{"title":"Structures Do March in the Streets: De Certeauian Tactics in Jorge Volpi's \"Tetralogy of Power\"","authors":"Kevin M. Anzzolin","doi":"10.1353/rvs.2023.a901499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a901499","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines Jorge Volpi's \"Tetralogy of Power\" (En busca de Klingsor, El fin de la locura, Tiempo de cenizas, and Memorial del engaño) alongside Michel de Certeau's thought—especially The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). Volpi's narrative includes a significant number of themes and plotlines consonant with De Certeau's philosophical meditations. Volpi likely cultivates his works' affinities with De Certeau's hallmark concepts of \"strategy,\" \"tactics,\" and \"making do\" as part of a larger literary project already defined by Ignacio Sánchez Prado as \"strategic Occidentalism\" (2018). While most scholarly interventions attempt to interpret only one of the tetralogy's novels or treat Volpi's series as a trilogy, this article pinpoints two overarching commonalities in the texts: tactical walking and artistic consumption. The article also ties together gaps in criticism surrounding Volpi's series and clarifies its philosophical, political, and marketplace meaning.Ultimately, Volpi's tetralogy proposes that micropolitical, commonplace practices—whether walking, consuming, or reading—may produce a heterogeneity of voices in terms of politics and literature. Like De Certeau, Volpi optimistically asserts a tenacious, hopeful, and agentive subjectivity that makes small interventions to undo the doxa of politicians and publishing houses.","PeriodicalId":281386,"journal":{"name":"Revista de Estudios Hispánicos","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116079897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada Larissa Brewer-García (review)","authors":"J. R. Jouve Martín","doi":"10.1353/rvs.2023.a901503","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a901503","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281386,"journal":{"name":"Revista de Estudios Hispánicos","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131032325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Más allá de una mirada extractiva: caña y memoria en La tierra y la sombra, de César Acevedo","authors":"Daniel Coral Reyes","doi":"10.1353/rvs.2023.a901498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a901498","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Set in the sugar cane plantations of Valle del Cauca, Colombia, the film Land and Shade (2015) is a drama about personal loss and ecological crisis. After seventeen years of abandoning his family, Alfonso returns to his old farm to take care of his ailing son, who suffers from an acute respiratory disease. While workers struggle against unfair labor practices in the plantations, the protagonist witnesses the environmental degradation caused by air pollution and soil erosion. Acevedo's debut film epitomizes what María Ospina has called the rural turn in contemporary Colombian cinema—a set of films that dismantle an extractive gaze of the landscape by unearthing its social and cultural memory. However, while critics have analyzed how the film's plot connects to current debates about structural violence and land distribution in a transitional context, this essay pays attention to the film's botanic imaginary. By focusing on its haptic visuality and its representation of plants, I argue that Land and Shade displays new scenarios of ethical interdependence and cohabitation with the non-human: an urgent task in a present marked by the rapid decline of biodiversity.","PeriodicalId":281386,"journal":{"name":"Revista de Estudios Hispánicos","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128731218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production by Susan Antebi (review)","authors":"Pavel Andrade","doi":"10.1353/rvs.2023.a901509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a901509","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281386,"journal":{"name":"Revista de Estudios Hispánicos","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130012749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film by Stephanie Pridgeon (review)","authors":"A. Huberman","doi":"10.1353/rvs.2023.a901506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a901506","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281386,"journal":{"name":"Revista de Estudios Hispánicos","volume":"119 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134162440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Secret to Catalan Political Identity in Ventura Pons's Barcelona (un mapa)","authors":"C. Valero","doi":"10.1353/rvs.2023.a901500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a901500","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the representation of Catalan identity in Ventura Pons's 2007 film Barcelona (un mapa). The discussion breaks down the daring, anti-objectivistic ways in which Pons revisits early Francoism in order to denounce the regime's essentialist rhetoric and counter its lasting imprint on the city of Barcelona. Special emphasis is devoted to the film's complex portrayal of those members of the Catalan bourgeoisie who supported Franco, a portrayal that foregrounds secrecy and the practice of cross-dressing as a fitting sociopolitical metaphor. First, the adoption of an anthropological perspective illuminates the dynamics of the massive religious events that allowed individuals to affect their adhesion to the Francoist state in public. Secondly, a Derridean examination of the act of cultural transmission in the film suggests that Pons invites spectators to experience the violence inherent in Catalan heritage in order to overcome its despotic hold on contemporary politics and culture. The conclusion argues that Barcelona (un mapa) centers often neglected processes of construction and performance of identity and opposes the notion that constructed identities need be \"false.\"","PeriodicalId":281386,"journal":{"name":"Revista de Estudios Hispánicos","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122216532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"La Hermosa Carne: el cuerpo en la poesía puertorriqueña actual by Juan Pablo Rivera (review)","authors":"Benigno Trigo","doi":"10.1353/rvs.2023.a901505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a901505","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281386,"journal":{"name":"Revista de Estudios Hispánicos","volume":"127 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121358315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia by Henry Berlin (review)","authors":"Núria Silleras-Fernández","doi":"10.1353/rvs.2023.a901504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a901504","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281386,"journal":{"name":"Revista de Estudios Hispánicos","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123105924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Riot and Rebellion in Mexico: The Making of a Race War Paradigm by Ana Sabau (review)","authors":"Brian Gollnick","doi":"10.1353/rvs.2023.a901501","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a901501","url":null,"abstract":"This book argues that race became the central category for criminalizing poverty and justifying state violence against Mexico’s popular classes during the nineteenth century. With this thesis, Sabau contradicts the assumption that ideologies of mestizaje dominated post-independence Mexican nationalism. She instead emphasizes a reconstitution of ethnic hierarchies around a “race war paradigm,” by which she means an expanding use of state violence against subordinate ethnic groups to explain and address social tensions. Sabau studies the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Her discussions are deeply argued both academically and historically. Her exposition is exemplary. The only concerns that arise relate to the framing of her conclusions and the weight of the evidence for her historical claims. Riot and Rebellion has three sections, each containing two chapters. The first section deals with disturbances in the silver mining region north of Mexico City during the eighteenth century. Sabau draws on administrative reports to show that military suppression of the unrest was informed by a desire to regulate racial groups. She then uses sources closer to the insurgents to argue that popular actors had an awareness of systemic racial oppression. The second section presents reactions in Mexico to the Haitian Revolution. The translation of a Dessalines biography illustrates how fears of racial conflict built elite solidarity by defining whiteness in ways that stressed differences with Haiti. Sabau contrasts that perspective with the attitudes of key figures in the Latin American independence movement who saw Haiti as a positive impetus toward freedom even as they broadened race as the determining lens on politics. The final section of the book deals with the Caste War in Yucatán, often considered the most successful indigenous rebellion in the Americas. Sabau traces how liberal elites expanded the legal framework around warfare as a justification for selling Maya people into indentured servitude in Cuba. She then shifts to focusing on how the rebel-held territories on the peninsula were conceived in maps, novels, military dispatches, and travel writing. Generally understood as blank spaces or zones outside state control, the rebel areas in Yucatán gave license to migration projects aimed at bringing either new colonizers from Europe or forced laborers from Africa, Asia, or other indigenous regions in Mexico. Although the Caste War polarized Yucatecan society more than other parts of Mexico, Sabau maintains that its aftermath demonstrates how state violence was used to address “the criminalization of racialized poverty” (216). The ease with which Riot and Rebellion can be synthesized points to Sabau’s precision. This book is deeply researched and admirably written. Perhaps most importantly, Riot and Rebellion brings recent perspectives on race from other contexts to bear on Mexican national consolidation. Given the prominence of Enrique D","PeriodicalId":281386,"journal":{"name":"Revista de Estudios Hispánicos","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127380043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reality TV, Poverty Porn, and the \"Money Shot\": Performing Female Incarceration in Los caballeros las prefieren presas by Minerva Valenzuela","authors":"Christina Baker","doi":"10.1353/rvs.2023.a901497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a901497","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In her teatro-cabaret piece Los caballeros las prefieren presas, Minerva Valenzuela offers a searing critique of the inconceivably cruel abuses women suffer in Mexico's prison system. She does so by way of the charming protagonist Marilynares. Taking center stage with platinum blonde hair, red lipstick, a white body suit, and black heels, she channels the glamour of Marilyn Monroe. However, Marilynares is not an actress, but an inmate at the fictional Santa Martha Lamitas prison, hence the blue smock she wears over her form-fitting outfit. She is also contestant No. 10, competing for her freedom on the metatheatrical reality show \"Hoy se decide mi vida.\" Coached and directed by an invisible voz en off belonging to Mr. Destino, the show's producer and host, Marilynares is instructed to share the most intimate details related to prison life by way of confessional addresses and musical numbers. However, when our protagonist realizes she is being exploited, she decidedly rejects and subverts central tenets of the neoliberal gameshow model: stark individualism and the sought-after \"money shot.\" In refusing to play by someone else's rules, Marilynares hopes her audience will find compassion not just for her, but also for the thousands of women locked away across Mexico.","PeriodicalId":281386,"journal":{"name":"Revista de Estudios Hispánicos","volume":"217 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121975999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}