Issue #201 Mar 2015 Volume 42-2
Argentina a Decade after the Collapse: The Causes of the Crisis and Structural Changes TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE
Issue #200 Jan 2015 Volume 42-1
Argentina a Decade after the Collapse: The Causes of the Crisis and Structural Changes TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE
Issue #199 NOV 2014 VOLUME 41-6
African-Descended Americans TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE
Force and Meaning Political Hauntings in Two Contemporary Brazilian Films (film review)
By: Kristi M. Wilson (full story - click here) According to Avery Gordon, sociological hauntings can take a range of forms, from lost personal artifacts to decaying archival material to people living in the wake of dispossession and repression. Two Brazilian films from 2012, Neighboring Sounds/O som ao redor, a fiction film directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, and Elena, a documentary directed by Petra Costa, explore this idea of hauntings from different moments of the political past: colonialism and the last dictatorship, respectively. They represent collisions between the force of the past and its meaning in the present across a range of Brazilian chronoscapes—historical changes and recurrences that impact race, gender, and class relations and speak to the widening chasm of social inequality, continually reinventing itself for the times. Neighboring Sounds was featured at the 2013 Latin American Studies Association film festival. Neighboring Sounds explores notions of past and present violence under the surface of the increasingly privatized and policed urban landscape of Recife, a Portuguese colonial settlement with a painful history of slavery and sugar barons. Elena is a poetic documentary about loss, memory, and exile (from home and self). Born at the tail end of the dictatorship to [...]
Issue #198 SEP 2014 VOLUME 41-5
Brazil: State and Citizens in Pursuit of National Goals TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE
El edificio de los Chilenos (featured film)
Macarena Aguiló’s debut documentary The Chilean Building (Magic Lantern Films, 2010) takes up an often neglected aspect of the organized struggles against the Pinochet dictatorship. The film reminds us that when young militants went underground to organize armed resistance, they made enormous sacrifices to protect their children (often targets of the repression) that sometimes entailed a radical challenge to their roles as parents. Aguiló tells the story of a group of more than 60 children who were put in the care of surrogate parents, first in Europe and then in Cuba. The biological parents belonged to the same political organization, the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario), and, as the film discloses, had lengthy debates about the pros and cons of leaving their children temporarily while they carried on the struggle. The film interviews reveal profound meditations on familial responsibilities and political commitment and thoughts about the damaging role of conservative institutions and practices on the education of children. They also deal with the profound disappointment of the revolutionaries and their children upon returning to a politically divided Chile. The fact that this remarkable story is told from a first-person perspective generates rich historical readings. As a small child, Macarena Aguiló was kidnapped [...]
ISSUE #197 July 2014 VOLUME 41-4
Cuba in Transition TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE
The Outsiders Pathways of Migratory Experience in Latin American Films (film review)
In the past several decades the theme of migration has continually recurred in the cinema of and about Latin America, and it is not difficult to see why it is a popular topic in a region characterized by rapid upheavals in political, economic, and cultural circumstances. In the midst of flux and change, movement is transformed into something more than an urgent necessity. It is a reflex; it becomes one of the few ways that one can make sense of the ever-shifting world. Indeed, we can even speak of the aesthetics of migration itself and suggest that cinema is well suited to depicting and contemplating that experience of traversal within and across national borders; the medium is capable of capturing grand vistas and broad swaths of space and time, along with attending to the minute details of daily life and daily struggle. The more familiar manifestations of this theme come with the cycle of films, almost a subgenre unto themselves, that chronicle the danger-filled journeys of migrants toward the global North. In films like El norte (1983) and Sin nombre (2009) the border between Mexico and the United States serves as a kind of finish line at the end of a perilous [...]
ISSUE #196 MAY 2014 VOLUME 41-3
Indigenous Migration in Mexico and Central America: In the Footsteps of Michael Kearney TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE
ISSUE #195 MAR 2014 VOLUME 41-2
Imagined Narcoscapes: Narcoculture and the Politics of Representation TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE