Empire

Empire is the keyword that frames both the field of Latina/o studies and what Latina/o studies projects interrogate in order to make visible how empire\u27s scattered remains throughout the Americas cross national borders as well as affective states of being. In so doing, Latina/o studies\u27 methodological recourse to and critique of empire seeks to apprehend empire\u27s legacies beyond the singular historical actor model of the exceptional nation-state in order to engage how empire saturates and conditions affects across space, time, and bodies

Haunting the \u3cem\u3eCorpus Delicti\u3c/em\u3e: Rafael Campo’s \u3cem\u3eWhat the Body Told\u3c/em\u3e and Wallace Stevens’ (Modernist) Body

What the Body Told You, a volume of poems by the Cuban-American poet Rafael Campo (b. 1964), addresses how formal poetry may give form to loss and memory in the age of AIDS by structuring an exchange between the literary institutions that privilege poetry as a representational medium and the inability of language adequately to account for and remember loss. Campo’s What the Body Told haunts modernism’s legacy by construing it as the corpus delicti, literally the body of the crime, where “crime” is conceived as the insufficiency of modernist aesthetic agencies to give evidence of the “truth” about the body.1 Campo’s ghostly demarcations of the corpus delicti, through a search for keener sounds, are established in his implicit dialogue with modernism in general and with Wallace Stevens in particular

The King\u27s Toilet: Cruising Literary History in Reinaldo Arenas\u27 \u3cem\u3eBefore Night Falls\u3c/em\u3e

In this article I will read Before Night Falls as Arenas\u27 queer version of Cuban literary history and his relation to it. Against the commonplace assertions that demand that Before Night Falls be primarily understood, if not exclusively, as an invective against Fidel Castro or, in the other extreme, as an ars moriendi and AIDS testimonial from a sexual dissident, I wish to revisit this text on the twentieth anniversary of its publication to underscore a missed reading that can help situate how Arenas, one of the most transgressive writers theorized in this collection as the Generation of \u2772, might also be its most conservative in his attachments to the very modernist aesthetic agencies eschewed by so many of his generational contemporaries.5 This is not to ignore, of course, the most obvious and sometimes illuminating readings of Before Night Falls that have fallen on either end of the political continuum, or somewhere in between, but rather as an opportunity to revisit Arenas\u27 important autobiography on the anniversary of its publication this year. And so it is to Before Night Falls\u27 afterlives that I now turn in order to reconsider and map el caso Arenas\u27 literary histories

Latino Louisiana

When Louisiana became the 18th state of the Union in 1812, the territory was already seeped in the linguistic, historical, and cultural antecedents that had made New Orleans, its most important city at the time, one of the first multilingual, multiracial, and multiethnic cosmopolitan centers in the United States. The origins of Spanish-speaking Latino Louisiana can be traced to the arrival of Alonso Alvarez de Pineda (c. 1492-1520) in 1519. Alvarez de Pineda sailed from Cuba to explore the uncharted territories between the Florida peninsula -- modern-day Arkansas and Louisiana -- and the southern Gulf of Mexico region. The purpose of his trip was to find a route to the Pacific Ocean and, in this sense, the trip can be said to have initiated the importance of Louisiana, and of New Orleans in particular, to the development of one of the first major commercial zones in the Americas. Though the Spanish were the first Europeans to explore Louisiana, the area was largely under the political control of the French until 1762, when it was briefly ceded to Spain. France, however, regained control of the region in 1800, with the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, but less than 3 years later it sold the territory to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. By the time it was incorporated into the Union, Louisiana had thriving communities of Spanish speakers composed of migrants from Latin American, Spain, and the Canary Islands

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

The Latino Body tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. Lázaro Lima charts the interrelated groups that define themselves as Latinos and examines how these groups have responded to calls for unity and nationally shared conceptions of American cultural identity. He contends that their responses, in times of cultural or political crisis, have given rise to profound cultural transformations, enabling the so-called “Latino subject“ to emerge. Analyzing a variety of cultural, literary, artistic, and popular texts from the nineteenth century to the present, Lima dissects the ways in which the Latino body has been imagined, dismembered, and reimagined anew, providing one of the first comprehensive accounts of the construction of Latino cultural identity in the United States.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1097/thumbnail.jp

Locas al Rescate: The Transnational Hauntings of Queer \u3cem\u3eCubanidad\u3c/em\u3e

“Locas al Rescate: The Transnational Hauntings of Queer Cubanidad” (originally published in Cuba Transnational) offers a significant contribution both to transnational American Studies and to gender studies. In telling the insider story of the alternative identity formation, practices, and forms of “rescue” initiated by the affective activism of the Cuban American society in drag in 1990s Miami/South Beach, Lima resuscitates the liberatory gestures of a subculture defined by its pursuit of its own acceptance, value, and freedom. With their aesthetic and political life on a raft, the gay micro-communities inside Cuban America asserted their own islandic space, Lima observes, performing “takeovers” in and of parks and bars and beaches—creating a post-Habermasian sphere of public activism focused on private parts, saving themselves from AIDS, from the disaffection and disaffiliation of the right-wing Cuban immigrant community, and from the failure of their own yearning to belong, to be wanted, to be embodied as the figure of their compelling Cubanidad. Against the hegemony of the invented collective politics of the sacrificing immigrants whose recognition of the queer side of being (of a being constituted by identity loss) is yet to come, Lima suggests a spectral return—a personal and transnational reckoning of those whose lives the dream of freedom drowned

Spanish Speakers and Early \u27Latino\u27 Expression

Spanish speakers have been present and writing in what is today the United States since the late sixteenth century, when Spanish explorers and colonizers described their experiences in chronicles, prose, poems, and epistolary exchanges. But it was not until the nineteenth century that Spanish speakers from various Latin American countries and Spain began to develop a cultural identity within the United States that was linguistically, racially, and culturally distinct from the Anglo-American majority culture. In the nineteenth century Spanish speakers comprised three principal groups: American citizens of Spanish ancestry, Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Americans, and exiled political figures in the United States who fought for Latin American independence from Spain. The presence of these Spanish speakers transformed the American cultural landscape at a times when the United States was defining its own cultural and national identity in response to its rapid continental and hemispheric expansion. The most significant polemic of and about Spanish speakers in the United States came as a result of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). After the war Mexico lost almost half of its territories to the United States, including modern-day California, Utah, and Nevada and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming as well as Mexico’s claim to Texas, which had been under U.S. occupations since 1836. The massive acquisition of territory meant that the country’s cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious makeup would undergo considerable transformation. Yet how is that American literary history has not been able to register this important incorporation of a people, their cultural history, and the literature that charts this transformation? This essay seeks to provide the basis from which to understand what has been conceived as a “recent” cultural and literary phenomenon borne out the 1960s civil rights movements

Empire

Empire is the keyword that frames both the field of Latina/o studies and what Latina/o studies projects interrogate in order to make visible how empire\u27s scattered remains throughout the Americas cross national borders as well a affective states of being. In so doing, Latina/o studies\u27 methodological recourse to and critique of empire seeks to apprehend empire\u27s legacies beyond the singular historical actor model of the exceptional nation-state in order to engage how empire saturates and conditions affects across space, time, and bodies

Didactics in vocational education and training – Diversity and intercepts in the Nordic educational landscape

This article pictures complexity of didactical research in vocational education and training (VET) and how international comparative research can contribute to development of VET’s didactics. We have argued earlier that depending on differences in perspectives and even on language differences, we are facing a remarkable conceptual diversity of what didactics is about. We claim that there is a need to transcend the language discussion and to focus on content related aspects to advance knowledge and research in this area within the field of VET. We start by shortly presenting research on didactics aiming at highlighting transitions and diversity in various approaches. Particular emphasis is on the challenges in designing vocational didactics. We then present selected contributions from scholars in the VET field with the intention to illustrate and propose discussion about the diversity and intercepts that are visible today. A thorough comparative study of didactics in VET in the Nordic countries remains as a necessary project ahead. Tämä artikkeli tarkastelee ammatillisen koulutuksen didaktiikkaa ja sen monimuotoisuutta, lisäksi tuomme esiin sen, miten kansainvälinen vertaileva tutkimus voi edistää ammatillisen didaktiikan kehittämistä. Olemme aiemmin esittäneet, että didaktiikan käsite ja mitä sillä tarkoitetaan, on monimerkityksinen johtuen erilaisista näkökulmista ja jopa kielellisistä eroista. Ehdotamme, että vaikka merkityseroja esiintyy, meidän tulisi ylittää kielikeskustelu ja keskittyä didaktiikan sisältöön lisätäksemme tietoa ja tutkimusta ammatillisesta koulutuksesta. Katsauksemme tarkoitus on esitellä lyhyesti didaktiikkaan liittyvää tutkimusta ja samalla tehdä näkyväksi erilaisia lähestymistapoja, siirtymiä ja eroavaisuuksia sekä erityisesti ammatillisen didaktiikan haasteita muutaman keskeisen tutkimuksen avulla. Lisää tutkimusta tarvitaan erityisesti Pohjoismaisesta näkökulmasta

Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing

As the U.S. Latino population grows rapidly, and as the LGBTQ Latino community becomes more visible and a more crucial part of our literary and artistic heritage, there is an increasing demand for literature that successfully highlights these diverse lives. Edited by Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano, Ambientes is a revolutionary collection of fiction featuring stories by established authors as well as emerging voices that present a collective portrait of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender experience in America today. With a preface by Picano and an introduction by Lima that sets the stage for understanding Latino literary and cultural history, this is the first anthology to cross cultural and regional borders by offering a wide variety of urban, rural, East Coast, West Coast, and midwestern perspectives on Latina and Latino queers from different walks of life. Stories range from sensual pieces to comical romances and from inner- city dramas fueled by street language to portraits of gay domesticity, making this a much-needed collection for many different kinds of readers. The stories in this collection reflect a vibrant and creative community and redefine received notions of gay and lesbian.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1089/thumbnail.jp