Download or read book A History of Colombian Literature written by Raymond Leslie Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the international recognition of Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez has placed Colombian writing on the global literary map. A History of Colombian Literature explores the genealogy of Colombian poetry and prose from the colonial period to the present day. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction that charts the development of a national literary tradition, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of Colombian literature. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse and fiction of such diverse writers as José Eustacio Rivera, Tomás Carrasquilla, Alvaro Mutis, and Darío Jaramillo Agudelo. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism and multiculturalism in Colombian literature. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Colombian writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.
Download or read book Human Rights in Colombian Literature and Cultural Production written by Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores how Colombian novelists, artists, performers, activists, musicians, and others seek to enact—to perform, to stage, to represent—human rights situations that are otherwise enacted discursively, that is, made public or official, in juridical and political realms in which justice often remains an illusory or promised future. In order to probe how cultural production embodies the tensions between the abstract universality of human rights and the materiality of violations on individual human bodies and on determined groups, the volume asks the following questions: How does the transmission of historical traumas of Colombia’s past, through human rights narratives in various forms, inform the debates around the subjects of rights, truth and memory, remembrance and forgetting, and the construction of citizenship through solidarity and collective struggles for justice? What are the different roles taken by cultural products in the interstices among rights, laws, and social justice within different contexts of state violence and states of exception? What are alternative perspectives, sources, and (micro)histories from Colombia of the creation, evolution, and practice of human rights? How does the human rights discourse interface with notions of environmental justice, especially in the face of global climate change, regional (neo)extractivism, the implementation of megaprojects, and ongoing post-accord thefts and (re)appropriations of land? Through a wide range of disciplinary lenses, the different chapters explore counter-hegemonic concepts of human rights, decolonial options struggling against oppression and market logic, and alternative discourses of human dignity and emancipation within the pluriverse.
Download or read book The Aesthetic Border written by Brantley Nicholson and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-22 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.
Download or read book One Hundred Years of Solitude written by Gabriel García Márquez and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Netflix’s series adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude premieres December 11, 2024! One of the twentieth century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth—these universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an account of the history of the human race.
Download or read book Salt and the Colombian State written by Joshua M. Rosenthal and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2014-08-23 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In republican Colombia, salt became an important source of revenue not just to individuals, but to the state, which levied taxes on it and in some cases controlled and profited from its production. The salt trade consistently accounted for roughly 10 percent of government income. In the town of La Salina de Chita, in Boyaca province, thermal springs offered vast amounts of salt, and its procurement and distribution was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance. Focusing his study on La Salina, Joshua M. Rosenthal presents a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the early Colombian state, its institutions, and their interactions with local citizens during this formative period. Although historians have cited the state's weakness and, in many cases, its absence in local affairs, Rosenthal counters these assumptions by documenting the primary role the state held in administering contracts, inspections, land rights, labor, and trade in La Salina, contending that this was not an isolated incident. He also uncovers the frequent interaction between the state and local residents, who used the state's liberal rhetoric to gain personal economic advantage. Seen through the lens of the administration of La Salina's saltworks, Rosenthal provides a firsthand account of the role of local institutions and fiscal management in the larger process of state building. His study offers new perspectives on the complex network of republican Colombia's political culture and its involvement in provincial life across the nation.
Download or read book Pablo Escobar and Colombian Narcoculture written by Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years since his death in 1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has become a globally recognized symbol of crime, wealth, power, and masculinity. In this long-overdue exploration of Escobar’s impact on popular culture, Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky shows how his legacy inspired the development of narcoculture—television, music, literature, and fashion representing the drug-trafficking lifestyle—in Colombia and around the world. Pobutsky looks at the ways the “Escobar brand” surfaces in bars, restaurants, and clothing lines; in Colombia’s tourist industry; and in telenovelas, documentaries, and narco memoirs about his life, which in turn have generated popular interest in other drug traffickers such as Griselda Blanco and Miami’s “cocaine cowboys.” Pobutsky illustrates how the Colombian state strives to erase his memory while Escobar’s notoriety only continues to increase in popular culture through the transnational media. She argues that the image of Escobar is inextricably linked to Colombia’s internal tensions in the areas of cocaine politics, gender relations, class divisions, and political corruption and that his “brand” perpetuates the country’s reputation as a center of organized crime, to the dismay of the Colombian people. This book is a fascinating study of how the world perceives Colombia and how Colombia’s citizens understand their nation’s past and present. A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez
Download or read book Haunting Without Ghosts written by Juliana Martínez and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, William M. LeoGrande Prize, Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, 2022 For half a century, cultural production in Colombia has labored under the weight of magical realism—above all, the works of Gabriel García Márquez—where ghosts told stories about the country’s violent past and warned against a similarly gruesome future. Decades later, the story of violence in Colombia is no less horrific, but the critical resources of magical realism are depleted. In their wake comes "spectral realism." Juliana Martínez argues that recent Colombian novelists, filmmakers, and artists—from Evelio Rosero and William Vega to Beatriz González and Erika Diettes—share a formal and thematic concern with the spectral but shift the focus from what the ghost is toward what the specter does. These works do not speak of ghosts. Instead, they use the specter to destabilize reality by challenging the authority of human vision and historical chronology. By introducing the spectral into their work, these artists decommodify well-worn modes of representing violence and create a critical space from which to seek justice for the dead and disappeared. A Colombia-based study, Haunting without Ghosts brings powerful insight to the politics and ethics of spectral aesthetics, relevant for a variety of sociohistorical contexts.
Download or read book My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary written by María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary, María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo presents a gripping account of her experiences as a member of M-19, one of the most successful guerrilla movements in Colombia's tumultuous modern history. Vásquez's remarkable story opens with her happy childhood in a middle-class provincial household in which she was encouraged to be adventurous and inquisitive. As an eighteen-year-old university student in Bogotá, María Eugenia embraced radical politics and committed herself to militant action to rid her country of an abusive government. Dedicated and daring, Vásquez took part in some of the M-19's boldest operations in the 1970s and 1980s and became one of its leaders. She was able to avoid detection for nearly twenty years in the movement because she was both clever and considered too attractive to be a guerrillera. Her vivid narrative brings to life the men and women who were her comrades and conveys their anxiety and exhilaration as they carried out their actions. When she tells of her love affairs with some of M-19's top leaders, she cannot separate romance from camaraderie or escape a sense of impending tragedy. If Vásquez gave us only a rare insider's account of youth culture and a guerrilla movement in a Latin American country, this would be a book well worth reading. But she also gives us an unsparing analysis of what it meant to be a woman in the movement and how much her commitment to radical politics cost her. Author note: María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo is Director, Fundación Mujer y Futuro (NGO: Woman and Future Foundation), working in coordination with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the project "Mujer y Derechos" (Women and Rights), which serves women forcibly displaced by the armed conflict. The Spanish-language edition of this book, published as Escrito para no morir, was awarded the Colombian National Prize for Testimonial Literature in 1998. Lorena Terando is Assistant Professor of Translation at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
Download or read book Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature written by Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodriguez and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature traces the aesthetic and political development of the Gothic genre in Colombia. Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez shows how, in the hands of Colombian writers and filmmakers, Gothic tropes are taken to their extremes to reflect particularly Colombian issues, like the ongoing armed conflict in the country since the 1950s as various left wing guerillas, government factions and paramilitary groups escalated violence. In this context, collectives such as the “Cali group” challenge both the centrality of US and European Gothics as well as the centrality of Bogota-centered perspectives of Colombian politics and conflict. The book demonstrates how writers and filmmakers transform the European and American Gothic to show genealogical links between colonization, imperialism and domestic elites’ maintenance of social inequalities.
Download or read book Rock Aesthetics in Colombian Literature and Culture written by David Marti´nez Houghton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rock Aesthetics in Colombian Literature and Culture: Writing the Noise explores the presence of a rock aesthetic in the Colombian literary field and how its pivotal role in creating alternative creative expressions that challenge the dominance of tropicality as the prevailing artistic reference. More than a musical genre or a cultural industry, rock is also an aesthetic: a significant social practice that allows one to understand what people consider beautiful or authentic. Since its birth in the mid-1950s, rock as an aesthetic has expanded worldwide, transforming and establishing dialogues with artistic practices such as literature. Through an analysis of a series of novels, poems, and manifestos written from the 1950s to the early years of the twenty-first century, David Martínez Houghton embarks on a literary, musical, and historical journey. On the way, he explores complex phenomena such as urban violence, the formation of youth identities, the penetration of pop culture, national identity discourses, and even the social and physical transformation of Colombian cities.
Download or read book Night Prayers written by Santiago Gamboa and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two Colombian siblings struggle to reunite as the clock ticks down in this emotional thriller from an author praised for his “masterful suspense” (Publishers Weekly). As a boy, Manuel was a dreamer, a lover of literature, and a tagger. His sister, Juana, made a promise to do everything in her power to protect him from the drug- and violence-infested streets of Bogotá. She decided to take him as far from Colombia as possible, and in order to raise the money to do so, she went to work as a high-priced escort and entered into contact with the dangerous world of corrupt politicians—and when things spun out of control she was forced to flee, leaving her beloved brother behind. Now Manuel, a philosophy student, has been arrested in Bangkok and accused of drug trafficking. Unless he enters a guilty plea he will almost certainly be sentenced to death. But it is not this prospect that weighs most heavily on him—it is the longing for his sister, Juana, whom he hasn’t seen for years. Before he dies he wants nothing more than to be with her again. Finally, one man learns of Manuel’s situation and decides to find Juana—now married to a rich man in Tokyo—and reunite the siblings. But it is a feat that may be beyond his power . . . With the style that has earned him a reputation as one of “the most important Colombian writers” (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán), Santiago Gamboa presents a compelling and moving story about the mean streets of Bogotá, the sordid bordellos of Thailand, and a love between siblings that knows no end.
Download or read book The Shape of the Ruins written by Juan Gabriel Vasquez and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE A sweeping tale of conspiracy theories, assassinations, and twisted obsessions -- the much anticipated masterpiece from Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The Shape of the Ruins is a masterly story of conspiracy, political obsession, and literary investigation. When a man is arrested at a museum for attempting to steal the bullet-ridden suit of a murdered Colombian politician, few notice. But soon this thwarted theft takes on greater meaning as it becomes a thread in a widening web of popular fixations with conspiracy theories, assassinations, and historical secrets; and it haunts those who feel that only they know the real truth behind these killings. This novel explores the darkest moments of a country's past and brings to life the ways in which past violence shapes our present lives. A compulsive read, beautiful and profound, eerily relevant to our times and deeply personal, The Shape of the Ruins is a tour-de-force story by a master at uncovering the incisive wounds of our memories.
Download or read book Literature Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary Colombian Culture written by Rory O'Bryen and published by Tamesis Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory and mourning in Colombia. This book provides the first in-depth examination of a representative range of contemporary Colombian cultural engagements with the conflicts known simply as La Violencia that began in Colombia in the late 1940s. These include Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal's now classic revision of the 'novela de la Violencia', the autobiographical cycle of acclaimed author Fernando Vallejo, versions of the testimonio by Alfredo Molano and internationally renowned novelist Laura Restrepo, as well as cinematic works by Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina. These cultural icons, many of whom are remarkably understudied, show how the heterogeneity of social and cultural processes condensed in La Violencia demands a deconstruction of 'violence' in Colombian culture. This argument is developed in dialogue with European and Latin American cultural theory and contributes to theoretical debates surrounding issues of memory and mourning developed in other Latin American contexts. The narratives explored in this book provide alternatives to abstract historicism and show us how to imagine ways out of deeply rooted cycles of violence. Yet their insistence on haunting and spectres signals the problems besetting the task of mourning in Colombia, positing history rather than psychology as a remainder that troubles efforts to forge collective memories and enact social reconciliation. RORY O'BRYEN lectures in Latin American literature and culture at the University of Cambridge.
Download or read book Commodifying Violence in Literature and on Screen written by Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola and published by Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature. This book was released on 2021 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an exploration of the cultural processes that perpetuate the darker side of Latin America for global consumption, this book investigates the "condition" that has led writers, filmmakers, and artists to embrace (purposefully or not) the incessant violence in Colombian society as the object of their own creative endeavors.
Download or read book America s Other War written by Doug Stokes and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This controversial book maintains that in Colombia the US has long supported a pervasive campaign of state violence directed against both armed insurgents and a wide range of unarmed progressive social forces. While the context may change from one decade to the next, the basic policies remain the same: maintain the pro-US Colombian state, protect US economic interests and preserve strategic access to oil. Colombia is now the third largest recipient of US military aid in the world, and the largest by far in Latin America. Using extensive declassified documents, this book shows that the so-called "war on drugs", and now the new war on terror in Colombia are actually part of a long-term Colombian "war of state terror" that predates the end of the Cold War with US policy contributing directly to the human rights situation in Colombia today.
Download or read book Songs for the Flames written by Juan Gabriel Vasquez and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of electric, searing stories from award-winning, bestselling author Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence—sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing—but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire and by unexpected encounters and unyielding forces. A photographer becomes obsessed with the traumatic past that an elegant woman, a fellow guest staying at a countryside ranch, would rather leave behind. A military reunion forces a soldier to confront a troubling history, both personal and on a larger scale. And in a tour-de-force piece, the search for a book leads a writer to the fascinating story of why a woman is buried next to a graveyard, rather than in it—and the remarkable account of her journey from France to Colombia as a child orphan. Juan Gabriel Vásquez returns to stories with these nine morally complex tales, fresh proof of his narrative versatility and his profound understanding of the lives of others. There’s a romantic wistfulness that combusts with the realities of dangerous histories, both personal and political, to throw these characters into the flames from which they either emerge purified, reborn, or burned and destroyed.
Download or read book Colombia written by Michael J. LaRosa and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated to include the historic 2022 presidential election, this deeply informed and accessible book traces the history of Colombia thematically over the past two centuries. LaRosa and Mejía move beyond the common perception of a failed state to explore the rich heritage and dynamism that have characterized Colombia past and present.
