Ilan Stavans's Latino USA: A Cartoon History (of a Cosmopolitan Intellectual)

Launched with considerable media coverage in 2000, nan Stavans's Latino USA: A Cartoon History, with illustrations by comic-artist Lalo Alcaraz, aimed to render accessible the history of the United States' heterogeneous Latino sectors.' In the Foreword, Stavans justifies the book's comic format by distancing it from Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para leer al Pato Donald, which in English translation became How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic? That 1971 study targeted the Disney comic as paradigmatic of U.S. cultural imperialism, a mass-cultural form capable of corrupting Third World youth with nefarious "American" capitalist and bourgeois individualist values. Stavans dismisses this argument as simplistic, tired, and tied to a bygone era ofleft-right Latin American antagonisms. Rather, Stavans insists, the worldwide popularity of the comic medium confirms that "Our global culture is not about exclusion and isolation, but about cosmopolitanism, which, etymologically derives from the Greek terms cosmos and polis, a planetary city" (xi). This appeal to an all-inclusive cosmopolitanism underwrites Stavans's desire for his cartoon history "to represent Hispanic civilization as a fiesta of types, archetypes, and stereotypes," and thus to avoid "an official, impartial tone, embracing instead the rhythms of carnival" (xv)

Ibis and the city: bogan kitsch and the avian revisualization of Sydney

The Australian White Ibis (Ibis) ( Threskiornis molucca) is one of three endemic Ibis species in Australia. In a short time frame beginning in the 1970s, this species has moved from inland waterways to urban centres along the eastern and southeastern seaboards, Darwin and the Western Australian southwest. Today Ibis are at home in cities across the country, where they thrive on the food waste, water resources and nesting sites supplied by humans. In this article, the authors focus on Sydney to argue that the physical and cultural inroads of Ibis, and the birds’ urban homeliness, are resignifying urban surfaces and the multispecies ecologies in which contemporary Australians operate. They explore how the very physical and sensory presence of Ibis disrupts the assumptions of many urban Australians, and visitors from overseas, that cities are human-centric or human-dominant, non-hybrid assemblages. They also introduce to this discussion of disrupted human expectations a cultural parallel, namely, the recent rise of Ibis in popular culture as an icon-in-the-making of the nation and as a totem of the modern Australian city itself. This trend exemplifies an avian-led revisualization of urban spaces, and is notable for its visual appeals to Ibis kitsch, and to working class or ‘bogan’ sensibilities that assert their place alongside cosmopolitan visions of being Australian. Sometimes kitsch Ibis imagery erupts across the urban landscape, as occurs with many Ibis murals. At other times it infiltrates daily life on clothing, on football club, university and business logos, as tattoos on people’s skin, and as words in daily idiom, confirmed by terms such as ‘picnic pirates’, ‘tip turkeys’ and ‘bin chickens’. The article uses a visual vignette methodology to chart Ibis moves into Sydney and the realms of representation alike, and thus to reveal how new zoöpolitical entanglements are being made in the 21st century. </jats:p

Mario Vargas Llosa, the fabulist of Queer Cleansing

IN 2005 MAroa VARGAS LLOSA DELIVERED HIS LECTURE "CONFESSIONS of a Liberal" for the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. A summation of Vargas Llos's intellectual evolution since the 1960s, the lecture confirmed his claim to the mantle of Latin American liberal par excellence. Plotted in opposition to ideology as "an open, evolving doctrine that yields to reality instead of ttying to force reality to do the yielding," Vargas Llos's liberalism rests on a number of familiar precepts: political democracy; private property; the free market; and the rule of law in productive tension with "the defense of individual interests over those of the state" ("Confessions of a Liberal")

Luis Alfaro

Emerging in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a queer Chicano performance artist, playwright, and writer, Luis Alfaro quickly established himself as an influential contributor to wider cultural debates about the intersections between gender, sexual, ethno-racial, class, religious, and national affiliations in the United States. In his early career Alfaro was a key player in the solo performance movement, in which performance artists used their own bodies and lives as self performance: that is, as primary physical and lived matter for interrogating their identities within a broader political questioning of US multicultural discourses. That questioning coincided with the prominence of Chicana feminist, queer, and AIDS activisms in California, all of which framed Alfaro’s early performances. Much of Alfaro’s work from the 1990s thus survives as historically significant chronicles of Chicana/o queer lives on the US West Coast. Alfaro consolidated his reputation in that decade with such classic solo performances as Downtown and Cuerpo Politizado, in which his body functioned as the prop onto and over which he articulated his queer memory work in relation to the Chicana/o neighborhoods of Central and East Los Angeles in which he grew up. Those neighborhoods anchor Alfaro’s career-long engagements with the US national imaginary as a Chicano queer cultural producer committed to community engagement and service and to telling the stories of Los Angeles’ heterogeneous Chicana/o communities. Since the 1990s Alfaro has refined his creative and critical praxis in solo performance work and plays that raise broader questions about national identity and belonging in the United States. Many of these plays have written back to and adapted works from Western theatrical and literary traditions—for example, Greek tragedies, Aesop, Spanish Golden Age theater, and Strindberg. The process of adaptation allows Alfaro to celebrate Chicanas/os and Latinas/os, and non-Latina/o immigrant communities, as cultural and ethno-racial epicenters of US national identity in the 21st century. Alfaro’s post-2000 interventions into Western theatrical and literary traditions recast those traditions so that they register meaningfully, in audience terms, for Chicana/o and other communities of color grappling inevitably with historical discourses that demean immigrant and minority populations

Typicals/Tipicos

"Look Slowly/A Mirar Despacito!: Venia un dolor abatido ..." Book and exhibition text to accompany images for the TypicalslTipicos exhibition and associated publication by Silvia Velez, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia, March-May 2003; and Museo de Arte Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Santa Fe de Bogota, Colombia, May-JUly, 2003. Explanation: I was one of seven writers from three countries invited in 2003 by the Colombian-born, Australianresident artist (photographer and installation artist), Silvia Veiez, for her exhibition and accompanying publication: TypicalslTipicos. Since my contribution, like that of the other invited writers, became an integral feature of both the exhibition and the book, I regard it is an N1 Creative work, which has resonances with my research work and interests in developing new knowledge about processes of transculturation and linguistic code-switching in the Americas. My contribution, "venia un dolor abatido ...," represents further a creative intervention into trans-American debates over transculturation, in that it involved a textual response in Spanish and English to a series of images whose context was unknown to me; the artist then attempted a simultaneous translation of the text into Spanish and English as appropriate. My contribution is the opening of both exhibition and book, and follows the artist's own ruminations on the genesis of her project, Look Slowly/A mirar despacito!, while also framing the interventions of the remaining writers who contributed to the project. The exhibition was also significant in that it was shown in two countries, at the following venues: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia, from March to May 2003; and Museo de Arte Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Santa Fe de Bogota, Colombia, from May toJuly, 2003. The book accompanying the exhibition, TypicalslTipicos, has the ISBN 0-646-42221-9