Yucatán, 1847. La incipiente república mejicana está ocupada por tropas de la Unión Americana. Se inicia una ominosa guerra, la que pronto sería llamada "Guerra de castas". Tizimín, situado en las últimas fronteras de la civilización, una década atrás había padecido de asonadas de militares que pretendían separar a la península de Méjico. Desde 1812 la Nueva España habían derogado de facto las leyes de las Cortes de Cádiz, que otorgaban a los indígenas los mismos privilegios que gozaban los españoles. Los nuevos amos son ahora los criollos: hacendados, empresarios, militares, clérigos, y una pequeña burguesía, oprimieron los mayas y restauraron el feudalismo en la región. El levantamiento indígena resultante sería el más cruento que recuerde la historia del Continente. En aquel ambiente, un mozalbete de ambigua procedencia y trastornada personalidad, se involucra activamente en la contienda. La gente blanca del pueblo huye en urgida caravana hacia Mérida, ciudad blanca. En el trayecto, nuestro amigo va descubriendo la realidad de sus orígenes. Y todo parece haber cambiado para él. A la muerte de sus padres, su tía y el cura del pueblo ya se habían encargado de su educación. Un misterioso personaje aparece reiteradamente a suplantar su singular personalidad. Su fascinación por la aventura, la temprana avidez por el dinero, una innata empatía hacia los mayas, y sus relación con una jovencita indígena, le mueven a unirse a los alzados, al tiempo que sus nuevos preceptores le apoyan en su vocación a las letras. A cuatro décadas de la huída, Turix nos relata las peripecias de su vida, y nos da a conocer el intolerante ambiente de aquella época. "El escritor es un observador imparcial, no juez de sus personajes, o de las palabras que él pueda poner en su boca; aprende a alejarse de sí mismo y a mirarse sin complicidades. No resuelve problemas, sólo los plantea abiertamente", expresa en algún momento de su narrativa.

Through performance and the spoken word, Yucatec Maya storytellers have maintained the vitality of their literary traditions for more than five hundred years. Telling and Being Told presents the figure of the storyteller as a symbol of indigenous cultural control in contemporary Yucatec Maya literatures. Analyzing the storyteller as the embodiment of indigenous knowledge in written and oral texts, this book highlights how Yucatec Maya literatures play a vital role in imaginings of Maya culture and its relationships with Mexican and global cultures. Through performance, storytellers place the past in dynamic relationship with the present, each continually evolving as it is reevaluated and reinterpreted. Yet non-indigenous actors often manipulate the storyteller in their firsthand accounts of the indigenous world. Moreover, by limiting the field of literary study to written texts, Worley argues, critics frequently ignore an important component of Latin America’s history of conquest and colonization: The fact that Europeans consciously set out to destroy indigenous writing systems, making orality a key means of indigenous resistance and cultural continuity. Given these historical factors, outsiders must approach Yucatec Maya and other indigenous literatures on their own terms rather than applying Western models. Although oral literature has been excluded from many literary studies, Worley persuasively demonstrates that it must be included in contemporary analyses of indigenous literatures as oral texts form a key component of contemporary indigenous literatures, and storytellers and storytelling remain vibrant cultural forces in both Yucatec communities and contemporary Yucatec writing.

These in-depth case studies from Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe and North America provide a state of the art overview of the gender dimensions of people-plant relations. The contributors reveal, among other things, the crucial role of women in plantbiodiversity management.

This volume addresses contemporary activist practices that aim to interrupt and reorient politics as well as culture. The specific tactics analyzed here are diverse, ranging from culture jamming, sousveillance, media hoaxing, adbusting, subvertising, street art, to hacktivism, billboard liberation, and urban guerilla, to name but a few. Though indebted to the artistic and political movements of the past, this form of activism brings a novel dimension to public protest with its insistence on humor, playfulness, and confusion. This book attempts to grasp both the old and new aspects of contemporary activist practices, as well as their common characteristics and internal varieties. It attempts to open up space for the acknowledgement of the ways in which contemporary capitalism affects all our lives, and for the reflection on possible modes of struggling with it. It focuses on the possibilities that different activist tactics enable, the ways in which those may be innovative or destructive, as well as on their complications and dilemmas. The encounter between the insights of political, social and critical theory on the one hand and activist visions and struggles on the other is urgent and appealing. The essays collected here all explore such a confrontational collaboration, testing its limits and productiveness, in theory as well as in practice. In a mutually beneficial relationship, theoretical concepts are rethought through activist practices, while those activist practices are developed with the help of the insights of critical theory. This volume brings scholars and activists together in the hope of establishing a productive dialogue between the theorizations of the intricacies of our times and the subversive practices that deal with them.

The first anthology in any language to represent the full trajectory of this remarkable literature.