This essay analyzes the figure of the “smoking habanera”–a term I use to describe the sexualized image of a black Cuban woman smoking a cigar, usually wearing a headdress and revealing clothing, whose latest iteration is found among the plethora … Continue reading “Smoking Habaneras, or A Cuban Struggle with Racial Demons”
Issue: Issue 104 Dislocations Americas
Introduction: Dislocations across the Americas
david sartoriusThis introduction diagnoses a moment of stark interest in interdependent relations of power, violence, and place. Transnational method, it argues, has welcomed this interest; as one of the sites in which scholars today are attempting to make sense with space, … Continue reading “Introduction: Dislocations across the Americas”
Testifying to Rightlessness: Haitian Refugees Speaking from Guantánamo
a. naomi paikThis essay is a cultural analysis of the legal testimony given in Haitian Centers Council v. Sale (HCC III), a federal lawsuit brought against the U.S. state on behalf of nearly 300 HIV-positive Haitian refugees imprisoned in a United States-operated … Continue reading “Testifying to Rightlessness: Haitian Refugees Speaking from Guantánamo”
Bodyscapes: Globalization, Corporeal Politics, and Violence in Mexico
rodrigo parriniIn this article, I propose the notion of “bodyscapes” as a way to understand the connections between the processes of globalization and the emerging forms of social violence in Mexico. A bodyscape enables us to explore the specific locus of … Continue reading “Bodyscapes: Globalization, Corporeal Politics, and Violence in Mexico”
Embodied Forms of State Domination: Gender and the Camp Grant Massacre
nicole m. guidotti-hernandezThis essay places the 1871 Camp Grant Indian Massacre in the context of the rise of a capitalist class of citizens and the state-sponsored violence they enacted as part of a war-based cross-border economy. Tracing transnational circuits of power in … Continue reading “Embodied Forms of State Domination: Gender and the Camp Grant Massacre”
Cinematic Contact Zones: Hemispheric Romances in Film and the Construction and Reconstruction of Latin Americanism
adrian perez melgosaThis essay researches the complex role that films portraying Anglo-Latin romances have played in the construction, dissemination, and reconstruction of Latin Americanism–the set of discourses representing and theorizing Latin America from local, U.S., and European perspectives. Authors like Welly Richard, … Continue reading “Cinematic Contact Zones: Hemispheric Romances in Film and the Construction and Reconstruction of Latin Americanism”
Afterword: It Takes Two to Tangle
mary louise prattThis brief afterword uses the image of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City to reflect on the north-south contact zones of the Americas, then goes on to examine how the five essays collected in … Continue reading “Afterword: It Takes Two to Tangle”