Download or read book The Mexican Dream written by J. M. G. Le Clézio and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-12 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A widely respected French novelist with a long history of interest in pre-Columbian Mexico, Le Clezio imagined how the thought of early Indian civilizations might have evolved if not for the interruption of European conquest. A powerful evocation of the imaginings that made and unmade an ancient culture. Map.
Download or read book The Mexican Dream Or The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations written by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Corn Woman Sings written by Barron Eleanor Druckrey, PhD and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Do you want to know?" the spirit asked twenty-three-year-old Eleanor Barrón Druckrey in 1967. At the time, the young woman was not quite ready. Ten years later and still stalked by spirits day and night, Barrón Druckrey accepted the invitation to embark on a journey of discovery through her dreams. She began to understand a pattern of brilliance and beauty related to the ancient past when magic, wonder, and awe reigned throughout the native cultures in the Americas. Drawn from more than thirty years of recorded dreams, Corn Woman Sings brings Native American traditions to life. Interwoven with Barrón Druckrey's personal stories and discussions on the legends of the great dreamers, Corn Woman's legacy lays a path of transformation and renewal for the modern-day curandera, medicine woman and mystic, in all walks of life. Corn Woman Sings shows you how to start building a dream map that will lead you to personal transformation. It illustrates the process of opening up to your inner self and starting the process of uniting mind, body, and spirit. Only time will tell what you might witness in your dreams.
Download or read book Deadly Baggage written by Al Sandine and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1519, a few hundred Europeans led by Hernan Cortes sailed from Cuba to the Mexican mainland, where they encountered representatives of the Aztec Empire. Their Iberian history, culture and religion, and their experience in the Greater Antilles made conquest and riches the aim of these adventurers. They regarded themselves as heroes in a romantic crusade of good against evil. Each member of the expedition sought to acquire precious metals and to become a lord of enslaved native labor. Their horses and steel swords, aided by native disunity and susceptibility to Old World diseases, ensured their success. This analysis of the conquest of Mexico stands in contrast to previous narratives that either reduce the conquest to a contest between Cortes and Montezuma, or describe a near miraculous victory of European ingenuity and Western values over Indian superstition and savagery. The author re-frames the clash of civilizations in New World prehistory that left inhabitants at a disadvantage.
Download or read book India A Civilization of Differences written by Alain Daniélou and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-07-05 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of Daniélou's writings that builds a bold and cogent defense of India's caste system • Looks at the Hindu caste system not as racist inequality but as a natural ordering of diversity • Reveals the stereotypes of Indian society invented to justify colonialism • Includes never-before-published articles by the internationally recognized Hindu scholar and translator of The Complete Kama Sutra (200,000 copies sold) In classical India social ethics are based on each individual's functional role in society. These ethics vary according to caste in order to maximize the individual's effectiveness in the social context. This is the definition of caste ethics. The Indian caste system is not a hierarchy with some who are privileged and others who are despised; it is a natural ordering, an organizing principle, of a society wherein differences are embraced rather than ignored. In the caste system it is up to the individual to achieve perfection in the state to which he or she is born, since to a certain extent that state also forms part of a person's nature. All people must accomplish their individual spiritual destinies while, as members of a social group, ensuring the continuity of the group and collaborating in creating a favorable framework for all human life--thereby fulfilling the collective destiny of the group. The notion of transmigration provides an equalizing effect on this prescribed system in that today's prince may be reborn as a woodcutter and the Brahman as a shoemaker. In India: A Civilization of Differences, Daniélou explores this seldom-heard side of the caste debate and argues effectively in its favor. This rare collection of the late author's writings contains several never-before-published articles and offers an in-depth look at the structure of Indian society before and after Western colonialism.
Download or read book Legends of the Plumed Serpent written by Neil Baldwin and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meticulously pieced together from personal experiences that come with years of travel, an extensive knowledge of the historic and scholarly works, and a deep appreciation of Latin American art and culture—both ancient and modern—critically-acclaimed biographer Neil Baldwin has created a mosaic of words and images retelling the myth of the Plumed Serpent (or Quetzalcóatl) as it has evolved through the millennia. He has also created an essential guidebook for the armchair traveller and passionate tourist alike. Only a few hours by air from the United States are the mysteries and hauntingly beautiful ruins of Mexico. Among the vines intertwined in the frail latticework of crumbling palaces, spiraling geometric motifs covering vast walls that sink beneath the jungle, and nearly vertical temple steps leading hundreds of feet to a dizzying view of sky and earth, images of Quetzalcóatl abound. The fanged, bug-eyed feathered serpent thrusts his malevolent, sneering head from the pyramid at Teotihuacán; he swims in a river of rock around the temple at Xochicalco; and at Chichén Itzá, serpent and jaguar dance on a trail of stone, their embrace spawning a monstrous snake with clawed forefeet. Depicted as part man, snake, and bird, the Plumed Serpent is the earliest known creation myth from Mesoamerica, the region spanning Mexico and most of Central America. He embodies good and evil, sky and earth, feast and famine—the duality of life itself. Steep, massive temples were built in his honor at Teotihuacán, the vast city of ruins near today’s Mexico City, and at Chichén Itzá in northern Yucatán, the intricate complex that includes the famed ballcourt. Moctezuma, the ruler of the Aztecs, mistook Hernán Cortéz and the invasion of the Spanish in 1519 for the return of Quetzalcóatl. The Catholic Church with its army of Franciscan monks adapted his legend to introduce the indigenous people to Catholicism. The myth enhanced Emiliano Zapata’s stature as a latter-day Quetzalcóatl during the Mexican Revolution. Diego Rivera and the modern muralists invoked his image to include indigenous themes in their state-sponsored art. And Quetzalcóatl inspired English author D. H. Lawrence to write a new “American novel.” These and many other tales are recounted in the words and images of Neil Baldwin’s Legends of the Plumed Serpent. Whether sharing a moment of reflection among the breathtaking ruins, delving into the historic role of Quetzalcóatl during the Spanish Conquest, or tracing the themes of revolution and rebirth in the art of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, Neil Baldwin’s enlightening prose captures the imagination. Accompanied by numerous illustrations—many photographs taken by the author, and others painstakingly researched and gathered over the past decade—Legends of the Plumed Serpent is a true labor of love.
Download or read book Latin American Postmodernisms written by Young and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-11-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essays in this volume locate Latin America within the postmodernism debate by addressing both its position in the theory of the postmodern and the peripheral existence of the continent in light of the globalizing practices of the contemporary world. The next essays focus on the Caribbean and elements of the formation of identity and culture in a group of societies belonging to the same geographic region but confronted with the idiosyncrasies of their colonial histories, the problematics of race and language, and their relation to the politics and cultures of metropolitan powers. There are three essays concerned with re-readings of the first encounters between Europe and America and discussions of more recent fictional representations of the past which attempt to recover the lost Amerindian Other of the Conquest and Colonization and to reveal the constructedness of History. Finally, preceded by two texts on ways of reading and writing in Latin America, the final four essays are concerned with challenges to the discourses of power by Latin American women who re-define the subject and counter the established hegemonies of religion, culture, and social structure both in their writing and political actions. As a collection of essays, this volume will appeal to readers who are interested in Post-modernism as a global phenomenon and in understanding the different forms it takes and the issues it addresses in different cultural environments.
Download or read book What If Latin America Ruled the World written by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This tour of the histories of North and South America explains how Latin America has become a vital part of the global community and discusses how its consumers, resources and emigrants will become big factors in the future.
Download or read book Return of the Plumed Serpent written by Graham Hancock and published by Coronet. This book was released on 2014-10-09 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graham Hancock, an expert in ancient civilisations and author of the 9 million selling Fingerprints of the Gods, and expert too, on the use of hallucinogens to achieve higher states of consciousness, brings these two interests together in the second volume of the War God trilogy. The conquistador Hernán Cortés is dreaming of Tenochtitlan, the golden city of Aztecs. But in order to win the Aztecs' gold, Cortés and his small force of just five hundred men will have to defeat the psychotic emperor Moctezuma and the armies of hundreds of thousands he commands. Cortés expects that the Tlascalans, hereditary enemies of the Aztecs, will join him, but instead finds himself locked in a deadly struggle. As Cortés risks all against the Tlascalans, he plays mind games with Moctezuma, aiming to defeat the Aztec emperor psychologically before ever having to face him in battle. In this he is aided by his lover Malinal, a beautiful Mayan princess. It is from Malinal that Cortés learns of the myth of Quetzalcoatl, 'The Plumed Serpent'. She shows him how to exploit the prophecy of the fabled god king's return to weaken Moctezuma's resolve and keep alive the suspicion that the conquistador might actually be Quetzalcoatl himself.
Download or read book The Political Uses of Literature written by Benjamin Kohlmann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature's utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment. The question of literature's 'uses' has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature's distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection. The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature's political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundational moment, it draws attention to the important body of interwar politicized literature and to debates about literature's ability to intervene in social reality. It then traces the mobilization of related conversations and artistic practices across several historical conjunctures, most notably the committed literature of the 1960s and our own present. In mapping out these geographically and artistically diverse traditions – including case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, India and Russia – contributors advance critical discussions in the field, making questions pertaining to politicized art newly compelling to a broader and more diverse readership. Most importantly, this volume insists on the need to think about literature's political uses today – at a time when it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any kind of political efficacy for art, even as the need to do so is growing more and more acute. Literature may not proffer easy answers to our political problems, but as this collection suggests, the writing of the 20th century holds out aesthetic resources for a renewed engagement with the dilemmas that face us now.
Download or read book Land scape theater written by Elinor Fuchs and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by leading theater scholars and theorists exploring the "turn to landscape" in modern and contemporary theater
Download or read book Cannibal Culture written by Deborah Root and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines the ways Western art and Western commerce co-opt, pigeonhole, and commodify so-called "native experiences." It raises important and uncomfortable questions about how we travel, what we buy, and how we determine cultural merit.
Download or read book Oh Mexico written by Lucy Neville and published by Nicholas Brealey. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Anybody who has ever been a 20-something traveler should enjoy this engaging read." - Bookseller and Publisher Set against the vibrant background of one of the world's most dangerous cities, Oh Mexico! is not only a classic travel memoir, but also contains great narrative and stuffed with amazing facts about this country's colourful history, lit up by warmth, wit, wisdom and pizzazz. With an eye for the bizarre and comic, Lucy's engaging account of surviving life and love in a vast, bustling Central American city is irresistible. After graduating from university with an Arts degree, she is faced with a dilemma: find a job or disappear to Latin America, the exotic land of her childhood dreams! Arriving in Mexico City with little money and only basic Spanish, Lucy's To-Do list is simple enough: "Next morning I awoke and began writing a to do list. Not that I am an organised person, but I was feeling overwhelmed and I always find that a to do list gives me a sense that there is a potential to cope with the situation. 1. Find something to eat, 2. Wash undies, 3. Learn Spanish and 4. Get a job" Lucy promptly finds work as an English teacher and scores a room in a sunny apartment. Her new flatmate, the well-connected Octavio, is unnervingly attractive. So begins an adventure of comic challenges as Lucy negotiates Mexico City's stratified worlds, meeting everyone from street hawkers to crazy gringos, academics and socialites. Then, as the two men she accidentally falls in love with discover each other s existence, her extrovert family arrive for a visit! With a curious mind and a knowing eye, Lucy's account of life in this riotous third-world metropolis that is Mexico City is utterly irresistible.
Download or read book The Return of Carvajal written by Ilan Stavans and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2017, the New York Times announced that the long-lost memoir of Luis de Carvajal the Younger had been rediscovered. Considered the first autobiography by a Jew in the Americas, the book had been stolen decades earlier from Mexico’s National Archives. Here, Ilan Stavans recounts the extraordinary and entertaining story of the reappearance of this precious object and how its discovery opened up new vistas onto the world of secret Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition. Called el Mozo (the Younger) to distinguish him from an uncle of the same name who was governor of Nuevo León, Luis de Carvajal learned of his Jewishness after being raised a Catholic. He came to recognize himself as a messiah for fellow crypto-Jews, and he was burned at the stake on December 8, 1596, in the biggest auto-da-fé in all of Latin America. His memoir—a 180-page manuscript written by a crypto-Jew targeted by the Holy Office of the Inquisition for unlawful proselytizing activities—was not only distinct but of enormous value. With characters such as conniving academics embroiled in a scholarly feud, a magnanimous philanthropist, naïve booksellers, and a secondary cast that could be taken from a David Lynch film, The Return of Carvajal recounts the global intrigue that placed crypto-Jewish culture at the heart of contemporary debates on religion and identity.
Download or read book The Beats in Mexico written by David Stephen Calonne and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its landscape, history, and mystical practices in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti, as well as lesser-known female Beat writers like Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger.
Download or read book Drugs Violence and Latin America written by Joseph Patteson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book undertakes a psychotropic analysis of texts that deal with the violence of drug trafficking and interdiction, especially in Mexico. While most critics of so-called narcoculture have either focused on an aesthetic “sobriety” in these works or discounted them altogether as exploitative and unworthy of serious attention, Drugs, Violence, and Latin America illuminates how such work may reflect and intervene in global networks of intoxication. Theorizing a “dialectics of intoxication” that illustrates how psychotropy may either solidify or destabilize the self and its relationship to the other, it proposes that these tendencies influence human behavior in distinct ways and are leveraged for social control within both licit and illicit economies. A consideration of a countercultural genealogy in Latin America provides a contrastive psychotropic context for contemporary novels that exposes links between narcoviolence and consumerism, challenging our addictions of thought and feeling about ourselves and our relationships to drugs and narco-violence.
Download or read book Conquistador written by Buddy Levy and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2009-07-28 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this astonishing work of scholarship that reads like an edge-of-your-seat adventure thriller, acclaimed historian Buddy Levy records the last days of the Aztec empire and the two men at the center of an epic clash of cultures perhaps unequaled to this day. It was a moment unique in human history, the face-to-face meeting between two men from civilizations a world apart. In 1519, Hernán Cortés arrived on the shores of Mexico, determined not only to expand the Spanish empire but to convert the natives to Catholicism and carry off a fortune in gold. That he saw nothing paradoxical in carrying out his intentions by virtually annihilating a proud and accomplished native people is one of the most remarkable and tragic aspects of this unforgettable story. In Tenochtitlán Cortés met his Aztec counterpart, Montezuma: king, divinity, commander of the most powerful military machine in the Americas and ruler of a city whose splendor equaled anything in Europe. Yet in less than two years, Cortés defeated the entire Aztec nation in one of the most astounding battles ever waged. The story of a lost kingdom, a relentless conqueror, and a doomed warrior, Conquistador is history at its most riveting.
