Reflecting the Nation: Costa Rican Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-180
Author(s):  
Liz Harvey-Kattou
Keyword(s):  
Costa Rica ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Costa Rican ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
San Jose ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Marginalised Groups ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The City

This chapter argues that cinema has been the primary creative vehicle to reflect on national – tico – identity in Costa Rica in the twenty-first century, and it begins with an overview of the industry. Considering the ways in which film is uniquely positioned to challenge social norms through the creation of affective narratives and through the visibility it can offer to otherwise marginalised groups, this chapter analyses four films by key directors. Beginning with an exploration of Esteban Ramírez’s Gestación, it considers youth culture, gender, and class as non-normative spaces in the city of San José. Similarly, Jurgen Ureña’s Abrázame como antes is then discussed from the point of view of its ground-breaking portrayal of trans women in the capital. Two films shot at the geographic margins of the nation are then discussed, with the uncanny coastline the focus of Paz Fábrega’s Agua fría de mar and the marginalized Afro-Costa Rican province of Limón the focus of Patricia Velásquez’s Dos aguas.

Contested Identities in Costa Rica

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Harvey-Kattou
Keyword(s):  
Costa Rica ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
Costa Rican ◽  
First Century ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Protest Literature ◽  
Female Consciousness ◽  
Nation Image

Costa Rica is a country known internationally for its eco-credentials, dazzling coastlines, and reputation as one of the happiest and most peaceful nations on earth. Beneath this façade, however, lies an exclusionary rhetoric of nationalism bound up in the concept of the tico, as many Costa Ricans refer to themselves. Beginning by considering the very idea of national identity and what this constitutes, this book explores the nature of the idealised tico identity, demonstrating the ways in which it has assumed a white supremacist, Central Valley-centric, patriarchal, heteronormative stance based on colonial ideals. Chapters two and three then go on to consider the literature and films produced that stand in opposition to this normative image of who or what is tico and their creation as vehicles of soft power which aim to question social norms. This book explores protest literature from the 1970s by Quince Duncan, Carmen Naranjo, and Alfonso Chase who narrate their experiences from the margins of society by virtue of their identity as Afro-Costa Rican, feminist, and homosexual authors. Cinema from the twenty-first century is then analysed to demonstrate the nuanced and intersectional position chosen by national directors Esteban Ramírez, Paz Fábrega, Jurgen Ureña, and Patricia Velásquez to challenge the dominant nation-image as they reinscribe youth culture, Afro-Costa Rica, a female consciousness, and trans identity into the fabric of the nation.

Noise, Sonic Experimentation, and Interior Coloniality in Costa Rica

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Campos Fonseca ◽  
Julianne Graper
Keyword(s):  
Costa Rica ◽  
Costa Rican ◽  
First Century ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Academic Training ◽  
Anomalous Zone ◽  
The Face ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter explores how conceptual disputes over genre boundaries, noise, and music open a window into a society that debates and constructs its own contemporaneity, in dialogue with conceptions about what is meant by indigeneity, music, musical composition, musicality, and experimentalism in the twenty-first century. The chapter inquires into how discourses about experimentation and innovation coming from the realm of Noise are constructed under specific technological assumptions; it also explores how these discourses might play out within the Costa Rican artistic scene. On an aesthetic level, this chapter problematizes how the “noise community” (formed by sound artists) imagines itself in the face of a “community of musicians,” separated by the principles of “academic training,” and how Noise, without the noise community, conceives itself as an anomalous zone in Costa Rican society, evidencing processes of “interior coloniality” that function on a micropolitical level.

scholarly journals Sacred Spaces in a Holy City. Crossing Religious Boundaries in Istanbul at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 34-56
Author(s):  
Méropi Anastassiadou-Dumont
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Local Economy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The City ◽  
Holy City

The article examines Muslim pilgrimages to Christian places of worship in Istanbul after the 1950s. It aims to answer whether and how the Ottoman heritage of cultural diversity fits or does not fit with the pattern of the nation-state. After a brief bibliographic overview of the issue of shared sacred spaces, the presentation assembles, as a first step, some of the key elements of Istanbul’s multi-secular links with religious practices: the sanctity of the city both for Christianity and Islam; the long tradition of pilgrimages and their importance for the local economy; meanings and etymologies of the word pilgrimage in the most common languages of the Ottoman space; and the silence of the nineteenth century’s Greek sources concerning the sharing of worship. The second part focuses more specifically on some OrthodoxGreek sacred spaces in Istanbul increasingly frequented by Muslims during the last decades.

Introduction

City, State ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Ran Hirschl
Keyword(s):  
Policy Making ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
First Century ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The City ◽  
Spatial Governance

This introductory chapter illustrates that, in many settings worldwide, hardwired constitutional arrangements reflect outdated concepts of spatial governance featuring constitutional division of competences adopted in a pre-megacity era and increasingly detached from twenty-first-century realities. Consequently, cities do not exist constitutionally. And with few exceptions, cities remain subjugated by a Westphalian constitutional order and by the state’s innate inclination to maintain jurisdictional primacy over its territory. National constitutions’ entrenched nature and innately statist outlook render the city systemically weak and to a large degree underrepresented. As extensive urbanization marches on, an ever-widening gap emerges between what is expected of a modern metropolis, and what cities can actually deliver in the absence of adequate standing, representation, taxation powers, or robust policy-making authority.

scholarly journals Molecular Basis for Resistance to Fluazifop-P-Butyl in Itchgrass (Rottboellia cochinchinensis) from Costa Rica

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. CASTILLO-MATAMOROS ◽  
A. BRENES-ANGULO ◽  
F. HERRERA-MURILLO ◽  
L. GÓMEZ ALPÍZAR.
Keyword(s):  
Costa Rica ◽  
Molecular Basis ◽  
Pcr Amplification ◽  
Costa Rican ◽  
Acetyl Coa Carboxylase ◽  
Annual Grass ◽  
San Jose ◽  
Weed Species ◽  
Rottboellia Cochinchinensis ◽  
Grass Weed

Rottboellia cochinchinensis is an annual grass weed species known as itchgrass, or "caminadora" in America´s Spanish speaking countries, and has become a major and troublesome weed in several crops. The application of fluazifop-P-butyl at recommended rates (125 g a.i. ha-1) was observed to be failing to control itchgrass in a field in San José, Upala county, Alajuela province, Costa Rica. Plants from the putative resistant R. cochinchinensis population survived fluazifop-P-butyl when treated with 250 g a.i. ha-1 (2X label rate) at the three- to four-leaf stage under greenhouse conditions. PCR amplification and sequencing of partial carboxyl transferase domain (CT) of the acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACCase) gene were used to determine the molecular mechanism of resistance. A single non-synonymous point mutation from TGG (susceptible plants) to TGC (putative resistant plants) that leads to a Trp-2027-Cys substitution was found. This Trp-2027-Cys mutation is known to confer resistance to all aryloxyphenoxyproprionate (APP) herbicides to which fluazifop-P-butyl belongs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of fluazifop-P-butyl resistance and a mutation at position 2027 for a Costa Rican R. cochinchinensis population.

scholarly journals The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Christopher Breu
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
Dialectical Tension ◽  
Level Of Knowledge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Twenty First Century

This essay begins by surveying our current moment in the humanities, diagnosing the language of crisis that frames much of the discourse about them. It argues that the crisis is a manufactured economic one not a symbolic one. The problems with many recent proposals—such as the new aestheticism, surface reading, and postcritique—is that they attempt to solve an economic crisis on the level of symbolic capital. They try to save the humanities by redisciplining them and making them mirror various forms amateur inquiry. I describe these approaches as the new enclosures, attempts at returning the humanities to disciplinarity with the hopes that administrative and neoliberal forces will find what we do more palatable. Instead of attempting to appease such forces by being pliant and apolitical, we need a new workerist militancy (daring to be “bad workers” from the point of view of neoliberal managerial rhetorics) to combat the economic crisis produced by neoliberalism. Meanwhile, on the level of knowledge production, the humanities need to resist the demand to shrink the scope of their inquiry to the disciplinary. The humanities, at their best, have been interdisciplinary. They have foregrounded both the subject of the human and all the complex forces that shape, limit, and exist in relationship and contradiction with the human. The essay concludes by arguing that the humanities, to resist neoliberal symbolic logics, need to embrace both a critical humanism, and the crucial challenges to this humanism that go by the name of antihumanism and posthumanism. It is only by putting these three discourses in negative dialectical tension with each other that we can begin to imagine a reinvigorated humanities that can address the challenges of the twenty-first century.

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