The annual congress of the Latin American Studies Association will be held virtually this week. We are offering discount prices and free shipping on all orders with code LASA21 through June 30, 2021. Browse all books here. Need to know what’s new this year? View highlights below.
Have a Book Idea?
Our acquisitions editor for Latin American and Caribbean studies, Stephanye Hunter, would love to hear from you. We invite proposals from new and established scholars in the field, and you can email Stephanye here.
LASA Award Winner
Congratulations to Ángeles Donoso Macaya, whose book, The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile’s Dictatorship was named Best Book in Visual Culture Studies by the LASA Visual Culture Section.
The Insubordination of Photography is the first book to analyze how various collectives, organizations, and independent media used photography to expose and protest the crimes of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime. Featuring never-before-seen photos and other archival material, this book reflects on the integral role of images in public memory and issues of reparation and justice.
Series Highlight:
Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America
Edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez
Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America explores how Latin American and Latino audiovisual (film, television, digital), musical (radio, recordings, live performances, dancing), and graphic (comics, photography, advertising) cultural practices reframe and reconfigure social, economic, and political discourses at a local, national, and global level. In addition, it looks at how information networks reshape public and private policies, and the enactment of new identities in civil society. The series also covers how different technologies have allowed and continue to allow for the construction of new ethnic spaces. It not only contemplates the interaction between new and old technologies but also how the development of brand-new technologies redefines cultural production.
Recent Books in the Series
The Lost Cinema of Mexico: From Lucha Libre to Cine Familiar and Other Churros
Edited by Olivia Cosentino and Brian Price
This volume challenges the dismissal of Mexican filmmaking during the 1960s through 1980s, an era long considered a low-budget departure from the nation’s earlier Golden Age, examining the critical implications of discovering, uncovering, and recovering forgotten or ignored films.
See the editors at LASA:
The Lost Cinema of Mexico: A Roundtable Re-reading of 1960s-1980s Film
Wednesday 26 May – 5:00 PM – 6:45 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Afro-Latinx Digital Connections
Edited by Eduard Arriaga and Andrés Villar
This volume presents examples of how digital technologies are being used by people of African descent in South America and the Caribbean as a means to achieve social justice and to challenge racist images of Afro-descendant peoples.
See the editors at LASA:
Afro-Latinx Digital Connections Book Launch and Round Table
Thursday 27 May – 11:15 AM – 11:45 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Univision, Telemundo, and the Rise of Spanish-Language Television in the United States
Craig Allen
In the first history of Spanish-language television in the United States, Craig Allen traces the development of two prominent yet little-studied powerhouses, Univision and Telemundo. Allen tells the inside story of how these networks fought enormous odds to rise as giants of mass communication, questioning monolingual and Anglo-centered versions of U.S. television history.
Cuba’s Digital Revolution: Citizen Innovation and State Policy
Edited by Ted A. Henken and Sara Garcia Santamaria
This volume argues that recent technological developments are reconfiguring the cultural, economic, social, and political spheres of Cuba’s Revolutionary project in unprecedented ways.
Read an article by Ted A. Henken on digital media and Cuba in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
More New Books in Latin American Studies
Portraits of Cuba
Daniel Duncan, Marcela Vásquez-León, and Dereka Rushbrook
Through an abundance of dynamic photographs, this book captures daily life across Cuba, depicting the experiences of Cubans of different ages and walks of life who are navigating the challenges and changes transforming the island today.
Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance: Performing the Entangled Histories of Cuba and West Africa
Jill Flanders Crosby and JT Torres
Through a revolutionary ethnographic approach that foregrounds storytelling and performance, this book explores shared ritual traditions between the Anlo-Ewe people of West Africa and their descendants, the Arará of Cuba, who were brought to the island in the Atlantic slave trade.
Read more from the authors on the Religious Matters blog.
Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba
Takkara K. Brunson
In the first book to focus on the activism of Black women during Cuba’s prerevolutionary period, Takkara Brunson discusses how these women battled exclusion on multiple fronts but played an important role in forging a modern democracy.
Wage-Earning Slaves: Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
Claudia Varella and Manuel Barcia
This volume is the first systematic study of coartación, a process by which slaves worked toward purchasing their freedom in installments. Focusing on Cuba, this book reveals that instead of providing a “path to manumission,” the process was often rife with obstacles that blocked slaves from achieving liberty.
Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left
Edited by Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez
This volume showcases new research on the global reach of Latin American revolutionary movements during the height of the Cold War, mapping out the region’s little-known connections with Africa, Asia, and Europe.
Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives
Edited by Cécile Accilien and Valérie K. Orlando
This volume provides guidance on teaching about Haiti’s history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective, offering ways of reshaping old narratives through women’s and gender studies, poetry, theater, art, religion, language, politics, history, and popular culture.
Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire
Mauro José Caraccioli
In this volume, Mauro Caraccioli examines the natural history writings of early Spanish missionaries, using these texts to argue that colonial Latin America was fundamental in the development of modern political thought.
Navigating Life and Work in Old Republic São Paulo
Molly C. Ball
In this volume, Molly Ball examines the experiences of São Paulo’s working class during Brazil’s Old Republic, combining social and economic methods to present a robust historical analysis of everyday life along racial, ethnic, national, and gender lines.
Read more about Molly Ball’s process of piecing together this history.
A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico
K. Mitchell Snow
This book illuminates how collaborations between dancers and painters shaped Mexico’s postrevolutionary cultural identity, tracing this relationship throughout nearly half a century of developments in Mexican dance from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Read more about the inspiration behind this book.
Reimagining the Gran Chaco: Identities, Politics, and the Environment in South America
Edited by Silvia Hirsch, Paola Canova, and Mercedes Biocca
This volume traces the socioeconomic and environmental changes taking place in the Gran Chaco, a vast and richly biodiverse ecoregion in South America, illuminating how the region’s many indigenous groups are negotiating these transformations in their own terms.
Rómulo Betancourt: His Historical Personality and the Genesis of Modern Democracy in Venezuela
Germán Carrera Damas
Translated by Elizabeth Lowe
Available here for the first time in English, this book is an extended essay on a transformational figure in Venezuelan history who overthrew the ruling military dictatorship in the 1940s and established a modern democratic regime.
New in Paper
Use code LASA21 for discount prices and free shipping through June 30, 2021.
The Florida Bookshelf 