Latin American Cities

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-51
Author(s):  
Brandon P. Martinez ◽  
Alejandro Portes

We summarize the history of Latin American urbanization with a focus on the evolution of cities from the colonial and post-colonial eras to the adoption of the import-substitution model of development and its subsequent replacement by a neoliberal adjustment model. Consequences for the urban system of both import-substitution and neoliberal policies are examined, with a focus on the evolution of the urban population and trends in several strategic areas. We examine indicators of unemployment and informal employment; poverty and inequality; and urban crime and victimization rates as they evolved from the import-substitution era to the implosion of the neoliberal model that replaced it in the early twenty-first century. The consequences for cities of the disastrous application of this model are summarized as a prelude to the analysis of more recent trends. Based on the latest statistical indicators available, we document a significant decline in unemployment and economic inequality in six Latin American nations that jointly comprise 80 percent of the population of the region. Employment in the informal sector also declined steadily, although it still comprises a large proportion of Latin American labor markets. Consequences of this situation for the citizenry and alternative government policies to address it are discussed.

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-420
Author(s):  
Theodoros Papadopoulos ◽  
Ricardo Velázquez Leyer

Latin America has emerged as a social policy ‘laboratory’ in recent decades and most prominent among the social policy innovations developed in the region are the so-called Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes (Cecchini et al., 2015; Borges Sugiyama, 2011; Martínez Franzoni et al., 2009). They have been widely promoted by international organisations across the world as policy instruments that enhance human capital and the agency of participants while reducing poverty and inequality and promoting co-responsibility and self-help in the long-term (see Sandberg, 2015; Bastagli, 2009; Lomelí, 2008, 2009).


Author(s):  
Catriona Elder

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n2p165This article analyses John Hillcoat’s 2005 film The Proposition in relation to a spate of Australian films about violence and the (post)colonial encounter released in the early twenty-first century. Extending on  Felicity Collins and Therese Davis argument that these films can be read in terms of the ways they capture or refract aspects of contemporary race relations in Australia in a post-Mabo, this article analyses how The Proposition reconstructs the trauma of the Australian frontier; how from the perspective of the twenty-first century it worries over the meaning of violence on the Australian frontier. It also explores what has become speakable (and remains unspeakable) in the public sphere about the history of the frontier encounter, especially in terms of family and race.  The article argues that The Proposition and other early twenty-first century race relations films can be understood as post-reconciliation films, emerging in a period when Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians were rethinking ideas of belonging through a prism of post-enmity and forgiveness. Drawing on the theme of violence and intimate relations in the film, this article argues that the challenges to the everyday formulation of Australian history proffered in The Proposition reveal painful and powerful differences amongst Australian citizens’ understanding of who belongs and how they came to belong to the nation. I suggest that by focusing on violence in terms of intimacy, relationships, family and kin, it is possible to see this film presented an opportunity to begin to refigure ideas of belonging. 


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
MIMI HADDON

Abstract This article uses Joan Baez's impersonations of Bob Dylan from the mid-1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century as performances where multiple fields of complementary discourse converge. The article is organized in three parts. The first part addresses the musical details of Baez's acts of mimicry and their uncanny ability to summon Dylan's predecessors. The second considers mimicry in the context of identity, specifically race and asymmetrical power relations in the history of American popular music. The third and final section analyses her imitations in the context of gender and reproductive labour, focusing on the way various media have shaped her persona and her relationship to Dylan. The article engages critical theoretical work informed by psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory, and Marxist feminism.


Author(s):  
Tatyana Zlotnikova ◽  

Contemporary Russian socio-cultural, cultural and philosophical, socio psychological, artistic and aesthetic practices actualize the Russian tradition of rejection, criticism, undisguised hatred and fear of power. Today, however, power has ceased to be a subject of one-dimensional denial or condemnation, becoming the subject of an interdisciplinary scientific discourse that integrates cultural studies, philosophy, social psychology, semiotics, art criticism and history (history of culture). The article provides theoretical substantiation and empirical support for the two facets of notions of power. The first facet is the unique, not only political, but also mental determinant of the problem of power in Russia, a kind of reflection of modus vivendi. The second facet is the artistic and image-based determinant of problem of power in Russia designated as artis imago. Theoretical grounds for solving these problems are found in F. Nietzsche’s perceptions of the binary “potentate-mass” opposition, G. Le Bon’s of the “leader”, K.-G. Jung’s of mechanisms of human motivation for power. The paper dwells on the “semiosis of power” in the focus of thoughts by A. F. Losev, P. A. Sorokin, R. Barthes. Based on S. Freud’s views of the unconscious and G. V. Plekhanov’s and J. Maritain’s views of the totalitarian power, we substantiate the concept of “the imperial unconscious”. The paper focuses on the importance of the freedom motif in art (D. Diderot and V. G. Belinsky as theorists, S. Y. Yursky as an art practitioner). Power as a subject of influence and object of analysis by Russian creators is studied on the material of perceptions and creative experience of A. S. Pushkin (in the context of works devoted to Russian “impostors” by numerous authors). Special attention is paid to the early twenty-first century television series on Soviet rulers (Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Furtseva). The conclusion is made on the relevance of Pushkin’s remark about “living power” “hated by the rabble” for contemporary Russia.


Author(s):  
Alfred L. Brophy

This chapter discusses the role of historical analysis in property law. The history of property has been used to offer support for property rights. Their long history makes the distribution of property look normal, indeed natural and something that cannot or should not be challenged. However, historically in the U.S there have been competing visions of property. From the Progressive era onward especially, the history of property has been used to show the unequal distribution of property and to offer an alternative vision that expands the rights of non-owners of property. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the history of opposition to feudalism and protection of the rights of non-owners was used to protect the rights of non-owners. Thus, the history of property has been a tool of judges and legislators to support property rights and it has also been, less frequently, a tool of critique.


2021 ◽  
pp. 225-256
Author(s):  
Luis Roniger

This chapter assesses where the region stands in the early twenty-first century, as Latin American democracies exhibit a tug of war between executive policies and strong participatory trends, with countries joining multiple yet segmented intergovernmental organizations that have failed to reach institutional integration and express a voice in unison. These tensions have never been as poignant as in the current scenario, as the region faces transnational challenges and dilemmas, exacerbated by the health pandemic and economic contraction.


Collections ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-424

Explores how exhibitionary practices interpellate and otherwise produce racialized and/or post/colonial subjects, as well as the potential for curatorial challenges to conventional subjectification, including how photography became a technology to frame Algerians as colonized subjects (Slyomovics), the history of African American families in photography (Labode), imagining exhibitions on Africa and Canada that are not constrained by traditional exhibition models (Butler), and appropriating kunstkammern as an “autonymic” expression of postcolonial Latin American identity (Mesa-Bains).


Tempo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (289) ◽  
pp. 30-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hunter Coblentz

AbstractThis article serves as an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical practices that have made use of glass instruments and objects. Emphasis is placed on those practices that use glass in a raw, acoustic manner, and those that take advantage of the precision with which glass can be tuned. First, a general history of glass music is presented, followed by an overview of the physical and acoustic aspects pertaining to the material that are relevant to those composers wishing to integrate glass into their works. Finally, the composers, performers and instrument builders who have made significant use of glass in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are surveyed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-358
Author(s):  
Andrew Scull

Michel Foucault remains one of the most influential intellectuals in the early twenty-first century world. This paper examines the origins and impact of his first major work, Folie et déraison, on the history of psychiatry, particularly though not exclusively in the world of Anglo-American scholarship. The impact and limits of Foucault’s work on the author’s own contributions to the history of psychiatry are examined, as is the larger influence of Madness and Civilization (as it is known to most Anglophones) on the nascent social history of psychiatry. The paper concludes with an assessment of the sources of the appeal of Foucault’s work among some scholars, and notes his declining influence on contemporary scholars working on the history of psychiatry.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-90
Author(s):  
Brooke Holmes

Abstract This essay examines, from a position within Classics, different angles on critiques of historicism and the turn to anachronism in History, Art History, Medieval Studies, and Queer Theory before proposing the idea of ‘kairological history’, on the model of the artist Paul Chan’s ‘kairological art’. On this analysis, ‘kairological history’ engages the critical and creative resources of anachronic thinking alongside tools of historicism (e.g. empiricism, successionism, periodization, alterity) in making choices about ‘telling time’. These choices reflect a critical understanding of how temporality shapes the valuation of the past, particularly in relation to a ‘classical’ past; the negotiation of identity and difference between past and present; and the kinds of communities that history aims to support. The second half of the essay examines two instances of anachronism within the history of anatomy, one from Galen and one from the early twenty-first century. Both cases represent problems that historicism can correct. But the modality of correction, in itself, is anaemic and risks the very teleology that linear history is so often faulted for. The essay therefore explores what gets lost and what gets found when temporality is aligned with linearity, as well as non-linear modes of telling time.


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