Brian Baker

Chris Harris

Amit Thakkar

This volume collates and examines literary and screened representations of what the editors term ‘border masculinities’. It seeks to understand masculine subjectivities, through fiction and screen, within a complex global arena of relationships and fluid movements across multiple boundaries within that arena. It also concerns paradigmatic borders related to class, gender and ethnicities, as well as other theoretical parameters which cut across porous spatial boundaries. This collection contains a range of theoretically informed responses to varying cultural representations of such masculinities in Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean, Australasia and Asia. Thematic and conceptual connections between them are discussed in the introductory chapter and such links are also made between chapters.

Literary and Visual Representations

Border Masculinities

This is the first extended, English-language study to focus exclusively on the fiction of Juan Rulfo in over twenty years, analyzing a selection of short stories from Rulfo's collection and also two of the main characters of his masterpiece, Pedro Páramo.

Irony, Revolution and Postcolonialism

The Fiction of Juan Rulfo

Nick Hodgin

This book examines recent cinematic representations of the traumatic legacies of national and international events and processes. Whilst not ignoring European and Hollywood cinema, it includes studies of films about countries which have been less well-represented in cinematic trauma studies, including Australia, Rwanda, Chile and Iran. Each essay establishes national and international contexts that are relevant to the films considered. All essays also deal with form, whether this means the use of specific techniques to represent certain aspects of trauma or challenges to certain genre conventions to make them more adaptable to the traumatic legacies addressed by directors. The editors argue that the healing processes associated with such legacies can helpfully be studied through the idiom of ‘scar-formation’ rather than event-centred ‘wound-creation’.

Film and Legacies of Trauma

Scars and Wounds

Each contribution to this book discusses key issues arising from the portrayal of men and the formation of masculine identities in a range of representative and landmark texts, fictional and non-fictional, drawn from different historical periods and from various countries in the Hispanophone Americas. There is an emphasis on the ways in which writers from Argentina (Manuel Puig), Chile (the Spaniard Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga and the Chilean Nicolás Palacios), Mexico (Gustavo Sainz and Ángeles Mastretta) and the Hispanic USA (Jennifer Harbury and Francisco Goldman) have explored the themes of love, friendship and trust and their transformative power for gender relations in situations and contexts where deception, exploitation and oppression are often disturbingly present. There is also a discussion of the applications, insights and limitations of different theoretical frameworks and concepts relevant to the task of producing gendered readings, including Connell’s ‘world gender order’ and ‘hegemonic masculinity’, as well as ‘the cult of virility’ as characterised by Still and Worton, Chela Sandoval’s ‘decolonial love’ and ‘methodology of the oppressed’ and Beasley-Murray’s ‘posthegemony’. This book was originally published as a special issue of Iberian and Latin American Studies.

Amit Thakkar

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