Cervantine Futures places the writings of Miguel de Cervantes into conversation with some of the most pressing issues in cultural studies, critical theory, and sociopolitical discourse of the last decade. Assembling a diverse range of prominent and emerging scholars in the field, this volume stakes a claim for Hispanism’s place in the growing scholarly movement to vindicate pre- and early modernity for its incisive and often singular perspective on race, gender, ability, the body,...

"David Castillo takes us on a tour of some horrific materials that have rarely been considered together. He sheds a fantastical new light on the baroque."---Anthony J. Cascardi, University of California Berkeley"Baroque Horrors is a textual archeologist's dream, scavenged from obscure chronicles, manuals, minor histories, and lesser-known works of major artists. Castillo finds tales of mutilation, mutation, monstrosity, murder, and mayhem, and delivers them to us wi...

Zombie Talk offers a concise, interdisciplinary introduction and deep analytical set of theoretical approaches to help readers understand the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary and modern culture. With essays that combine Humanities and Social Science methodologies, the authors examine the zombie through an array of cultural products from different periods and geographical locations: films ranging from White Zombie (1932) to the pioneering films of George Romero, television shows like A...

The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a tragic illustration of the existential threat that the viral spread of disinformation poses in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news. From climate change denialism to the frenzied conspiracy theories and racist mythologies that fuel antidemocratic white nationalist movements in the United States and abroad, What Would Cervantes Do? is a lucid meditation on the key role the humanities must play in dissecting and comba...

There has been a significant surge in recent Argentine cinema, with an explosion in the number of films made in the country since the mid-1990s. Many of these productions have been highly acclaimed by critics in Argentina and elsewhere. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is its coinciding with a period of severe economic crisis and civil unrest in the nation. Offering the first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films of the late twentieth century and early t...

Becoming Reinaldo Arenas explores the life and work of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990), who emerged on the Latin American cultural scene in the 1960s and quickly achieved literary fame. Yet as a political dissident and an openly gay man, Arenas also experienced discrimination and persecution; he produced much of his work amid political controversy and precarious living conditions. In 1980, having survived ostracism and incarceration in Cuba, he arrived in the United S...

X-Men is one of the most popular comic book franchises ever, with successful spin-offs that include several feature films, cartoon series, bestselling video games, and merchandise. This is the first look at the deeper issues of the X-Men universe and the choices facing its powerful "mutants," such as identity, human ethics versus mutant morality, and self-sacrifice.J. Jeremy Wisnewski (Oneonta, NY) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hartwick College and the editor of ...

A central tenet of Catholic religious practice, confession relies upon the use of language between the penitent and his or her confessor. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Spain colonized the Quechua-speaking Andean world, the communication of religious beliefs and practices—especially the practice of confession—to the native population became a primary concern, and as a result, expansive bodies of Spanish ecclesiastic literature were translated into Quechua. In this fascinati...

Originally published in Mexico in 1970, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is the first book by the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch (1922–79) to be translated into English. At its core is a binary created by colonization and the devaluation of indigenous practices and cosmologies: an opposition between the technologies and rationalities of European modernity and the popular mode of thinking, which is deeply tied to Indian ways of knowing and being. Arguing that this bi...

Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish-America. In the first full-length study of this commercially successful and intellectually significant genre, Bradbury underlines the service performed by the miscellanists as disseminators of knowledge and information to a popular ...

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) directed the composition of an encyclopaedic work on the world of the Nahuas, Universal History of the Things of New Spain (ca. 1577-1579), for which he has received the title of pioneering ethnographer and anthropologist of colonial Mexico. Contextualizing Sahagún and his work in sixteenth-century Spain and America, this study presents him as a cultural translator who reconceptualized the Nahua world according to his own Euro-Christian categorization...

Research consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, how multitasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media.Media Life is a primer on how we may think of our lives as lived in rather than with media. The book uses the way media function today as a prism to understand key issues in contemporary society, where reality is open so...