Deborah Cohn

Look away! : the U.S. South in New World studies

Look Away! considers the U.S. South in relation to Latin America and the Caribbean. Given that some of the major characteristics that mark the South as exceptional within the United States--including the legacies of a plantation economy, slave trade, and military defeat--are common to most of the Americas, Look Away! points to postcolonial studies as perhaps the best perspective from which to comprehend the U.S. South. At the same time it shows how, as part of the United States, the South--both centre and margin, victor and defeated, and empire and colony--complicates ideas of the postcolonial. The twenty-two essays in this comparative, interdisciplinary collection rethink southern U.S. identity, race, and the differences and commonalities between the cultural productions and imagined communities of the U.S. South and Latin America. Look Away! presents work by respected scholars in comparative literature, American studies, and Latin American studies. The contributors analyze how writers--including the Martinican Edouard Glissant, Cuban-American Gustavo Perez Firmat, and Trinidad-born, British V. S. Naipaul--have engaged with the southern United States. They explore William Faulkners role in Latin American thought and consider his work in relation to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Many essays re-examine major topics in southern U.S. culture--such as race, slavery, slave resistance, and the legacies of the past--through the lens of postcolonial theory and postmodern geography. Others discuss the South in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border. Throughout the volume, the contributors consistently re-conceptualize U.S. southern culture in a way that acknowledges its postcolonial status without diminishing its distinctiveness. Contributors: Jesse Aleman; Bob Brinkmeyer; Debra Cohen; Deborah N. Cohn; Michael Dash; Leigh Anne Duck; Wendy Faris; Earl Fitz; George Handley; Steve Hunsaker; Kirsten Silva Gruesz; Dane Johnson; Richard King; Jane Landers; John T. Matthews; Stephanie Merrim; Helen Oakley; Vincent Perez; John-Michael Rivera; Scott Romine; Jon Smith; Ilan Stavans; Philip Weinstein; Lois Parkinson Zamora

History and memory in the two souths : recent Southern and Spanish American fiction

It is commonplace among literary critics to refer to William Faulkners influence on Spanish American literature. Yet few studies have delved seriously into why the attraction of the writings of this southerner has been so powerful. In this bold new study, Deborah N. Cohn addresses this question squarely, from two perspectives.First, Cohn proposes that Faulkners appeal derives from Spanish American authors perception of similarities between the Souths history and the experiences of their own respective nations. She delineates historical experiences common to the South and Spanish America, including civil wars, defeat and dispossession, regional marginalization, and socio-economic hardship. She also suggests that Spanish American authors found in Faulkner a set of concerns with which they could identify and that, as a result, they were inspired to take up the stylistic innovations characteristic of his writing. The resulting assimilation and adaptation of Euro-American modernism through Faulkner has been an indispensable part of what is known as la nueva narrativa, the new narrative, as well as of successive movements in Spanish American literature.From another perspective, Cohns book shows points of contact between works by other southern and Spanish American novelists without positing relations of influence. Specifically, after identifying common, recurrent themes in modern southern and Spanish American literature in general, Cohn reveals levels of a shared understanding of regional history in Faulkner and Mario Vargas Llosa, in Ralph Ellison and Isabel Allende, as well as in Katherine Anne Porter and Juan Rulfo. Her analyses compare and contrast these authors shared attempts to provide correctives to official, mainstream historical discourse through alternate, parallel strategies for reconstructing, recording, and reclaiming the past.In yoking together the South and Spanish America as neighboring spaces with similar personalities, Cohn advances a daring and controversial thesis that both narrows and enhances the frame of comparison between the literatures of the South and Spanish America.

A Tale of Two Translation Programs: Politics, the Market, and Rockefeller Funding for Latin American Literature in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s

In the 1960s, the Cuban Revolution sparked great interest in Latin America throughout the United States. Not coincidentally, the promotion and translation of literature from Latin America increased dramatically during this period. This essay explores the interplay of market and political forces in the promotion of Latin American literature in the United States through an examination of two programs funded by Rockefeller family philanthropies during the 1960s and 1970s: a translation subsidy program supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and administered by the Association of American University Presses; and the Translation Program of the Center for Inter-American Relations, which was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. I trace both programs efforts at working the U.S. market to promote works and authors. I also study the political motivations fostering these efforts, exploring the extent to which these programs both sought to promote cross-cultural understanding and tried to further U.S. foreign policy interests. La traducción y diseminación de la literatura latinoamericana en los Estados Unidos empezó a tener éxito durante los años sesenta, reflejo del gran interés que la revolución cubana estimuló en la región. Este ensayo examina el papel del mercado y de la política, así como la relación entre ambas fuerzas, en la promoción de la literatura latinoamericana en los Estados Unidos. Se estudian en particular dos programas de subvención de traducciones patrocinados por filantropías de la familia Rockefeller en los años 60 y 70. El primero de ellos fue organizado por la Association of American University Presses con fondos de la Fundación Rockefeller, y el segundo formó parte del Programa de Literatura del Center for Inter-American Relations, el cual recibió fondos del Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Tras identificar los esfuerzos de ambos programas por estimular el mercado literario estadounidense para promocionar obras y autores latinoamericanos, este ensayo investiga también sus metas políticas, y se pregunta hasta qué punto ambos programas buscaban fomentar las relaciones culturales entre los Estados Unidos y América Latina al mismo tiempo que intentaban avanzar los intereses políticos de los Estados Unidos en la región.

La construcción de la identidad cultural en México: nacionalismo, cosmopolitismo e infraestructura intelectual, 1945-1968

Se ofrece un analisis de las posiciones tomadas por los intelectuales mexicanos en cuanto a los modelos culturales a seguir por el pais entre 1945 y 1968. El articulo se centra en la relacion entre las dos principales corrientes representadas en el debate sobre la cultura mexicana: la nacionalista y la cosmopolita. Los principales temas tratados son: 1) la relacion entre la controversia sobre la identidad mexicana y los cambios que se dieron al nivel de la infraestructura intelectual ; 2) la promocion de la vision universalista de la cultura por parte de intelectuales como Fernando Benitez, Emmanuel Carballo, Carlos Fuentes, y Jaime Garcia Terres; 3) los vinculos de los intelectuales internacionalistas con el Estado.

Ghosts of the American Century: The Intellectual, Programmatic, and Institutional Challenges for Transnational/Hemispheric American Studies

American Studies—one of the most historically prominent venues for the study of the Americas—is under siege on many fronts. The annual conference, once parodied as a bizarre and quirky mix of pop cultural ephemera, is still dismissed as “anti-American Studies.” Leaders of the field have been engaged in a lengthy, introspective, somewhat bloody monologue about its complicity in projects of empire, exceptionalism, and global advantage, with most of these debates referring, almost inevitably, to the reckless use of the term “American,” and suggesting, in one way or another, a more self-reflexive, transnational, cosmopolitan, or internationalist deployment of that troublesome name.1 Finally, American Studies is an easy target in an age of budget crises and proto-corporate initiatives. Conceived in a nation renowned for its anti-intellectualism and its supposedly practical “know-how,” the field has no easily summed methodology, produces no immediately or instrumentally significant skills for the workplace, and the object of its study is, as some see it, so blurry as to be beyond mere vagueness and imprecision.

Magazine/Book and reviews

Review oí Latinarte The Feast of the Goat Mario Vargas Llosa Translated by Edith Grossman New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 Heres to you, Jesusa! Elena Poniatowska Translated by Deanna Heikkinen New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil Darcy Ribeiro Translated by Gregory Rabassa Gainsville: University of Florida, 2000 Flight of the Swan Rosario Ferré New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 Blakes Therapy Ariel Dorfman New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001 Velocities of the Possible Gonzalo Rojas Selected, Translated and Introduced by John Oliver Simon Red Wing, Minnesota: Red Dragonfly Press, 2000 Corriendo bajo la lluvia/Running Back Through the Rain: Selected Poems, 1982–1998 Raúl Barrientos Translated by Ben A. Heller and Christopher Maurer Chicago: Swan Isle Press, 2002 Abstraction: the Amerindian Paradigm With texts by César Paternosto, Mary Frame, Lucy Lippard, Valentín Ferdinán, and Cecilia de Torres Brussels.Valencia: Societé des Expositions du Palais des Beaux‐Arts de Bruxelles in association with IVAM Institut Valencia dArt Modern, 2001