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

Founded in the 1860s and 1870s as a set of missions, the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan may be considered the most politically active Christian Church in Taiwan today. The church’s political profile became public since the 1970s, and it aimed to defend human rights and the right to self-determination of the island and its inhabitants. This article problematizes the historical narratives that trace the church’s defense of self-determination back to the nineteenth-century Presbyterian missions’ purported autonomy. Firstly, the missions’ autonomy is described as one of the main strategies of a network of missionary Protestant churches that sought to materialize the global expansion of Christianity. Secondly, the missions’ independence is qualified as one that required external supervision and relied on utilitarian operating mechanisms. Thirdly, it is argued that evangelization by the Presbyterian missionaries and the missions’ eventual autonomy required the creation and operation of problematic yet functional “Others”. The manuscript highlights the need for critical studies that approach the missions as sites traversed by extra-institutional and inter-subjective governmental dynamics.

Between 1993 and 1997, the Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat (Qazvin, 1957) produced in the United States the photographic series Women of Allah, with which she gained wide international recognition. In this series, she reflects on the affective and identity universe of Iranian Muslim women who helped defend the nation during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Neshat uses her own image to critically embody the cliché of the chador-veiled woman that has obsessed the Western hegemonic media and that conforms to the model of the “virtuous woman” as constructed by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s official discourse. The main objective of this study is to analyze how, using self-representation and Iranian poetry written by women, the artist subverts these models of representation. 

Wendy Phillips, Laura Carballido and Óscar Figueroa, coords. 2019. Inventar la India: representaciones disciplinarias a partir de la historia, las humanidades y las artes. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 256 pp. ISBN 9786073022965

Alexander Vovin. [2005 and 2009] 2020. A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese. Revised, Updated and Enlarged 2nd Edition. 2 vols. History of Oriental Studies. Leiden: Brill. 438 and 1279 pp. ISBN 9789004422117

Filippo Costantini. 2021. El Dao de la sabiduría: análisis y comparación de los tres comentarios más influyentes del Laozi Daodejing. Puntarenas: Editorial de la Sede del Pacífico. ISBN 9789930973219

This article studies the rebellion that took place in the Amakusa Islands as a paradigmatic example of how members of the Society of Jesus interfered in Japan’s internal political affairs at the end of the Momoyama period. The territorial decentralization prevailing in Japan at that time favored contact among the multiple feudal lords (daimyo), who assigned political and military power, and the missionaries, who sought the daimyos’ vital patronage and protection for their evangelical work. To assure these relations, the Jesuits sometimes intervened in internal issues of secular government, either materially by supplying weapons or resources to a daimyo or, more personally, by acting directly as counselors or intermediaries in armed conflicts such as the Amakusa rebellion.

The period of the French protectorate in Tunisia was a crucial historical moment and a cultural melting pot; several domestic and imported ideologies struggled to gain dominance in this intellectual and political milieu. Theories such as salafiyya, Islamic reformism, and pan-Arabism, entered powerfully from predominantly Islamic territories, while European settlers and workers brought with them many leftist ideologies, such as Marxism, anarchism or socialism. This article analyzes Tunisia’s intellectual and political environment during the first half of the French protectorate, paying special attention to these two groups of ideologies.

André Haudricourt. 2019. El cultivo de los gestos: entre plantas, animales y humanos/ Marie Bardet. Hacer mundos con gestos. Traducido por Pablo Ariel Ires. Buenos Aires: Cactus. 112 pp. ISBN 9789873831386

Fernando Camacho Padilla, Fernando Escribano Martín, Nadereh Farzamnia Hajardovom y José Luis Neila Hernández, coords. 2021. Miradas de Irán: historia y cultura. Madrid: Catarata. 284 pp. ISBN 9788413522333

Aaron Rosenberg y Leslie F. Zubieta, eds. 2021. África: nuevos horizontes de la etnografía mexicana. Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México. 197 pp. ISBN 9786075642949