upon the spread of internationalism in the Americas and the larger world.
Download or read book The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture written by Grégory Pierrot and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the Ta-Nehisi Coates-authored Black Panther comic book series (2016); recent films Django Unchained (2012) and The Birth of a Nation (2016); Nate Parker's cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion; and screen adaptations of Marvel's Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018); violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however, that the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries. The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as a heathen and a barbarian, his values-honor, loyalty, love-reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity. Pierrot's The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.
Download or read book Cuba in the American Imagination written by Louis A. Pérez Jr. and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2008-08-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than two hundred years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images--Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. Louis A. Perez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island as they have persisted and changed since the early nineteenth century. Drawing on texts and visual images produced by Americans ranging from government officials, policy makers, and journalists to travelers, tourists, poets, and lyricists, Perez argues that these charged and coded images of persuasion and mediation were in service to America's imperial impulses over Cuba.
Download or read book Istwa across the Water written by Toni Pressley-Sanon and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-01-03 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Haiti-Dominican Republic Section Isis Duarte Book Prize Gathering oral stories and visual art from Haiti and two of its "motherlands" in Africa, Istwa across the Water recovers the submerged histories of the island through methods drawn from its deep spiritual and cultural traditions. Toni Pressley-Sanon employs three theoretical anchors to bring together parts of the African diaspora that are profoundly fractured because of the slave trade. The first is the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, which she uses to identify parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region as Haiti's twinned sites of cultural production. Second, she draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite's idea of tidalectics—the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves—as a way to look at the cultural exchange set in motion by the transatlantic movement of captives. Finally, Pressley-Sanon searches out the places where history and memory intersect in story, expressed by the Kreyòl term istwa. Challenging the tendency to read history linearly, this volume offers a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.
Download or read book Imagining America written by Wesley Brown and published by Turtleback. This book was released on 2003-02-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents stories written by authors of diverse cultural backgrounds, including Alice Walker, Oscar Hijuelos, Sherman Alexie, Michelle Cliff, Mei Mei Evans, LeRoi Jones, and Sui Sin Far.
Download or read book American Nationalisms written by Benjamin E. Park and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces how early Americans imagined what a 'nation' meant during the first fifty years of the country's existence.
Download or read book Haiti and the Americas written by Carla Calarge and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haiti has long played an important role in global perception of the western hemisphere, but ideas about Haiti often appear paradoxical. Is it a land of tyranny and oppression or a beacon of freedom as site of the world's only successful slave revolution? A bastion of devilish practices or a devoutly religious island? Does its status as the second independent nation in the hemisphere give it special lessons to teach about postcolonialism, or is its main lesson one of failure? Haiti and the Americas brings together an interdisciplinary group of essays to examine the influence of Haiti throughout the hemisphere, to contextualize the ways that Haiti has been represented over time, and to look at Haiti's own cultural expressions in order to think about alternative ways of imagining its culture and history. Thinking about Haiti requires breaking through a thick layer of stereotypes. Haiti is often represented as the region's nadir of poverty, of political dysfunction, and of savagery. Contemporary media coverage fits very easily into the narrative of Haiti as a dependent nation, unable to govern or even fend for itself, a site of lawlessness that is in need of more powerful neighbors to take control. Essayists in Haiti and the Americas present a fuller picture developing approaches that can account for the complexity of Haitian history and culture.
Download or read book Theorizing Race in the Americas written by Juliet Hooker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. African-American and Latin American intellectuals - Frederick Douglass and Domingo F. Sarmiento, and W. E. B. Du Bois and José Vasconcelos - have never been read alongside each other. Although these thinkers addressed key political and philosophical issues in the Americas, political theorists have yet to compare their ideas about race. By juxtaposing these thinkers, Theorizing Race in the Americas takes up the opportunity to bring African-American and Latin American political thought into conversation, and in turn, maps a genealogy of racial theory throughout the hemisphere.
