Explore the vast range of titles available.

Best Nineteenth-Century Book Award Winner, 2018, Latin American Studies Association Nineteenth-Century Section Moral electricity-a term coined by American transcendentalists in the 1850s to describe the force of nature that was literacy and education in shaping a greater society. This concept wasn't strictly an American idea, of course, and Ronald Briggs introduces us to one of the greatest examples of this power: the literary scene in Lima, Peru, in the nineteenth century. As Briggs notes in the introduction to The Moral Electricity of Print , \"the ideological glue that holds the American hemisphere together is a hope for the New World as a grand educational project combined with an anxiety about the baleful influence of a politically and morally decadent Old World that dominated literary output through its powerful publishing interests.\" The very nature of living as a writer and participating in the literary salons of Lima was, by definition, a revolutionary act that gave voice to the formerly colonized and now liberated people. In the actions of this literary community, as men and women worked toward the same educational goals, we see the birth of a truly independent Latin American literature.

In her book, The Closed Hand: Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature, Rebecca Riger Tsurumi captures the remarkable story behind the changing human landscape in Peru at the end of the nineteenth century when Japanese immigrants established what would become the second largest Japanese community in South America. She analyzes how non-Japanese Peruvian narrators unlock the unspoken attitudes and beliefs about the Japanese held by mainstream Peruvian society, as reflected in works written between l966 and 2006. Tsurumi explores how these Peruvian literary giants, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Gutiérrez, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Carmen Ollé, Pilar Dughi, and Mario Bellatin, invented Japanese characters whose cultural differences fascinated and confounded their creators. She compares the outsider views of these Peruvian narrators with the insider perceptions of two Japanese Peruvian poets, José Watanabe and Doris Moromisato, who tap personal experiences and memories to create images that define their identities. The book begins with a brief sociohistorical overview of Japan and Peru, describing the conditions in both nations that resulted in Japanese immigration to Peru and concluding in contemporary times. Tsurumi traces the evolution of the terms “Orient” and “Japanese/Oriental” and the depiction of Asians in Modernista poetry and in later works by Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges. She analyzes the images of the Japanese portrayed in individual works of modern Peruvian narrative, comparing them with those created in Japanese Peruvian poetry. The book concludes with an appendix containing excerpts from Tsurumi’s interviews and correspondence in spa with writers and poets in Lima and Mexico City.

InThe Andes Imagined,Jorge Coronado not only examines but also recasts theindigenismomovement of the early 1900s. Coronado departs from the common critical conception ofindigenismoas rooted in novels and short stories, and instead analyzes an expansive range of work in poetry, essays, letters, newspaper writing, and photography. He uses this evidence to show how the movement's artists and intellectuals mobilize the figure of the Indian to address larger questions about becoming modern, and he focuses on the contradictions at the heart ofindigenismoas a cultural, social, and political movement. By breaking down these different perspectives, Coronado reveals an underlying current in which intellectuals and artists frequently deployed their indigenous subject in order to imagine new forms of political inclusion. He suggests that these deployments rendered particular variants of modernity and makeindigenismorepresentational practices a privileged site for the examination of the region's cultural negotiation of modernization. His analysis reveals a paradox whereby the un-modernindiobecomes the symbol for the modern itself. The Andes Imaginedoffers an original and broadly based engagement with indigenismo and its intellectual contributions, both in relation to early twentieth-century Andean thought and to larger questions of theorizing modernity.

\"This book brings to light these indigenous intellectuals' dynamic efforts to shape their own social and political status in the Spanish Empire. For the historian of colonial Spanish America or Peru, it provides an enticing overview of a transatlantic political discourse and suggests interesting avenues for future research.\" Emily Berquist, Hispanic American Historical Review

Imagining Modernity in the Andes deals with the intersection of projects of modernity and cultural representation in the Andes. The Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas occupies a privileged place in a study that charts the social, cultural, and intellectual transformations that took place in the Andes throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In its examination of political and literary indigenistas of the 1920s, applied anthropology in the 1950s, the novelistic response to emigration and urbanization, the theory of transculturation in the era of transnationalism, and the appearance of new visual technologies in a cultural context long defined by the oral-textual divide, Imagining Modernity in the Andes conducts the type of interdisciplinary approach which a full appreciation for the heterodoxies of Andean cultural production makes indispensable.

InThe Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru, Ignacio López-Calvo rises above the political emergence of the Fujimori phenomenon and uses politics and literature to provide one of the first comprehensive looks at how the Japanese assimilated and inserted themselves into Peruvian culture. Through contemporary writers' testimonies, essays, fiction, and poetry, López-Calvo constructs an account of the cultural formation of Japanese migrant communities. With deftly sensitive interviews and comments, he portrays the difficulties of being a Japanese Peruvian. Despite a few notable examples, Asian Peruvians have been excluded from a sense of belonging or national identity in Peru, which provides López-Calvo with the opportunity to record what the community says about their own cultural production. In so doing, López-Calvo challenges fixed notions of Japanese Peruvian identity.The Affinity of the Eyescrutinizes authors such as José Watanabe, Fernando Iwasaki, Augusto Higa, Doris Moromisato, and Carlos Yushimito, discussing their literature and their connections to the past, present, and future. Whether these authors push against or accept what it means to be Japanese Peruvians, they enrich the images and feelings of that experience. Through a close reading of literary and cultural productions, López-Calvo's analysis challenges and reframes the parameters of being Nikkei in Peru.Covering both Japanese issues in Peru and Peruvian issues in Japan, the book is more than a compendium of stories, characters, and titles. It proves the fluid, enriching, and ongoing relationship that exists between Peru and Japan.

Este libro gira en torno a los artículos publicados en la prensa peruana en las tres últimas décadas del siglo diecinueve (1871-1892). Mi propuesta recupera el nombre de diez escritoras que publicaron en la prensa limeña y replantea el análisis de dichos artículos para abordarlos no como simples artículos de opinión sino como textos ensayísticos. Se analiza a las autoras con criterios sociológicos, vinculándolas al momento histórico y las circunstancias personales y culturales de su tiempo bajo dos perspectivas: la individual y la colectiva. No solo se rescata un corpus oculto e ignorado sino que se dignifica el valor histórico de esta vasta producción ensayística practicada por las escritoras peruanas a finales de siglo. La antología de textos ensayísticos complementa el estudio y busca difundir los veintiséis textos primarios que constituyen el volumen. [Texto de la editorial]