Collecting from the Margins: Material Culture in a Latin American Context

From the cabinets of wonder of the Renaissance to the souvenir collections of today, selecting, accumulating, and organizing objects are practices that are central to our notions of who we are and what we value. Collecting, both private and institutional, has been instrumental in the consolidation of modern notions of the individual and of the nation, and numerous studies have discussed its complex political, social, economic, anthropological, and psychological implications. However, studies of collecting as practiced in colonized cultures are few, since the role of these cultures has usually been understood as that of purveyors of objects for the metropolitan collector. Collecting from the Margins: Material Culture in a Latin American Context seeks to counter the historical understanding of collecting that posits the metropolis as collecting subject and the colonial or postcolonial society as supplier of collectible objects by asking instead how collecting has been practiced and understood in Latin America. Has collecting been viewed or portrayed differently in a Latin American context? Does the act of collecting, when viewed from a Latin American perspective, unsettle the way we have become accustomed to think about it? What differences, if any, arise in the activity of collecting in colonized or previously colonial societies? Spanning the period after the independence wars until the 1980s, this collection of ten essays addresses a broad range of examples of collecting practices in Latin America. Collecting during the nineteenth century is addressed in discussions of the creation of the first national museums of Argentina and Colombia in the post-independence period, as well as in analyses of the private collections of modernistas such as Enrique Gomez Carrillo, Ruben Dario, Jose Asuncion Silva, and Delmira Agustini at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The practice of collecting in the twentieth century is discussed in analyses of the self-described revolutionary practices of Oswald de Andrade, Augusto de Campos and the films of Ruy Guerra, as well as the polemical collections of Pablo Neruda, and the unsettling collections portrayed in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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110.250000 USD

New World Literacy: Writing and Culture Across the Atlantic, 1500-1700

This book on the role of written and iconographic communication in the Atlantic World combines a broad outlook, geographically and chronologically, with the precise treatment of specific evidence extracted from the sources. The author argues that diatribes against chivalric fiction and the Index of Prohibited Books did not prevent proscribed literature from circulating freely on both sides of the Atlantic. On the contrary, he notes, such prohibitions may have increased the lure of certain books. A description of the process of registering and inspecting ships in Seville and upon reaching their destinations highlights opportunities for contraband, smuggling, fraud, and the corruption of officials entrusted with regulating the trade. Within the prominent spiritual genre, the author documents a shift from Erasmian to Tridentine thinking. The registers analyzed also suggest the growing popularity of literary works by Cervantes, Mateo Aleman, and Lope de Vega. It opens a fascinating window onto the book trade in the Americas. Different forms of participation in this culture included the use of books as fetishes and the possession of printed devotional images. The analysis of books as well as printed images supports larger contentions about their role as agents of evangelization and westernization. This book certainly opens up new worlds on the impact of books and images in the Atlantic World.

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130.18 USD

Ambivalent Desires: Representations of Modernity and Private Life in Colombia (1890s-1950s)

Ambivalent Desires: Representations of Modernity and Private Life in Colombia (1890s-1950s) is a literary and cultural study of the reception of modernity in Colombia. Unlike previous studies of Latin American modernization, which have usually focused on the public aspect of the process, this book discusses the intersection between modernity and the private sphere. It analyzes canonical and noncanonical works that reflect the existing ambivalence toward the modernizing project being implemented in the country at the time, and it discusses how the texts in question reinterpret, adapt, and even reject the ideology of modernity. The focus of the study is how the understanding of the relationship between modernity and private life relates to the project of constructing a modern nation, and the discontinuities and contradictions that appear in the process. The question of what modernity is, its implications for everyday life, and its desirability or undesirability as a new cultural paradigm were central issues in Colombian texts from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. At stake was the definition of the nation's identity and the project of breaking away from the cultural patterns of the colonial past. Considering that the apparently peaceful process of modernization in Colombia was interrupted in the 1950s by the eruption of political violence across the country, this study situates itself on the eve of a crisis and asks how representations of modernity in texts from the period evidence the social fragmentation that may have led to it.

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https://magrudy.com/book/ambivalent-desires-representations-of-modernity-and-private-life-in-colombia-1890s-1950s-9781611480009/

42.72 USD