Debra A. Castillo

Anna Sims Bartel

The Scholar as Human brings together faculty from a wide range of disciplines—history; art; Africana, American, and Latinx studies; literature, law, performance and media arts, development sociology, anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies—to focus on how scholarship is informed, enlivened, deepened, and made more meaningful by each scholar's sense of identity, purpose, and place in the world. Designed to help model new paths for publicly-engaged humanities, the contributions to this groundbreaking volume are guided by one overarching question: How can scholars practice a more human scholarship? Recognizing that colleges and universities must be more responsive to the needs of both their students and surrounding communities, the essays in The Scholar as Human carve out new space for public scholars and practitioners whose rigor and passion are equally important forces in their work. Challenging the approach to research and teaching of earlier generations that valorized disinterestedness, each contributor here demonstrates how they have energized their own scholarship and its reception among their students and in the wider world through a deeper engagement with their own life stories and humanity. Contributors: Anna Sims Bartel, Debra A. Castillo, Ella Diaz, Carolina Osorio Gil, Christine Henseler, Caitlin Kane, Shawn McDaniel, A. T. Miller, Scott J. Peters, Bobby J. Smith II, José Ragas, Riché Richardson, Gerald Torres, Matthew Velasco, Sara Warner Thanks to generous funding from Cornell University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Research and Teaching for Public Impact

The Scholar as Human

Mónica Szurmuk

How do we address the idea of the literary now at the end of the second decade in the 21st century? Many traditional categories obscure or overlook significant contemporary forms of cultural production. This volume looks at literature and culture in general in this hinge period. Latin American Literature in Transition 1980-2018 examines the ways literary culture complicates national or area studies understandings of cultural production. Topics point to fresh, intersectional understandings of cultural practice, while keeping in mind the ongoing stakes in a struggle over material and intangible cultural and political borders that are being reinforced in formidable ways.

Latin American Literature in Transition 1980–2018: Volume 5

Kavita Panjabi

Debaroti Chakraborty

This book presents inter-disciplinary research on contemporary borders with contributions from scholars and cultural practitioners located in different contexts in the Americas and South Asia. There has been significant sociological work on borders; however there is a relative dearth of humanities research on contemporary border realities, particularly in South Asia. This volume introduces frameworks of critical insights and knowledge on border narratives and cultural productions. It addresses and goes beyond the impact of the partition in South Asia to train a unique comparative and aesthetic lens on borders and borderlands in relation to Latin America and the U.S.A. through oral narratives, photographs, ‘objects’, films, theatre, journals, and songs. It maps border perspectives and their reception in a framework of cultural politics. It revolves around themes such as violence and modes of survival; women’s narratives of migration, trafficking and incarceration; abduction of children; vulnerability as experience; rationalities of mass killings; and proliferation of countercultures to map border perspectives in a framework of cultural politics. First of its kind, the volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of comparative literary and cultural studies, South Asian studies, Latin American studies, border studies, arts and aesthetics, visual studies, sociology, comparative politics, international relations, and peace and conflict resolution studies.

Aesthetics and Politics of Cultural Production

Centering Borders in Latin American and South Asian Contexts

Addresses the topic of prostitution and "easy women" in Mexican literature. The figure of the prostitute or sexually liberated woman not only permeates Mexican folk songs and popular movies but stands at the crossroads of its national literary culture. In Easy Women, Debra A. Castillo focuses on the prostitute, or the woman perceived as such, in order to ask why this character exerts such a hold on the Mexican imagination. Combining early twentieth-century novels, current best-selling pulp fiction, and testimonial narratives, Castillo explores how Mexican writers have positioned the "easy woman" in their works. In each example the transgressive woman -- marked by an active sexuality -- serves a crucial narrative function, one that both promotes and challenges myths about women on the continuum of sexual promiscuity. Ending with a discussion based on a series of in-depth interviews with sex workers in Tijuana, Castillo highlights the complexities and ambiguities of these women's professional and personal lives. Bridging Latin American literary and cultural criticism, gender studies, and studies of Mexican society, Easy Women provides a sophisticated and groundbreaking examination of the place of the sexually liberated woman in contemporary Mexican culture.

Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction

Easy Women

Anindita Banerjee

Unique interdisciplinary analysis of gendered and racialized economies of care in South Asia and the Americas. South Asia and Latin America represent two epicenters of migrant care work and the globalized reproductive market. Yet scholars and the media continue to examine them in geographical and conceptual isolation. South of the Future closes both these gaps. It investigates nannying, elder care, domestic work, and other forms of migrant labor in the Americas together with the emerging “Wild West” of biotechnology and surrogacy in the Indian subcontinent. The volume is profoundly interdisciplinary and includes both prominent and emerging scholars from a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, law, literary and cultural studies, science and technology studies, and social policy. These contributors speak to the dynamic, continually changing facets of the nexus of care and value across these two key regions of the global south. By mobilizing specific locations and techno-economics and putting them into dialogue with one another, South of the Future rematerializes the gendered, racialized bodies that are far too often rendered invisible in structural analyses of the global south, or else are confined to particular geo- and biopolitical paradigms of emerging markets. Instead, these bodies occupy the center of a global, highly financialized economy of creating and sustaining life. Anindita Banerjee is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and chair of the humanities concentration in the Environment and Sustainability Program at Cornell University. Her most recent book is Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East. Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Latina/o Studies Program at Cornell University. She is the author or editor of several books, including Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture, also published by SUNY Press.

Marketing Care and Speculating Life in South Asia and the Americas

South of the Future

Exploring the use of key authorial strategies in selected literary and theoretical texts by women from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, as well as the US, Castillo (Romance studies, Cornell U.) illuminates the ongoing process of constructing a feminist criticism that can incorporate the diverse, shifting, and often contradictory voices of Latin American feminist writers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism

Talking Back

María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba

A transnational analysis with an emphasis on gender examines the work of women writers from both sides of the border writing in Spanish, English, or a mixture of the two languages whose work questions the accepted notions of border identities.

Writing from la Frontera

Border Women

Edmundo Paz Soldán

Edmundo Paz-Soldan

This volume examines Latin American literature in the context of a complimentary audiovisual culture dominated by mass media such as photography, film, and the Internet. The articles gathered here, all of them published for the first time, critically assess Latin American media theories (Garcia Canclini et al.), pointing out their strengths and shortcomings; show how literary works have been able to sustain their visibility in a highly competitive media ecology, accommodating to pop and mass culture while at the same time reaffirming the authority of the literary intellectual. Overall, the book's foregrounding of the impact of mass media on Latin American literature opens the critical debate on an increasingly essential subject.

Latin American Literature and Mass Media

Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas

Cartographies of Affect

Pursues an inquiry into the cultural and linguistic dissonances that Spanish creates in the United States.

Toward a Bilingual American Culture

Redreaming America

Mayra Santos-Febres

Sirena Selena vestida de pena ("Syren Selena, dressed in sorrow" might be a fair translation) tells the story of Leocadio, formerly a drug addicted child -owner of an extraordinary bolero singing voice- rescued from the streets of Puerto Rico and transformed by his rescuer ?Martha Divine? into Sirena Selena, a mesmerizing trans vestite singer-entertainer, both characters setting their respective hopes in making a fortune to escape a haphazard life. The main character represents the enigma of seduction, beautiful and monstrous, in an opposition between Truth and Reality. To her rescuer the child must "become who she really is", because the only way she will be able to harmonize his/her interior and exterior self is by being reborn as the diva.Ironically truth and harmony stem from the bifurcated nature of a mythical figure -half human, half monster- unstoppable in its seduction. The tragic aspect arises from Sirena Selena's awareness that his/her attraction resides equally in the awesome perfection of her presence and in the knowledge that it is merely a performance. The fluent and musical Spanish prose of Sirena Selena constitutes a rare reading pleasure, both for the casual reader as well as the literary critique, who will find in the identity creating "protectress" a twin soul in the process of concealing desires under layers of quotes and counter-quotes. In this edition the foreword by prof. Debra A. Castillo discloses these clever mechanisms, while her footnotes help readers to enjoy this intelligent and intrinsically poetic text.

Sirena Selena vestida de pena

Andrés Lema-Hincapié

Provides sophisticated theoretical approaches to Latin American cinema and sexual culture. Despite All Adversities examines a representative selection of notable queer films by Spanish America’s most important directors since the 1950s. Each chapter focuses on a single film and offers rich and thoughtful new interpretations by a prominent scholar. The book explores films from across the region, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s and Juan Carlos Tabío’s Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993), Marcelo Piñeyro’s Plata quemada (Burnt Money, 2000), Barbet Schroeder’s La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins, 2000), Lucía Puenzo’s XXY (XXY, 2007), Francisco J. Lombardi’s No se lo digas a nadie (Don’t Tell Anyone, 1998), Arturo Ripstein’s El lugar sin límites (Hell Without Limits, 1978), among others. A survey of recent lesbian-themed Mexican films is also included.

Debra A. Castillo

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