Cultural Agency in the Americas

by Sommer, Doris; Barbero, Jesus Martin (CON); Taylor, Diana (CON); Canclini, N & eacute; stor Garcia (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780822334996
• ISBN10: 0822334992
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-01-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

"Cultural agency" refers to a range of creative activities that contribute to society, including pedagogy, research, activism, and the arts. Focusing on the connections between creativity and social change in the Americas, this collection encourages scholars to become cultural agents by reflecting on exemplary cases and thereby making them available as inspirations for more constructive theory and more innovative practice. Creativity supports democracy because artistic, administrative, and interpretive experiments need margins of freedom that defy monolithic or authoritarian regimes. The ingenious ways in which people pry open dead-ends of even apparently intractable structures suggest that cultural studies as we know it has too often gotten stuck in critique. Intellectual responsibility can get beyond denunciation by acknowledging and nurturing the resourcefulness of common and uncommon agents.Based in North and South America, scholars from fields including anthropology, performance studies, history, literature, and communications studies explore specific variations of cultural agency across Latin America. Contributors reflect, for example, on the paradoxical programming and reception of a state-controlled Cuban radio station that connects listeners at home and abroad; on the intricacies of indigenous protests in Brazil; and the formulation of cultural policies in cosmopolitan Mexico City. One contributor notes that trauma theory targets individual victims when it should address collective memory as it is worked through in performance and ritual; another examines how Mapuche leaders in Argentina perceived the pitfalls of ethnic essentialism and developed new ways to intervene in local government. Whether suggesting modes of cultural agency, tracking exemplary instances of it, or cautioning against potential missteps, the essays in this book encourage attentiveness to, and the multiplication of, the many extraordinary instantiations of cultural resourcefulness and creativity throughout Latin America and beyond.Contributors. Arturo Arias, Claudia Briones, Neacute;stor Garciacute;a Canclini, Denise Corte, Juan Carlos Godenzzi, Charles R. Hale, Ariana Hernaacute;ndez-Reguant, Claudio Lomnitz, Jesuacute;s Martiacute;n Barbero, J. Lorand Matory, Rosamel Millamaacute;n, Diane M. Nelson, Mary Louise Pratt, Alcida Rita Ramos, Doris Sommer, Diana Taylor, Santiago Villaveces

Table of Contents

Introduction: Wiggle Room	1	(28)
Doris Sommer
Media	29	(62)
Intervening from and through Research Practice: Meditations on the Cuzco Workshop	31	(6)
Jesus Martin Barbero
Between Technology and Culture: Communication and Modernity in Latin America	37	(15)
Jesus Martin Barbero
DNA of Performance	52	(30)
Diana Taylor
A City that Improvises Its Globalization	82	(9)
Nestor Garcia Canclini
Maneuvers	91	(188)
The Cultural Agency of Wounded Bodies Politic: Ethnicity and Gender as Prosthetic Support in Postwar Guatemala	93	(28)
Diane M. Nelson
Tradition, Transnationalism, and Gender in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble	121	(25)
J. Lorand Matory
The Discourses of Diversity: Language, Ethnicity, and Interculturality in Latin America	146	(21)
Juan Carlos Godenzzi
Conspiracy on the Sidelines: How the Maya Won the War	167	(11)
Arturo Arias
Radio Taino and the Cuban Quest for Identi...que?	178	(25)
Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
Olodum's Transcultural Spaces: Community and Difference in Afro-Brazilian Contemporary Performance	203	(26)
Denise Corte
Political Construction and Cultural Instrumentalities of Indigenism in Brazil, with Echoes from Latin America	229	(19)
Alcida Rita Ramos
Questioning State Geographies of Inclusion in Argentina: The Cultural Politics of Organizations with Mapuche Leadership and Philosophy	248	(31)
Claudia Briones
Cautions	279	(47)
Cultural Agency and Political Struggle in the Era of the Indio Permitido	281	(24)
Charles R. Hale
Rosamel Millaman
The Crossroads of Faith: Heroism and Melancholia in the Colombian ``Violentologists'' (1980-2000)	305	(21)
Santiago Villaveces-Izquierdo
Afterword: A Fax, Two Moles, a Consul, and a Judge	326	(8)
Mary Louise Pratt
Afterword: Spread It Around!	334	(7)
Claudio Lomnitz
References	341	(30)
Contributors	371	(4)
Index	375