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  The Sacred Language of the Abakuá

  Lydia Cabrera, Victor Manfredi, Ivor Miller, and Patricia González Gómez-Cásseres

  In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899-1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution's history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure.

  Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera's lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first "insider's" view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera's writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba's history.

  With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera's Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.

  Source: Publisher

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  National Tragedy, Transnational Gaze: The Films of Héctor Gálvez

  Maria Helena Rueda

  This volume brings together scholars from Peru, Europe, and the United States whose lucid essays situate Peruvian film production within a global context. The breadth of this volume makes it essential reading for those interested both in Latin American cinema and Peruvian culture." - Carolina Rocha, Southern Illinois University Edwardsvillle, USA "This ground-breaking collection uniquely illuminates the vibrant panorama of contemporary Peruvian cinema. Recognized mostly for its internationally feted art films, now the full picture comes into sharp focus, acknowledging Peru's metropolitan rom coms, artisanal digital indies, regional commercial films, female-led non-fiction, shorts, experimental and indigenous filmmaking. Undoubtedly this will be a "go to" text for Peruvian cinema for at least the next decade." - David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgow, UK "This volume makes a convincing case for 21st-century Peruvian films as a distinct body of work. It usefully charts the changing landscape of Peru's film legislation while offering a cogent grouping of the films, the aim being to clarify the different aspirations of contemporary Peruvian filmmakers and the diversity of their approaches to film production and audience building. This fine collection makes a most welcome contribution to the study of 'small' national cinemas. " - Mette Hjort, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong This is the first English-language book to provide a critical panorama of the last twenty years of Peruvian cinema. Through analysis of the nation's diverse modes of filmmaking, it offers an insight into how global debates around cinema are played out on and off screen in a distinctive national context. The insertion of post-conflict Peru within neoliberalism resulted in widespread commodification of all areas of life, significantly impacting cinema culture. Consequently, the principal structural concept of this collection is the interplay between film production and market forces, an interaction which makes dynamism and instability the defining features of 21st-century Peruvian cinema. Cynthia Vich is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Film at Fordham University, New York, USA. Sarah Barrow is Professor of Film and Media at University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

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  Films on Loss: Bridging the Collective and the Personal

  María Helena Rueda

  Focusing on films from Chile since 2000 and bringing together scholars from South and North America, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World is the first English-language book since the 1970s to explore this small, yet significant, Latin American cinema. The volume questions the concept of "national cinemas" by examining how Chilean film dialogues with trends in genre-based, political, and art-house cinema around the world, while remaining true to local identities. Contributors place current Chilean cinema in a historical context and expand the debate concerning the artistic representation of recent political and economic transformations in contemporary Chile. Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World opens up points of comparison between Chile and the ways in which other national cinemas are negotiating their place on the world stage. The book is divided into five parts. "Mapping Theories of Chilean Cinema in the World" examines Chilean filmmakers at international film festivals, and political and affective shifts in the contemporary Chilean documentary. "On the Margins of Hollywood: Chilean Genre Flicks" explores on the emergence of Chilean horror cinema and the performance of martial arts in Chilean films. "Other Texts and Other Lands: Intermediality and Adaptation Beyond Chile(an Cinema)" covers the intermedial transfer from Chilean literature to transnational film and from music video to film. "Migrations of Gender and Genre" contrasts films depicting transgender people in Chile and beyond. "Politicized Intimacies, Transnational Affects: Debating (Post)memory and History" analyzes representations of Chile’s traumatic past in contemporary documentary and approaches mourning as a politicized act in postdictatorship cultural production. Intended for scholars, students, and researchers of film and Latin American studies, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World evaluates an active and emergent film movement that has yet to receive sufficient attention in global cinema studies. Source: Publisher