Carlos Riobo - Böcker

A collection of essays on theories of space in relation to Havana.Cuban Intersections of Literary and Urban Spaces examines Havana as a center where urban and literary spaces often come together. The idea for this collection of essays grew out of an international conference on Cuba, Cuba Futures: Past and Present, held by the City University of New York's Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies at CUNY's Graduate Center in 2011, but evolved out of a collaboration with scholars in the fields of literature, architecture, urban planning, and library science. The topics addressed peek at a dynamic Cuban nation through its cultural interstices at a crucial moment in the island's evolving history. This conference proceeding opens with a piece on the intersections between Havana's colonial built environment and the literary aesthetic of the Baroque in the Caribbean. The collection continues with the following areas of study: urban gardens, urban planning, architecture, literary projections on space, international relations and cultural institutions, access to books, and social policies.

Caught between the Lines examines how the figure of the captive and the notion of borders have been used in Argentine literature and painting to reflect competing notions of national identity from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Challenging the conventional approach to the nineteenth-century trope of “civilization versus barbary,” which was intended to criticize the social and ethnic divisions within Argentina in order to create a homogenous society, Carlos RiobÓ traces the various versions of colonial captivity legends. He argues convincingly that the historical conditions of the colonial period created an ethnic hybridity-a mestizo or culturally mixed identity-that went against the state compulsion for a racially pure identity. This mestizaje was signified not only in Argentina’s literature but also in its art, and RiobÓ thus analyzes colonial paintings as well as texts.Caught between the Lines focuses on borders and mestizaje (both biological and cultural) as they relate to captives: specifically, how captives have been used to create a national image of Argentina that relies on a logic of separation to justify concepts of national purity and to deny transculturation.

The essays included in Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa celebrate Mario Vargas Llosa’s visits to the City College of New York, the creation of the CÁtedra Vargas Llosa in his honor, and the interests of the Peruvian author in reading and books. This volume contains previously unpublished material by Vargas Llosa himself, as well as by novelists and literary critics associated with the CÁtedra.This collection offers readers an opportunity to learn about Vargas Llosa’s body of work through multiple perspectives: his own and those of eminent fiction writers and important literary critics. The book offers significant analysis and rich conversation that bring to life many of the Nobel Laureate’s characters and provide insights into his writing process and imagination. As the last surviving member of the original group of writers of the Latin American Boom-which included Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio CortÁzar-Vargas Llosa endures as a literary icon because his fiction has remained fresh and innovative. His prolific works span many different themes and subgenres.A combination of literary analyses and anecdotal contributions in this volume reveal the little-known human and intellectual dimensions of Vargas Llosa the writer and Vargas Llosa the man.

Sub-Versions of the Archive: Manuel Puig's and Severo Sarduy's Alternative Identities analyzes recent theories of the archive to examine how Manuel Puig and Severo Sarduy reformulate the Latin American literary tradition. This study focuses on eclectic theories of the archive as both repository and danger, drawing from an array of sources both within and outside the Hispanic literary tradition: from Borges, Foucault, Arrom, Derrida, González Echevarría, and Guillory to digital media and biotechnology. This book also applies theories of cultural contamination (Maria Lugones) and symbolic capital (Pierre Bourdieu) to the novels of Puig and Sarduy to explore the representation of marginal cultures within a body of literature that previously altered or elided these subaltern cultures from the tradition. Through close readings and critical theoretical applications, this book demonstrates how archival fiction continues to be one of the most popular strategies among Latin American novelists and, most importantly, how they have successfully managed to find new ways to inscribe their alternative fictions within this tradition. Puig's and Sarduy's novels reproduce discourses-popular culture and the mass media-that lack prestige within the traditional archive. These discourses mirror realities of marginal groups-gay people, children, the poor, the illiterate, women, and racial minorities. Their cultural variants, sub-versions of hegemonic masterstories, are endowed with truth-bearing power for them, but were previously left out of the archive as legitimate novelistic models.To date, this is the only study of contemporary Latin American fiction that puts current theories of the archive-especially that of Roberto González Echevarría-to practice in such a systematic way. Riobó's analysis of how Puig and Sarduy reformulate the Latin American canon is both a necessary complement of González Echevarría's work and an intelligent answer to the first of his projected masterstories. Riobó's multidisciplinary approach

Cuban studies is a highly dynamic field shaped by the country's distinctive political and economic circumstances. Mauricio A. Font and Carlos Riobo offer an up-to-date and comprehensive survey offering the latest research available from a broad array of disciplines and perspectives. The Handbook of Contemporary Cuba brings contributions from leading scholars from the United States, Cuba, Europe, and other world regions and introduces the reader to the key literature in the field in relation to rapidly changing events on the island and in global political and economic affairs. It also addresses timely developments in Cuban civil society and human rights. The guide also presents economic models and forecasts as well as analyses of the recent, pivotal Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba. For students, scholars, and experts in government, it is a vital addition to any collection on Latin American studies or global politics.