Transatlantic Film Studies in the Age of Neoliberalism: Towards a Postnational Cinema?

2019 ◽  
pp. 299-312
Author(s):  
Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
The Us ◽  
Rules Set

This essay argues that specialists in Transatlantic Film Studies need to contextualize their research agendas within the growing intensification of globalizing forces, above all, transnational capitalism. Within this historical context, the customary intellectual praise for aesthetic and cultural hybridity, alterity, self-dislocation and cosmopolitan deterritorialization is, at least, partially misguided. Due to the financial specificities of the film industry and its pervasive social preeminence, Transatlantic Film Studies have been a favorable academic venue to negatively evaluate the constrains, narrowness and reductive essentialism of the nation-state, as well of national communities and traditions. One should not overstate this argumentative gesture for three reasons. First, transatlantic artistic collaborations are never symmetrical and tend to be mediated by strong socio-economic and geopolitical inequalities. Second, the filmic interconnection between Spain and Latin American does not take place vis-a-vis, but under the commercial rules set by the US audiovisual mega-industry. Finally, it is a (partial) mistake to eulogize cultural miscegenation, migrancy and rhizomatic self-proliferation when many emancipatory, anti-imperialist movements have traditionally found and still find traction in autochthonous practices and habits. This is why the idea of a national cinema and specially of a national-popular cinema still deserves a careful, more dialectical attention.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nilo Couret
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World Literature ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Latin American Studies ◽  
Transition To Sound ◽  
Film Comedy

The introduction is loosely structured in three parts addressing questions of genre, geography, and period. It situates the book within comparative literature debates on world literature in order to defend a genre-based paradigm (in opposition to nation-based models) that produces a diachronic made all the more significant by the particular reception of comedy; debates in Latin American studies that cast this period exclusively in terms of cultural nationalism, that is, as complicit with nation-state consolidation; and, finally, debates in film studies on vernacular modernism and the intersections of cinema and modernity. The introduction explains how studying the transition to sound and the emergence of film comedy provides an endogenous and nonsynchronous rejoinder to the cosmopolitanism of these debates, a mock classicism reliant on an intertextual horizon that produces a semblance of continuity between screen and theater.

Journal of Scandinavian Cinema turns ten: About the past and for the future

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-234
Author(s):  
Chris Holmlund ◽  
Andrew Nestingen
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
South America ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Nordic Region ◽  
The Past ◽  
America South ◽  
Representation Of Sexuality

Chris Holmlund and Andrew Nestingen have long been involved with the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema (JSCA) – Chris since 2013, Andy since the journal’s inception in 2010. This article reviews trends in the journal’s first decade and identifies areas where more scholarship would be welcome. JSCA has built a reputation for excellence and is the authoritative publication on cinema and media of the Nordic region. Special Issues, articles on the representation of sexuality and discussions of national cinema constitute valuable contributions. There have been many excellent articles on male auteurs, and several articles on popular cinema. Women auteurs remain underrepresented; more research on television and media and additional studies of race and ethnicity in all media are needed. The authors encourage JSCA and its contributors to continue to build alliances with film studies organizations in Europe, North America, South America and Asia.

Reagan and Thatcher's Special Relationship

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally-Ann Treharne
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
Pivotal Moments ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
Latin American Region ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Elite Interviews ◽  
Personal Diplomacy ◽  
The Cold War

Reagan and Thatcher’s Special Relationship offers a unique insight into one of the most controversial political relationships in recent history. An insightful and original study, it provides a new regionally focused approach to the study of Anglo-American relations. The Falklands War, the US invasion of Grenada, the Anglo-Guatemalan dispute over Belize and the US involvement in Nicaragua are vividly reconstructed as Latin American crises that threatened to overwhelm a renewal in US-UK relations in the 1980s. Reagan and Thatcher’s efforts to normalise relations, both during and after the crises, reveal a mutual desire to strengthen Anglo-American ties and to safeguard individual foreign policy objectives whilst cultivating a close personal and political bond that was to last well beyond their terms in office. This ground-breaking reappraisal analyses pivotal moments in their shared history by drawing on the extensive analysis of recently declassified documents while elite interviews reveal candid recollections by key protagonists providing an alternative vantage point from which to assess the contentious ‘Special Relationship’. Sally-Ann Treharne offers a compelling look into the role personal diplomacy played in overcoming obstacles to Anglo-American relations emanating from the turbulent Latin American region in the final years of the Cold War.

Geo-Economic Competition in Latin America: Brazil, Venezuela, and Regional Integration in the 21st Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Casarões
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
Free Trade Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Integration Model ◽  
Trade Area ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
The Us ◽  
New Institutions

The institutional framework of Latin American integration saw a period of intense transformation in the 2000s, with the death of the ambitious project of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), spearheaded by the United States, and the birth of two new institutions, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). This article offers a historical reconstruction of regional integration structures in the 2000s, with emphasis on the fault lines between Brazil, Venezuela and the US, and how they have shaped the institutional order across the hemisphere. We argue that the shaping of UNASUR and CELAC, launched respectively in 2007 and 2010, is the outcome of three complex processes: (1) Brazil’s struggle to strengthen Mercosur by acting more decisively as a regional paymaster; (2) Washington’s selective engagement with some key regional players, notably Colombia, and (3) Venezuela’s construction of an alternative integration model through the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) and oil diplomacy. If UNASUR corresponded to Brazil’s strategy to neutralize the growing role of Caracas in South America and to break apart the emerging alliance between Venezuela, Argentina, and Bolivia, CELAC was at the same time a means to keep the US away from regional decisions, and to weaken the Caracas-Havana axis that sustained ALBA.

Uncommon Grounds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.

An Inter-American Episode

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Pablo Neruda ◽  
Jose Marti ◽  
The South ◽  
American Reader ◽  
The North ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
The Us

This chapter focuses on a paradigmatic misencounter between an American experiencer and a Latin American reader. Examining an implicit debate about the sources of Walt Whitman’s poetry and vision of the Americas, I argue that Waldo Frank, one of the twentieth century’s main literary ambassadors from the US to Latin America, positioned Whitman as the representative US writer whose antibookish experiential aesthetics could serve as a model for “American” writers both in the North and in the South. I show how Frank’s framework provided a foil for Borges’s idiosyncratic view that Whitman’s poetry about America derived entirely from his readings of European and US writers. Although much of the best scholarship on Whitman’s reception in Latin America has concentrated on poets like José Martí and Pablo Neruda, who adapted Whitman’s naturalism, I contend that Borges’s iconoclastic portrait of Whitman as a reader profoundly influenced a range of anti-experiential literary theories and practices in Latin America.

Anxieties of Experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
The Us ◽  
New Interpretation

Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author’s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the “US literature of experience” and the “Latin American literature of the reader.” Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and “misencounters” between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the “common grounds” approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.

Archaeologists and the Dead

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Ethical Considerations ◽  
International Context ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Experience Effect

This volume addresses the relationship between archaeologists and the dead, through the many dimensions of their relationships: in the field (through practical and legal issues), in the lab (through their analysis and interpretation), and in their written, visual and exhibitionary practice--disseminated to a variety of academic and public audiences. Written from a variety of perspectives, its authors address the experience, effect, ethical considerations, and cultural politics of working with mortuary archaeology. Whilst some papers reflect institutional or organizational approaches, others are more personal in their view: creating exciting and frank insights into contemporary issues that have hitherto often remained "unspoken" among the discipline. Reframing funerary archaeologists as "death-workers" of a kind, the contributors reflect on their own experience to provide both guidance and inspiration to future practitioners, arguing strongly that we have a central role to play in engaging the public with themes of mortality and commemoration, through the lens of the past. Spurred by the recent debates in the UK, papers from Scandinavia, Austria, Italy, the US, and the mid-Atlantic, frame these issues within a much wider international context that highlights the importance of cultural and historical context in which this work takes place.

Modern Thought and the Phenomenology of Film

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Franz Brentano ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Film Viewing

This chapter situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its historical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophy and psychology, charting Merleau-Ponty’s indebtedness to thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, Max Wertheimer, Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Victor Freeburg, Sergei Eisenstein, and Siegfried Kracauer. The historical Bergson is differentiated from the Deleuzian Bergson we ordinarily encounter in film studies, and Merleau-Ponty’s fondness for gestalt models of perception is outlined with reference to the competing ‘persistence of vision’ theory of film viewing. The chapter ends with a consideration of some of the ways in which James Joyce could have encountered early phenomenology, through the work of the aforementioned philosophers and psychologists and the ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Franz Brentano, William James, and Edmund Husserl.

Charismatic, Pentecostal, and Evangelical Movements in Europe, the US, and Brazil

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Secularization Theory ◽  
Explanatory Factors ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Healing Rituals ◽  
The Us ◽  
Latin American Countries

The growth of Evangelical Protestantism and Pentecostalism is widely regarded as a potent argument against the validity of secularization theory. To explain this growth, Chapter 12 draws on theoretical approaches to analysing new social movements, which allows an expansion of the repertoire of explanations concerning religious change and a testing of alternatives to the models provided by secularization theory. To explain the worldwide growth and relative resilience of the Evangelical and Pentecostal movements, the chapter identifies a number of conditions and explanatory factors: cultural and social confirmation, religious syncretism, social deprivation, and the widespread magical worldview and broadly accepted spiritistic beliefs in Latin American countries that are conducive to the acceptance of Pentecostal experiences and healing rituals.

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