Editor’s Introduction to Panic Spring. First published in 1937, two years after Durrell took up residence on the Greek island Kerkyra, Panic Spring broke with the realist tradition in 1930s novels and shows the young author’s first attempts to extend High Modernist innovations in rural and personal landscapes. Cubist, surrealist, and imagist…[Read more]

Beginning with the renowned “Words to Intellectuals” (1961) delivered by Fidel Castro in the José Martí National Library and the creation of a state network of libraries, the library in Cuba was transformed into a cultural sphere saturated with ideological ambiguity. On the one hand, the library embodied the symbolic axis of the literacy campa…[Read more]

Beginning with the renowned “Words to Intellectuals” (1961) delivered by Fidel Castro in the José Martí National Library and the creation of a state network of libraries, the library in Cuba was transformed into a cultural sphere saturated with ideological ambiguity. On the one hand, the library embodied the symbolic axis of the literacy campa…[Read more]

This essay compares two mid-twentieth century poets of the Americas, Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos, in view of how their work circa 1960 intersects despite the differences in their poetics. It introduces the notion of the obversal, or the identity among poems through a common history.

“Becoming-animal” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia which at times can designate a movement towards denigration. With a “becoming,” a threshold is, invariably, crossed and the boundaries that have existed between the animal and the human become blurred. Moreover…[Read more]

Through an analysis of two post-crisis films (Estrellas, Federico León
and Marcos Martínez, 2007; El nexo, Sebastián Antico, 2005) shot in
the largest slum in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this essay sketches the
terms for conceptualizing a cultural dimension of the Global South
marked by the aesthetic reappropriation of poverty. Working ag…[Read more]

This article reads the smuggling of Aztec artifacts described in Lucha Corpi’s novel Black Widow’s Wardrobe in the context of new materialist philosophies of becoming.

In this paper, I use Sandra Cisneros’s /Caramelo/ (2002) to examine the “traveling borderlands” in Mexican American migrant narratives. Traveling borderlands names the aesthetic and existential practice of creating contingent home spaces that contest paradigms of fragmentation and essentialism, the former often taken to be a defining feature of ma…[Read more]

This paper traces the origins of Chicana-centered figures and tropes found in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God to early 20th century cuentos recorded in the New Mexico Federal Writer’s Project.

Course Description: As German intellectual Walter Benjamin writes in his essay “The Storyteller”, “Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn.” In the process of sharing experiences, more stories are born with authorship that are common while at the same time recognizing the individ…[Read more]