Bulletin of Latin American Research最新文献

This paper grapples with two crucial landscapes of extraction of the Argentine nineteenth century and their mediation through literature: maritime capitalism and primitive accumulation. First, it describes Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's aquatic utopia, focusing on his Americanism, his equation between oceans and plains and the aporias of his Orientalism. Second, this study shows an early displacement towards countryside provincialism in Argentine ideology by analysing José Mármol's novel Amalia. Departing from Etienne Balibar's concept of interior frontiers, this paper shows the emergence of a terrestrial imagination that was crucial for the consolidation of telluric ideologies. This process of ideological displacement coincides with the vanishing frontier and the dissolution of gaucho life within the Argentinian landscape, enabling the emergence of a new contempt for the urban plebs and the proletariat.

There are an estimated quarter of a million Latin Americans living in the UK, yet they remain outside the British national imaginary. This invisibility has historically extended to the literary scene and publishing industry, with only very few British-based Latin American and Latinx writers gaining any exposure. However, recent years have seen increased opportunities for Latin American and Latinx writers in Britain, largely due to the efforts of grassroots and independent publishing to create spaces for Latinx representation. This essay sketches the current landscape of our literature, tracing a timeline of the three generations of Latin American and Latinx writing in Britain and highlighting some of the writing groups, publishers, and events that have forged a Latin American presence. I also propose some of the shared themes and aesthetics of an emergent British Latinx canon.

This article reconstructs the political trajectories of Chilean exiled women settling in Costa Rica. It analyses the manifestations and transmutations of their political praxis before, during and after the period of ostracism, based on life stories reconstructed through semi-structured interviews with several women who began militancy before the 1973 coup d'état and are still active in the struggles for memory. Analysis shows how political praxis during exile facilitated alternative ways of conceiving citizenship, linking transnationally with solidarity networks and making their healing process a political instrument. During exile, the intersection between their background of militancy and detention, their political practices and social contexts promoted the development of gender perspectives that explain and redefine traumatic experiences.

This article analyses the philosophical assumptions embedded in the notions of family, as well as in the way the State's relationship with the family is conceptualised, in three social programmes for family support in Uruguay (Centros de Atención a la Infancia y la Família [CAIF], Uruguay Crece Contigo and Cercanías). Using a qualitative research design, the reconstruction of their normative assumptions was carried out through documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with different actors. It is argued that the philosophical–political perspective present in the three programmes can be linked to egalitarian liberal feminism, thereby showing a certain shift from the traditional way in which a liberal State has related to the family.

The feature documentary En el nombre del litio (In the Name of Lithium, 2021), directed by Argentine filmmakers Tian Cartier and Martin Longo, portrays the resistance of the Kolla and Atakama Indigenous communities against lithium mining in northwest Argentina. The film evaluates the mining project through a Pachacentric ethical lens, serving as an example of what this article defines as cosmocentric cinema. It exposes the lithium enterprise as a form of ecosocial torture, which can lead to the destruction of the salt flats, symbolically resulting in the ‘decapitation’ of Mother Salt.

Chile's recent constitutional process (2019–2023) is a case in point of a democratic, bottom-up collective effort of constitution-making. It was also an opportunity to bring to closure Chile's long transition to democracy, in which the Constitution – written during the military dictatorship of General Pinochet – had remained in place. As a response to large-scale social unrest, the process was set in motion after a referendum in favour of constitutional change. However, the draft of the new constitution ended up being rejected by more than 60 percent of Chileans. While this puzzle has hitherto been explained by factors relating to the constitution-making process itself, this article emphasises a different variable: Chilean voters. By process-tracing different pieces of quantitative evidence, the article provides an answer that focuses on the characteristics of the ‘withdrawn citizen’, a type of citizen who is disengaged from formal and informal politics. This citizen did not vote in the first referendum and only voted in the second because compulsory voting was introduced. Our explanation sheds light on the structural factors that impacted the constitution-making process, relating to a type of citizen arguably produced by Chile's four decades of neoliberalism and by the very same Constitution that the process aimed to replace.

This interview continued a conversation initiated at the panel ‘British Latin American Literature: Writing Ourselves Visible’, held at the 2024 Literary Leicester Festival (University of Leicester, UK), organised and chaired by Dr Emma Staniland (ES), at which Argentine-British poet Leo Boix (LB), Peruvian-British author of novels and short stories Dr Karina Likorish Quinn (KLQ), and Brazilian-French-British screenwriter, performer and author Gaël Le Cornec (GLC) each gave a reading. The conversation explores the work and experiences of these British Latinx writers as part of a broader dialogue on the need for, and the shape of, the burgeoning field of British Latinx Studies.