Framing China: The Belt and Road Initiative in Argentine national media outlets

This article studies how Argentine national media outlets reported on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) between 2013 and February 2022 (this covers the period from the launch of the BRI to Argentina’s official accession to the initiative). Based on a framing analysis of 272 articles, this study argues that national media outlets tend to reproduce two frames about the BRI: they either present it as an opportunity or as a threat. The balance between them matters when attempting to understand how media organisations shape citizens’ perceptions of China and the BRI. In the case of Argentina, even though its political and economic relations with China have become closer, reports on the BRI were quite polarised. Indeed, national media outlets’ portrayal of the BRI as an opportunity has been slightly more prevalent than negative portrayal (41% vs. 35%). However, national media firms covered the BRI in different ways. Some organisations conveyed largely positive frames, some chiefly presented negative ones, and others were more balanced. The specific editorial lines of the newspapers and their affinities to national political alliances explain these different patterns. Furthermore, although articles citing Western sources were indeed more negative about the BRI, many of the op-eds and reports criticising the BRI were produced by Argentine journalists and other local actors. Thus, Chinese academics exaggerate Western media sources’ influence on Argentina’s national media critical coverage of China while overlooking reasonable concerns about the impacts of Chinese projects

Disaster Capitalism on Puerto RIco: Causes and Consequences of the Privatization of Puerto RIco's Public Electric Authority after Huricane Maria

After the Spanish American War, the United States established full control over the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico and several small islands surrounding it. Unlike other territories outside the continental United States, Puerto Rico was never offered a path to statehood. Under U.S. policy and control, the island, its government, and that debt held by the government and its many public authorities like PREPA (the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority) grew over time. This thesis investigates the causes and consequences of the privatization of PREPA (the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority), especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Examining the privatization of this crucial government service in the context of the Puerto Rico’s unique status within the United States and its history as an unincorporated commonwealth territory, the specific measures of success and failure for an electric power utility, neoliberal policy that favors privatization and contractors, and the intersection of this neoliberal policy and the practice of disaster capitalism uncovers a complex story of policymakers, businessmen, union leaders, and government officials fighting to control an ailing service provider. By describing the current state of PREPA and the unique political landscape on Puerto Rico, this thesis considers the environmental, political, economic, historical, and social impact of the privatization of this public electric utility, answering the following questions: What role does Puerto Rico’s unique colonial legal environment play in PREPA’s decline, if any? Is PREPA simply a “failed experiment” of a public energy utility in the United States, or are other factors to blame for its current sub-par state of operations, lack of financial stability, and the resulting privatization focus of its managers and other political leaders on the island? What does the current state of PREPA reveal about federalism and neoliberal political ideology? Synthesizing the answers to these questions and many others through research on both government and private sector documents and across disciplines, this thesis accurately portrays different motivations for the privatization of PREPA and the impact that such a decision will have on Puerto Rico and its population.Plan II Honors Progra

Dystopias of Madrid. Public Space Transformation and Representation of Violence in Rafael Reig’s Sangre A Borbotones and Javier Moreno’s 2020

Sharp grills, uncomfortable public benches, hardly any shade…, these are some of the hallmarks of new tendencies in urban design that have burst into our cities: new ways to understand public space in a much less habitable mode. Moreover, pedestrian citizens increasingly find their right to use space curtailed by the proliferation of places for consumption. Parallel to the emergence of these new urban trends, certain narratives structured as urban dystopias and based on grotesque futurisms have also appeared. In this paper I discuss this urban transformation as the trigger or condition of possibility of two recent Spanish novels: Rafael Reig’s Sangre a borbotones and Javier Moreno’s 2020. I focus on the metamorphosis of contemporary Madrid, which these two authors take as the root of their paradoxically realist approach to dystopic futurism. Building upon this sublayer, Reig and Moreno have begun to imagine (or to warn of) the possible future account of our society.Enrejados puntiagudos, bancos incómodos, falta de sombra…, estas son algunas de las características de las nuevas tendencias en diseño urbano que han irrumpido en nuestras ciudades: nuevas formas de entender el espacio público de una manera mucho menos habitable. Además, los peatones encuentran cada vez más restringido su derecho a estar en la calle debido a la proliferación de espacios destinados al consumo. Paralelamente a la aparición de estas nuevas tendencias urbanas, también han aparecido ciertas narrativas estructuradas como distopías urbanas y basadas en futurismos grotescos. En este artículo analizo esta transformación de la ciudad como el desencadenante o condición de posibilidad de dos novelas españolas recientes: Sangre a borbotones de Rafael Reig y 2020 de Javier Moreno. Me centro aquí en la metamorfosis del Madrid contemporáneo, que estos dos autores toman como la raíz de un futurismo distópico de paradójica referencialidad con lo contemporáneo. A partir de este, Reig y Moreno se han dado a imaginar (o a advertir de) el posible relato futuro de nuestra sociedad

Discursive Capabilities of Contemporary Artistic Practices in Honduras

My dissertation constitutes a descriptive and interpretative analysis of modern and contemporary artistic practices in Honduras. This analysis is carried out comparatively, contrasting mainly the formative decades of Honduran modernism\u27 (1920s-40s) against the last 15 years of artistic production. Along this diachronic strategy, my interpretation of these processes is anchored in detailed accounts of the socio-historical durations that bear upon them. For each case, at least one case study is developed thoroughly, elucidating thus the dialectic entwinement of art and history. For such purpose, the modes of production and reception entailed by the practices of Arturo López Rodezno (active 1940s-1960s) and Lucy Argueta (active 2005-present) are read in close relation to the social historical processes in which they are incrusted. It thus becomes apparent how some practices, like that of López Rodezno, deny social history and contemporary realities, and others, like that Argueta, prompt participation in making sense of contemporary history, even while artists are too diffident or market-oriented to openly acknowledge meaning.\u2

Negotiations of race, class, and gender among Afro-Latina women immigrants to the southern United States

This qualitative study uses narrative inquiry to investigate the lived experiences of Afro-Latina women immigrants to the southern United States. Through Critical Race Theory and Black Transnational Feminist Theory the researcher explores how Afro-Latina women negotiate the dynamics of race, class, and gender in their home countries and in the United States. The researcher collected the counternarratives of eight Afro-Latina women from the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Panamá. The researcher conducted individual and group interviews as well as field observations. Using the words of the participants, the results of this study reveal five significant negotiations of race, class, and gender: Negotiations of Immigration and Class: "I did it for my family; Negotiations of Racism: "[T]here is a lot of racism here."; Negotiations of Race and Identity: Nationality First: "I am not Mexican or African-American!"; Negotiations of Gender: `Women are now in all spheres.'; and Negotiations of Beauty: `Pretty is having long straight hair.

Representations of Extractive Industries in Selected Fiction from Bolivia and Peru

The extractive industry is crucial to the economies of many countries in Latin America, particularly Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile and Mexico. Whereas the study of this economic sector in the context of Latin America is well established in academia, cultural manifestations related to the exploitation of natural resources have not been sufficiently explored. This thesis examines the literary representations of extractive industries in two Bolivian and two Peruvian examples of fiction: Aluvión de fuego (1935) by Oscar Cerruto, Canchamina (1956) co-written by Víctor Hugo Villegas and Mario Guzmán Aspiazu, José María Arguedas’ novel Todas las sangres (1964) and ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (1986) by Mario Vargas Llosa. The focus on Bolivia and Peru is partly because these two countries share much in common: they base their economy on the development of extractive industries, they are characterised by the presence of the Andes and they have a high degree of cultural and social heterogeneity since they include different social, cultural and ethnic identities. Nevertheless, in spite of these similarities, they are distinctive from each other because of notable differences related to history, economy, social configuration and literature. Bearing this in mind, this study uses a comparative approach in order to show how the interpretation and the conceptualisation of extractive industries is culturally constructed and changes in these two countries. The thesis is composed of four chapters, each of which is based on the close reading of a single text. Its ultimate aim will be to discuss in which way and to what extent these novels contribute to the construction of extractive industry discourses in Bolivia and in Peru and engage with broader issues related to the expansion of extractive industries

Vanguards of Liberation: Progressive Catholicism, the Student Movement, and Political Culture in Latin America, 1960-1973

Over the 1960s, a particular form of living the Christian faith bolstered student mobilization in Latin America. The Catholic episcopate supported the expansion of Catholic student organizations to strengthen the youth’s evangelization and form a Catholic intelligentsia that might inform social change and counter the elites’ de-Christianization. Significantly, dominant conservative views saw in these organizations the opportunity to halt Marxism in universities and society. Student organizations did not follow the latter path uncritically. They had their own agendas. Students built on multiple social theory developments, progressive theology—that reached momentum at Vatican II, and a shared apostolic method—the Review of Life. They produced common assessments of social reality. Significantly, organizations espoused the claims of their new members stemming from a social base already mobilized. Consequently, organizations crafted an alternative path that, following the gospel, sought to change society and a model of the Church deemed complicit with structural injustice. Vanguards of Liberation is a transnational study about the identity, intellectual and spiritual journey, and regional mobilization of the Latin American Catholic student youth affiliated with two international movements: the International Movement of Catholic Students-MIEC/IMCS and the International Young Catholic Students-JECI/IYCS. This dissertation accesses the MIEC-JECI memories through the archival sources of its regional Secretariat and testimonies from former militants. It develops with a political and intellectual history-from-below approach that recognizes subaltern subjects’ agency in producing meaning and knowledge and involvement in conflicts over hegemony. This study argues that Latin American MIEC and JECI organizations formed a transnational network and evolved into a social movement during the decade. Organizations converged around a common identity and agenda. Students’ embracing of Commitment as a form of spirituality, an apostolic attitude, and a historical project prompted militants to develop a committed apostolate into the milieu and go to the poor. In this decision and amid the Cold War’s unfolding, militants took many paths in a struggle for the liberation of the oppressed and engaged in varied expressions of the New Left. Consequences of this involvement, Catholics significantly impacted the region’s political culture while partaking in the Liberationist Christianity that crafted a new theology

\u27Black Atlantic\u27 Cultural Politics as Reflected in Panamanian Literature

The diaspora experience is characterized by hybridity, diversity and above all, difference. The nature of the diaspora experience therefore precludes an exclusive articulation of identity. Black identity in Panama is one characterized by this same multiplicity. My dissertation examines race, culture, and ethnicity in the development of Panamanian national identity and is informed by the critical theories of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Frantz Fanon. The articulation of Afro-Panamanian identity is both intriguing and complex because there are two groups of blacks on the Isthmus: Spanish speaking blacks who arrived as a result of slavery (15th -18th centuries) and English speaking blacks who migrated from the West Indies to construct the Trans-isthmian Railroad (1850-1855) and Panama Canal (1904-1914). The country’s cultural and linguistic heterogeneity not only enriches the study of Panama and illustrates that it is a nation characterized by multiplicity, but it also captures the complexity of the African Diaspora in the Americas. This plurality is evidenced in Afro-Panamanian literary discourse from its inception in the late nineteenth century to the present. This study analyzes the representation of Afro-Hispanics and Afro-Antilleans during different time periods in Panamanian literature, the literature written by Afro-Hispanics, and the literature written by Afro-Antilleans which emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. Finally, I address how the discourse of both groups of blacks converge and diverge. Panamanian literature has been grossly understudied. While its history, geography, and political ties to the United States have been examined extensively by intellectuals from the United States and Latin America, with the exception of a few studies, its literature has been virtually ignored by the Hispanic literary canon. Within the field of Afro-Hispanic literature, black Panamanian literature has also been understudied. With the exception of works published about Gaspar Octavio Hernández, Carlos Guillermo Wilson, and Gerardo Maloney, Afro-Panamanian literature has not been examined comprehensively. My dissertation seeks to fill this void in the field of Afro-Hispanic literature and, hopefully, it will enrich the field of Latin and Central American literature and literary criticism

Economic corridors in Asia : paradigm of integration?

460 páginasGlobal geopolitics has shifted dramatically over the last thirty years. After the vanishing expectations of a unipolar international system led by the United States, China has gained an increasingly dominant role in areas as innovative as quantum computing, robotics and artificial intelligence. In the ‘non-digital’ dimension, the eastern superpower has made gigantic investments in its Belt and Road Initiative, which include the development of a massive network of highways, industrial centers, harbors, pipelines and bridges, among many other works of infrastructure. These investments allow for the connection of more than 60 countries worldwide, guaranteeing China’s energetic security, easier conditions for trading goods and services and, perhaps more importantly, a significant influence in the political and economic events of the world