Awarded in Europe but censored in Bolivia during thirteen years, The Courage of the People (Jorge Sanjinés, Bolivia, 1971) is an outstanding example of Latin American collaborative political cinema. The film is an account of the massacre of St John’s eve in the Bolivian mining settlement of Siglo XX in 1967. But it also situates its background, th…[Read more]

This article contextualizes and characterizes production practices in political cinema in Bolivia and Peru between the 1960s and 1990s, reading them as a communitarian endeavor that included many more women than official history acknowledges. It also documents the work of two overshadowed filmmakers—the Bolivian Beatriz Palacios and the Peruvian M…[Read more]

Call for Proposals

Media, Lingualisms, Translations: Technologies of Language and Power

Conference to be held November 13-14, 2020; hosted by the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Keynote speakers: Jean-Noël Robert (Collège de France, Paris)
Lourdes Ortega (Georgetown University, W…[Read more]

Post Mortem by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín challenges traditional cinematic conventions of affect and spectacle through a narrative of spaces and bodies that is neither realist, comedic, nor melodramatic. This chapter draws upon affect theories that study the spectacle of cinematic spaces and political bodies in Latin American film. The…[Read more]

A study of the of the fictional representation of Catalan identities in the novels of Eduardo Mendoza, Juan Marsé, Enrique Vila-Matas , Nuria Amat and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán at the end of the 20th century.

This essay is an analysis of Eduardo Mendicutti’s portrayal of transgender bodies and voices in the context of Spain’s democratic transition. In “Una mala noche la tiene cualquiera,” the protagonist’s transgender body functions as a critical but problematic vehicle for the representation of the new national body between 1975 and 1982, follo…[Read more]

This essay analyzes the film “Violete Went to Heaven (2011), by Chilean director Andrés Wood, as a model for the ethical dilemmas present in the creation and reception of Latin American cinema in the early twenty-first century. As the dichotomy global/homogeneous versus local/heterogeneous becomes blurrier, contemporary film analysis requires a…[Read more]

Study on Claudia Llosa’s film “The Milk of Sorrow” (Peru-Spain, 2009) dedicated to the
relationship among different representations of the body, cinematic gaze, and gender according to the
theoretical referents provided by Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer” and Teresa de Lauretis’ feminist
exploration of the “off camera” concept.

The short story “Pasión de historia” (1987) by the Puerto Rican writer Ana Lydia Vega offers a feminist and self-reflective viewpoint on metaliterary concerns about the fictional rewriting of history and the inherent violence that belies this enterprise, as well as the ties of culpability and complicity that bind writers and readers of such text…[Read more]