scholarly journals Álvaro Menen Desleal’s Speculative Planetary Imagination

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Carolyn Fornoff
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Scaling Up ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Central American ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Historical Reality

Science fiction has long held a marginalized status within the Latin American literary canon. This is due to myriad assumptions: its supposed inferior quality, sensationalist content, and disconnect from socio-historical reality. In this article, I argue for the recuperation of Salvadoran author Álvaro Menen Desleal as a foundational writer of Central American speculative fiction. I explore why Menen Desleal turns to sci-fi - abstracting his fictive worlds to far-off futures or other planets - at a moment when the writing of contemporaries of the Committed Generation was increasingly politicized and realist. I argue that Menen Desleal’s speculative planetary imagination toggles between scaling up localized concerns and evading them altogether to play with “universal” categories. By thinking with the categories of the human or the planet from an ex-centric position, Menen Desleal playfully appropriates generic convention, only to disrupt it from within.

A Different Perspective for the Financial Crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean

1985 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
João Clemente Baena Soares
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Latin American ◽  
External Debt ◽  
Central American ◽  
South American ◽  
External Financing ◽  
Entire Region ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Interest Payments

The Latin American and Caribbean countries are facing a serious financial crisis. External debt in the region is over $360 billion, and seven South American countries are among the ten largest debtors in the world. Interest payments alone required, in the years of 1982, 1983, and 1984, more than 35% of total regional exports of goods and services, a percentage which reached the extreme level of over 50% for one country. To be sure, this problem mostly affects the largest economies, since most of the Central American and Caribbean countries apply to interest payments less than 20% of their exports. The debt problem is a reality for the entire region, and it makes it difficult for all the countries to obtain new external financing.

Liberation Theology and the Central America Solidarity Movement

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-126
Author(s):  
Sharon Erickson Nepstad
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Central America ◽  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Central American ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
School Of The Americas

This chapter examines the conditions that fostered liberation theology in Latin America. The chapter provides a brief overview of liberation theology’s central themes and how it fueled revolutionary movements in Central America, particularly in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. It surveys the Catholic hierarchy’s responses, ranging from sympathy to condemnation, and highlights several US religious movements that expressed solidarity with Central American Catholics who were fighting for social justice. These organizations included Witness for Peace, which brought US Christians to the war zones of Nicaragua to deter combat attacks, and also Pledge of Resistance, which mobilized tens of thousands into action when US policy toward the region grew more bellicose. Finally, the chapter describes the School of the Americas Watch, which aimed to stop US training of Latin American militaries that were responsible for human rights atrocities.

Design Ideation Through Speculative Fiction: Foundational Principles and Exploratory Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 143 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maulik C. Kotecha ◽  
Ting-Ju Chen ◽  
Daniel A. McAdams ◽  
Vinayak Krishnamurthy
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
User Interfaces ◽  
Divergent Thinking ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Practical Case ◽  
Generation Process ◽  
Design Ideation

Abstract The objective of this study is to position speculative fiction as a broader framework to stimulate, facilitate, and study engineering design ideation. For this, we first present a comprehensive and detailed review of the literature on how fiction, especially science fiction, has played a role in design and decision-making. To further strengthen the need for speculative fiction for idea stimulation, we further prototype and study a prototype workflow that utilizes excerpts from speculative fiction books as textual stimuli for design ideation. Through a qualitative study of this workflow, we gain insights into the effect of textual stimuli from science fiction narratives on design concepts. Our study reveals that the texts consisting of the terms from the design statement or closely related to the problem boost the idea generation process. We further discover that less directly related stimuli may encourage out-of-the-box and divergent thinking. Using the insights gained from our study, we pose critical questions to initiate speculative fiction-based design ideation as a new research direction in engineering design. Subsequently, we discuss current research directions and domains necessary to take the technical, technological, and methodological steps needed for future research on design methodologies based on speculative fictional inspiration. Finally, we present a practical case to demonstrate how an engineering design workflow could be operationalized by investigating a concrete example of the design of automotive user interfaces (automotive-UI) through the lens of speculative fiction.

Salinas, Raúl

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis G. Mendoza
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Prisoner Rights ◽  
Literary Output

The poetry, memoirs, essays, letters, prison journalism, and other forms of writing by Raúl Salinas (1934–2008) were grounded in his commitments to social justice and human rights. He was an early pioneer of contemporary Chicano pinto (prisoner) poetry whose work was characterized by a vernacular, bilingual, free verse aesthetics. Alongside other notables like Ricardo Sánchez, Luis Talamentez, Judy Lucero, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, Salinas helped make Chicana and Chicano prisoner rights an integral part of the agenda of the Chicana/o Movement through his writing and activism while incarcerated (1959–1972) and following his release. He was also a prolific prose writer in prison, and much of his journalism, reflective life writing, essays, and letters from his archives were published following his release. As important as his literary and political production in prisons was for establishing his literary recognition, it is important to note that the scope of his writing expands well beyond his prison experience. Though his literary and political interventions were important to a still emergent Chicana and Chicano literary, cultural, and political aesthetic, he was influenced by, but was not limited to, American and Latin American literary traditions. Given the scope of his life’s work, his indigenous and internationalist commitments, Salinas’ literary output make him a Xicanindio (indigenous identified Chicano) poet, a Latino internationalist, as well as a spoken word jazz and hip-hop artist whose work engaged, adapted and transformed elements of the American literary canon.

scholarly journals A Bridge between Worlds: Parallel Universes and the Observer in “The Celestial Plot” by Adolfo Bioy Casares

KronoScope ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-129
Author(s):  
Victoria Carpenter ◽  
Paul Halpern
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
Many Worlds ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Multiple Realities ◽  
Parallel Universes ◽  
Adolfo Bioy Casares ◽  
The Many ◽  
Main Protagonist

AbstractAdolfo Bioy Casares’s story “The Celestial Plot” (1948) is among the best known examples of Latin American science fiction writing of the early twentieth century inspired by contemporary advances in quantum physics. Most readings of the story focus on the movements of its main protagonist, Captain Ireneo Morris, as he traverses realities while test-flying a plane. This approach overlooks the role of the story’s other protagonist, Dr. Carlos Servian, who, we argue, is the lynchpin upon which the multiple realities are dependent. We read the changes to Dr. Servian’s character from a variety of scientific and philosophical perspectives on parallel universes. By addressing variations in Servian’s character and language, and focusing on the disparate representations of the key objects in the story, we show how the story anticipates in some ways the Many Worlds notion which argues that reality bifurcates during quantum measurements, leading to near-identical copies of observers.

The Andean Common Market: A New Thrust at Economic Integration in Latin America

1972 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin C. Kearns
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Economic Integration ◽  
Common Market ◽  
Central American ◽  
Trade Association ◽  
Common Problems ◽  
British Commonwealth ◽  
The 1960S

The decade of the 1960s could well be termed the First Economic Integration Decade in Latin America. During this period the republics of Latin America experienced a “collective awakening,” inspiring an environment in which superficial and exclusivist values gave way to pragmatic and cooperative attitudes. Economic alliances were formed among neighbors, predicated on the rationale that, by joining forces in the spirit of cooperation and applying an ecumenical approach to common problems, each of the participating countries would be better off than pursuing a strictly autarkic course (see Figure 1).The initial effort at integration was the Central American Common Market (CACM), formed in late 1960 and including all the countries of Central America except Panama.1 That same year, the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA) was created and, measured in terms of territory and population, represented the most significant economic cooperative. A third grouping was the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA), established in 1968 as an agreement among eleven British Commonwealth nations and territories.

scholarly journals Fortification of Sugar with Vitamin A

1998 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar Pineda
Keyword(s):  
Vitamin A ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Sugar Industry ◽  
Central American ◽  
Vitamin A Status ◽  
Organoleptic Characteristics ◽  
Iron And Zinc ◽  
Dry Mixing ◽  
Colour Changes ◽  
Two Stages

The technology for fortifying sugar with vitamin A was developed in Guatemala in the mid-1970s, and the Guatemalan government enacted legislation to make fortification mandatory in June 1974. This action was copied by other Central American governments. The fortification programme in Guatemala developed in two stages. In the first (1975–77), the fortification programme was evaluated four times at six-month intervals and was shown to be effective. The sugar industry was responsible for carrying out the programme, but the programme was suspended, mainly because of economic arguments. After 10 years of effort, the programme was restarted in 1989. At this time the programme was combined with an initial mass distribution of vitamin A capsules to pre-school children, which began the first successful social mobilization effort in the area. The programme was evaluated for six months and was shown to be effective in improving the vitamin A status of the Guatemalan population. This sec- ond stage has been active continuously since 1989. With improvements in the technology of fortification, new approaches have been tested, and now it is possible to obtain an excellent sugar doubly fortified with vitamin A and iron, using new iron products of high bioavailability that do not alter the organoleptic characteristics of the sugar and do not produce unwanted colour changes during processing. To avoid the rancidity of premixes, new processes of dry mixing have been developed in which no oil is used, This opens a real possibility for the fortification of sugar with other nutrients. Sugar fortified with vitamin A, iron, and zinc, either alone or in any combination, is commercially available in Brazil, where, under the guidance of the Latin American Centre of Nutrition and Metabolic Studies (CELANEM), the procedures have been developed using iron amino acid chelated minerals.

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