Mama Blanca’s Memoirs

This is a “backwoods” history that aims, with gentle irony, to question the usual privileging of “civilization” over “barbarism” that otherwise structures most literary depictions of nineteenth-century Latin America.

Hopscotch! The Rules of the Game

What is the “play”—the “freedom, opportunity, or room for action; scope for activity”—that literature offers, once we realize that there is no one “right” way of reading?

Hopscotch! Trailer

LAST100

This Fall, I’m teaching “Introduction to Latin American Studies.” I’ve taught it before, but the twist this time is that I have some money to make videos to illustrate and enhance the course.

There will be three types of videos: 1) “instructor videos,” or mini-lectures that I write and deliver; 2) conversations with colleagues and others on specific topics; 3) student-made videos.

Everything will be made available (via YouTube) with a CC-BY-NC license. This means that anybody can re-use and even remake the material, so long as they attribute the original source, and so long as they don’t use them for commercial purposes.

They are far from perfect (we’re not professionals), but I’m pretty pleased with how they’re turning out so far. Each one gets a little better, at least in technical terms, I think, even though we also find ways to add new glitches we’d barely considered before.

We’ll have to wait, of course, for the student-made videos, but here are the first few instructor videos and conversations:

Instructor videos:

1. Where is Latin America?
2. The Meeting of Two Worlds
3. The Colonial Experience

Interviews:

1. Hugo Chávez in Context, with Max Cameron
2. Modernity and Modernization in Mexico, with Alec Dawson
3. The Mexican Revolution, with Alec Dawson

On García Linera

Here is a video of a talk I gave as part of “Democracy in the Andes,” a conference on Bolivian vice president Alvaro García Linera at Texas A&M. (You can find more of the conference presentations here.)

Then you can also see the ensuing discussion:

Posthegemony in Peru

I was fortunate a few weeks ago to be able to present my book at a “Mesa Verde” at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in Lima.  Guillermo Rochabrún and Juan Carlos Ubilluz provided stimulating comments, and there was a spirited discussion session at the end.  Herewith, the video of the event.  Many thanks to Patricia Ames for moderating and making it possible.

More videos

And if you want videos of me teaching to first-year undergraduates, there are now a whole bunch of them available via Arts One Open. Here, for instance, I am (again) way out of my field of expertise, talking about Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart:

“The Mexican Exception?”

This blog has been neglected for too long. I hope to remedy that situation soon. In the meantime, here is a talk I gave a couple of months ago at the Vancouver Institute for Social Research. Not exactly on my area of expertise, and title stolen from my friend Gareth Williams:

sombrero

Watching this footage (which I’ve just come across) gives me goosebumps.

It comes from a pro-Sandinista solidarity concert held in Nicaragua in 1983, billed as a “concierto por la paz centroamericana.” The soundtrack was released as “April in Managua.” I used to own the cassette version, which I was given in Honduras sometime around 1988. I practically wore it out listening to it.

Wikipedia tells me that Alí Primera, the singer here, died a couple of years later, at the age of 42, which only adds further poignancy to this video.

reading

“We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier: we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 4).