Southern Cone Studies

An authorial collective including Luis Cárcamo-Huechante has published Ta iñ fijke xipa rakizuameluwün. Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país Mapuche (Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2012). This book provides testimony to the historical, socio-political, cultural, and territorial perspectives that have emerged within the Mapuche people, directly confronting the problematics of Mapuche reality through a transversal and dynamic understanding of the effects of colonialism on different aspects of history, society, and culture, focusing particularly on the relations between the Mapuche and dominant Chilean society. The work presented in this book expresses the desire to make evident the experiences of Mapuche resistance, and at the same time, to understand the very construction of Mapuche existence within a broader history of colonial relations that persist to the present day.

Robert J. Cottrol (George Washington State University) has published his book The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race and Law in the American Hemisphere. The book is a comparative legal and social history of race in the Americas examining the issue from slavery in the colonial period to current debates over affirmative action in the United States and Brazil.  The Long, Lingering Shadow provides a three way comparison examining the United States, Brazil and selected Spanish American countries including Argentina and Uruguay. For further information, see the following webpage: http://www.law.gwu.edu/News/newsstories/Pages/LongLingeringShadow.aspx

Gisela Heffes ha publicado la colección de relatos Glossa urbana (Alción, 2012). Se trata de ocho cuentos que exploran la problemática urbana desde perspectivas diversas, abarcando temáticas como violencia, frontera, espacios imaginarios y fábulas distópicas, entre otras. Según el escritor argentino Marcelo Damiani, "Glossa Urbana es un libro irrepetible y único, suerte de archipiélago de islas en miniatura conectadas por pasadizos subterráneos, a la espera de lectores con un verdadero espíritu de aventura. El resto es pura ficción". Gisela Heffes Assistant Professor de Hispanic Studies en Rice University, Houston, Texas.

Gisela Heffes published Poéticas de los (dis)locamientos (Literal, 2012). This volume of essays focuses on the overlooked relationship between the creative writing process and the experiences of migration, displacement and translocation in Latin American writers living in the US.  Some of the questions raised in this book are related to both the language and the culture in which the author embeds himself or herself.  The writers that collaborated in this volume are Sylvia Molloy, Alicia Borinsky, Sergio Chejfec, Sergio Ramírez, Eduardo Chirinos, José Antonio Mazzotti, Isaac Goldemberg, Cristina Rivera Garza, Eduardo González Viaña, Vicente Luis Mora, Ana Merino, MiguelÁngel Zapata, Rose Mary Salum and Gisela Heffes. Gisela Heffes is AssistantProfessor of Hispanic Studies at Rice University, Houston, Texas.

Gisela Heffes ha editado Utopías urbanas: geopolíticas del deseo en América Latina (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2013). A través del planteamiento geopolítico de Domingo F Sarmiento en Argirópolis, las ciudades se constituyen en un instrumento clave para transformar el "vacío" americano en un espacio apto para los "pueblos civilizados". Retomando la propuesta de Sarmiento, el presente volumen examina la interrelación entre territorialidad urbana e imaginario utópico en América Latina, teniendo en cuenta que la ciudad constituye el espacio de cruce en el que se van a articular los debates y preocupaciones propios de los escritores y letrados latinoamericanos, y las proyecciones políticas, sociales y culturales provocadas por los deseos e imaginaciones de una sociabilidad diferente a la real y que, por lo tanto, conformarán propuestas alternativas. Así, indaga en la relación entre la emergencia de una nueva realidad geopolítica (la ciudad americana) y la construcción del ideal utópico en diversas escrituras y prácticas latinoamericanas.

Sergio Chejfec:  Trayectorias de una escritura. Ensayos críticos.  (Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Serie Cornejo Polar, 2012.), edited by Dianna C. Niebylski, has been published. The volume, the first compilation of critical essays on Sergio Chejfec's work, contains an introduction by the author and essays on Chejfec's fiction published to date.  Essays by Beatriz Sarlo, Edgardo Berg, Jorge Carrión, Patrick Dove, Erin Graff Zivin, Reinaldo Laddaga, Alejandra Laera, Isabel Quintana, Luz Horne, Gina Saraceni, Luis Moreno Villamediana, Mariana Cattalin, Steve Buttes, Maximiliano Sánchez and Dianna Niebylski.

Marta Sierra has published Gendered Spaces in Argentine Women's Literature. (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012). Addressing the largely understudied issue of how gendered spatial relations impact the production of literary works, this book includes a discussion on gender implications of spatial categories like the notions of home and away, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation, and the "quest for place" in women's writing from Argentina from 1910 to the present. This study offers a cross-disciplinary model, blending theories from the social sciences' approaches to the production of space, feminist criticism about spatialization processes as gender based, and Latin American theories on geopolitics and the establishment of national territories.