Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

La ciencia no le fue ajena a Neruda. Más aún, lo que definirá su grandeza como hombre y como escritor, es que ambas mentalidades, la poética y la científica, en él tenderán a fundirse, a funcionar unidas, a ser una sola, inseparablemente (como debe ser). Tenderá a superar la tradicional dualidad de las dos culturas. Por eso el botánico, el ornitólogo, el entomólogo, el malacólogo Neruda no serán extravagancias del poeta, sino figuras plenamente integradas a su identidad nuclear, la del poeta.

The abundance of historical memory about the early modern empire produced by the 19th- and 20th-century intelligentsia culminating in the Franco regime’s complete embrace of Spain’s early modern imperial identity stands in sharp contrast to the occlusion of the 19th-century modern empire from Spain’s historical memory.

While well-known to most Peruvians, particularly those who are originally from the coastal region, Afroperuvian music has, until recently, had little dissemination outside of Peru. Heidi Feldman’s Black Rhythms of Peru is the first published monograph-length study on Afroperuvian music in two and a half decades and the first to be widely available outside of Peru. Largely based on field work and archival research conducted between 1998 and 2000 in Peru, the United States and Spain, the book focuses on the Afroperuvian revival movement and its legacy from the 1950s into the turn of the twenty first century. Feldman’s central concern is the role that memory projects have in the construction of a diasporic identity and how these are realized in geographical areas that have generally been omitted from or marginal to discussion of the Black Atlantic (namely, the circum Caribbean, the United States and Brazil). To this end, she posits the notion of the Black Pacific and suggests that descendants of Africans of the Andean Pacific coast have to contend with a number of different challenges: social invisibility and scarce documentation regarding the African experience in the region, lack of a continuously preserved African cultural heritage, and the presence of a large indigenous and mestizo populations that have often been more influential in the development of local race politics and accompanying ideologies of hybridity, assimilation, and national belonging.

In describing mid-nineteenth century reception of Sarmiento’s now institutionalized masterpiece Facundo, Julio Ramos effectively indicates that issues of veracity within the historico-literary sphere have traumatized Latin America for nearly two centuries. With his declaration that “[t]hesplit between poetry (as well as fiction) and true social history generates a foundational tension,” we note that literature is relegated to what might be demarcated the left side of the split, whereas authoritative forms of historical truth reside comfortably on the right. It is precisely this split-cum-tension that Joanna R. Bartow attempts to analyze and overcome in her Subject to Change: The Lessons of Latin American Women’s Testimonio for Truth, Fiction, and Theory.

One gets the impression that William Anthony Nericcio, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, is an excellent, if highly-caffeinated, educator. Tex{t}-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of The “Mexican” in America, his first book, captures the excitement and vitality of intellectual discovery and growth as possible only in the most invigorating university classrooms. An urgent enthusiasm bleeds from Nericcio’s writing, resulting in a nearly hyper-textual collection of essay and image that colors outside the lines of academia. Nericcio produces a hybrid scholarship; he does not merely present and analyze his objects of study. Instead, Nericcio remixes popular icons and images, breaking them down by revising them to produce his own media messages. It is this level of ambitious engagement —getting his hands textually dirty, so to speak— that makes Tex{t}-Mex worthy of reflection. Tex{t}-Mex is simultaneously accessible and theoretical, popular and academic. While the book claims to “assess the impact of various image and narrative industries on Latinas/os in literature, art, and mass culture,” it does much more

Beginning in 1990 and continuing into the present day, Cuba’s “special period in times of peace” has brought about historic changes in Cuban socialist society. The virtual overnight disappearance of economic subsidies after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc initiated a crisis marked by severe rationing and shortages in food, fuel, and medicine. In order to avert the collapse of Cuban socialism, conditions forced the state to implement economic reorganization geared toward a level of integration into the global economy. Signaling these changes, tourism eclipsed sugar production as the island’s primary industry in the new millennium. New joint economic ventures with foreign investors in tourism, mining, and biotechnology are gradually reviving a Cuban economy that was in profound crisis a decade ago. That the Cuban Revolution is experiencing an unprecedented transformation is undeniable.

Raul Fernandez is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. While trained in political economy, the Cuban-born Fernandez is extremely well positioned to study Latin jazz through his lifelong interaction with Cuban music, first as a fan, then as a musician, and finally as a scholar. Significantly, in addition to his decades of interaction with the subject matter, Fernandez’s expertise led to his recruitment by the Smithsonian Institution to conduct oral histories for its Jazz and Latino Music Oral History Programs. Fernandez interviewed over a dozen Latin jazz, Cuban, and salsa musicians on behalf of the Smithsonian, providing him invaluable access to major artists in these fields. His work resulted in Fernandez’s appointment as curator of an excellent traveling Smithsonian exhibit Latin jazz: La combinación perfecta (2002–2006). He also produced an outstanding companion compact disc and authored a bilingual exhibit book (2002), a dazzling work that includes over 150 photographs.

Black Rhythms of Peru, an over 300-page long ethnomusicological work, is a much needed systematic and well-researched study on testimonies and other materials, that when put together help construct the history of the revival of Afro-Peruvian music and dance traditions.

Ticio Escobar conceived this book not as ethnography but as a reflection on the art of the Ishir (also called Chamacoco) of the Paraguayan Chaco. The result, however, turned out to be both, artistic analysis and ethnographic account. Escobar offers a personal interpretation of the Ishir religious and ritual expressions. He retells the Great Ishir Myth—the epic of the anábsoro—and their Great Ceremony, with vivid and beautiful descriptions of their body painting and featherwork.

This edited volume brings the perspectives of sociology, political science, history, anthropology, law, and journalism to bear on the rise of state-sponsored repression and terror that characterized Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and has continued in some areas to the present.