Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture is a collective reflection on the value of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work for the study of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture. The authors deploy Bourdieu’s concepts in the study of Modernismo, avant-garde Mexico, contemporary Puerto Rican literature, Hispanism, Latin American cultural production, and more. Each essay is also a contribution to the study of the politics and economics of culture in Spain and Latin America. The book, as a whole, is in dialogue with recent methodological and theoretical interventions in cultural sociology and Latin American and Iberian studies.

This book brings together a group of leading and emerging scholars on the history of cultural and literary interactions between Asia and Latin America. Through a number of interlinked case studies, contributors examine how different forms of Asia-Latin America dialogues are embedded in various national and local contexts. The volume is divided in four parts: 1) Asian hybrid identities and Latin American transnational narratives; 2) translations and reception of Latin American narratives in Asia; 3) diffracted worlds of Nikkei identities; and 4) interweaving of Asian and Latin American narratives and travel chronicles. Through the lens of modern globality and Transpacific Studies, the contributions inaugurate a perspective that has, until recently, been neglected by Asian and Latin American cultural studies, while offering an incisive theoretical discussion and detailed textual analysis.

What are Hispanic alternative communities and how are they represented in literature, film, and popular music? This book studies the fictional representation of circles of artists and intellectuals, youth gangs, musical bands, packs of marginal urban dwellers, groups of immigrants, and other diverse associations that share the common trait of being small and subversive collectives, perhaps akin to secret societies plotting to take control of society. These groups usually exist within a larger and established community – typically, the nation-state – though maintaining with it complicated relations of rivalry, criticism, outright violence, and other forms of antagonism. Thus “alternative communities” represent the “other side” of official institutions, by constituting dystopias that condemn the status quo, or by building utopias that point to new social arrangements. In the Hispanic world – a broad, transatlantic space that includes Spain and Spanish America – alternative communities have existed since the 19th century, a time of nation-building for Spanish American countries, all the way to the 21st century, when hybrid, postnational, and cosmopolitan communities begin to appear. The seventeen chapters brought together in this volume, which constitutes the first systematic approach to Hispanic alternative communities, tackle this complex cultural phenomenon from diverse critical perspectives.

The debate over the concept of world literature, which has been taking place with renewed intensity over the last twenty years, is tightly bound up with the issues of global interconnectedness in a polycentric world. Most recently, critiques of globalization-related conceptualizations, in particular, have made themselves heard: to what extent is the concept of world literature too closely connected with the political and economic dynamics of globalization? Such questions cannot be answered simply through theoretical debate. The material side of the production of world literature must therefore be more strongly integrated into the conversation than it has been. Using the example of Latin American literatures, this volume demonstrates the concrete construction processes of world literature. To that purpose, archival materials have been analyzed here: notes, travel reports, and correspondence between publishers and authors. The Latin American examples provide particularly rich information about the processes of institutionalization in the Western world, as well as new perspectives for a contemporary mapping of world literature beyond the established dynamics of canonization.

Mexican Literature in Theory is the first book in any language to engage post-independence Mexican literature from the perspective of current debates in literary and cultural theory. It brings together scholars whose work is defined both by their innovations in the study of Mexican literature and by the theoretical sophistication of their scholarship. Mexican Literature in Theory provides the reader with two contributions. First, it is one of the most complete accounts of Mexican literature available, covering both canonical texts as well as the most important works in contemporary production. Second, each one of the essays is in itself an important contribution to the elucidation of specific texts. Scholars and students in fields such as Latin American studies, comparative literature and literary theory will find in this book compelling readings of literature from a theoretical perspective, methodological suggestions as to how to use current theory in the study of literature, and important debates and revisions of major theoretical works through the lens of Mexican literary works.

This book explains neoliberalism as a phenomenon of the capitalist world-system. Many writers focus on the cultural or ideological symptoms of neoliberalism only when they are experienced in Europe and America. This collection seeks to restore globalized capitalism as the primary object of critique and to distinguish between neoliberal ideology and processes of neoliberalization. It explores the ways in which cultural studies can teach us about aspects of neoliberalism that economics and political journalism cannot or have not: the particular affects, subjectivities, bodily dispositions, socio-ecological relations, genres, forms of understanding, and modes of political resistance that register neoliberalism. Using a world-systems perspective for cultural studies, the essays in this collection examine cultural productions from across the neoliberal world-system, bringing together works that might have in the past been separated into postcolonial studies and Anglo-American Studies.

The Politics of Literary Prestige provides the first comprehensive study of prizes for Spanish American literature. Covering state-sponsored and publisher-run prizes including the Biblioteca Breve Prize – credited with launching the 'Boom' in Spanish American literature – the Premio Cervantes and the Nobel Prize for Literature, this book examines how prizes have underpinned different political agenda. As new political positions have emerged so have new awards and the role of the author in society has evolved. Prizes variously position the winners as public intellectual, spokesperson on the world stage or celebrity in the context of an increasingly globalized literature in Spanish. Drawing on a range of sources, Sarah E.L Bowskill analyses prizes from the perspective of different stakeholders including states, publishers, authors, judges and critics. In so doing, she untangles the inner workings of literary prizes in Spanish-speaking contexts, proposes the existence of a prizes network and demonstrates that attitudes to cultural prizes are not universal but are culturally determined.