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Expanding on a major public program of April 2021, this volume presents wide-ranging perspectives on the legacies of the Dutch Atlantic slave trade within and beyond museum walls. Contributions by curators, academics, activists, artists, and poets consider this history as reflected in the arts of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Black diaspora more broadly, together illuminating how art museums may function as liberatory spaces working against systemic injustice.
Emblematics and the Brazilian Avant-Garde (1920-30s)
Author:
In Antropofagia, Aarnoud Rommens shows how this Brazilian avant-garde movement (1920-30s) deconstructed early tendencies in the European vanguard. Through imaginative re-readings, the author reinterprets Antropofagia’s central texts and images as elements within an ever-changing, neo-baroque memory palace. Not only does the movement subvert established conceptions of the pre- and postcolonial; it is also a counter-colonial critique of verbal and visual literacy. To do justice to the dynamic between visibility and legibility, Rommens develops the inventive methodology of ‘emblematics’. The book’s implications are wide-ranging, prompting a revaluation of the avant-garde as a transmedial tactic for disrupting our reading and viewing habits.
Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas
A class of child artists in Mexico, a ship full of child refugees from Spain, classrooms of child pageant actors, and a pair of boy ambassadors revealed facets of hemispheric politics in the Good Neighbor era. Culture-makers in the Americas tuned into to children as producers of cultural capital to advance their transnational projects. In many instances, prevailing conceptions of children as innocent, primitive, dependent, and underdeveloped informed perceptions of Latin America as an infantilized region, a lesser "Other Americas" on the continent. In other cases, children's interventions in the cultural politics, economic projects, and diplomatic endeavors of the interwar period revealed that Latin American children saw themselves as modern, professional, participants in forging inter-American relationships.

"Good Neighbor Empires is a skillfully crafted study of children as actors and as symbolic centerpieces in the infantilized image of Latin America. Marrying deep research in transnational archives with engaging storytelling, Albarrán examines the social meaning of children by crafting a story where they emerge as powerful artists, exiles and diplomats in open-air art schools, dormitories and classrooms. By vividly demonstrating how children’s experiences and the metaphors surrounding them both reaffirmed and contested diplomacy and hemispheric understandings in the Americas, the book asserts the relevance of childhood studies and transnational history to understandings of Latin American politics and culture." - Sonia Robles, author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico's Northern Border, 1930-1950 (The University of Arizona Press: 2023).

"Elena Albarrán is an internationally renowned authority on the history of childhood in Latin America, and especially Mexico. Good Neighbor Empires masterfully tells a transnational history of children, their cultural production, and their public perception in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, a time in which the United States discarded military intervention and heavy-handed diplomacy in favor of an approach focused on the soft power of commerce, media, and migration. At the heyday of U.S. imperialism, cartoons had often represented the Latin American republics as children in need of Uncle Sam's guidance, and Latin Americans (both adults and children) remained infantilized in the U.S. imagination throughout the Good Neighbor era. Focusing on the agency of children in three contexts, from Mexican folklore to Spanish Republican refugees to Pan-Americanism as an effort to foster hemispheric "solidarity" during an era of totalitarian threats, the author shows that children and the families they belonged to emerged as part of a new populist rhetoric that reinforced both international capitalist cooperation and patriarchy. A cutting-edge contribution to the history of the Americas in the twentieth century." - Jürgen Buchenau, Dowd Term Chair of Capitalism Studies, UNC Charlotte

"Albarrán makes significant contributions to the scholarship on both childhood studies and the history of cultural relations in Good Neighbor Empires. As well as examining the discourses of childhood that built upon colonial and neocolonial legacies and shaped Pan Americanism, Albarrán gives voice to the children who sometimes refashioned these discourses in surprising ways, based on their own understandings of childhood, Latin America, and the United States. Grounded in Mexican cultural history, but providing insights that demonstrate the usefulness of children as a category of analysis for understanding the entire hemisphere, she deftly weaves captivating tales of children’s agency as non-governmental actors in inter-American affairs with a fascinating account of the contested construction of U.S. neocolonial hegemony in the twentieth century." - Amelia M. Kiddle, University of Calgary, author of Mexico’s Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era (University of New Mexico Press, 2016)
Usable Pasts addresses projects dating to two periods in the United States that saw increased financial support from the state for socially engaged culture. By analysing artworks dating to the 1990s by Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe and Martha Rosler in relation to experimental theatre, modern dance, and photography produced within the leftist Cultural Front of the 1930s, this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics in order to write a new history of social practice art in the United States. From teenage mothers organising exhibitions that challenged welfare reform, to communist dance troupes choreographing their struggles as domestic workers, Usable Pasts addresses the aesthetics and politics of these attempts to transform society through art in relation to questions of state formation.
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A Companion to Early Modern Lima introduces readers to the Spanish American city which became a vibrant urban center in the sixteenth-century world. As part of Brill's Companions to the Americas series, this volume presents current interdisciplinary research focused on the Peruvian viceregal capital. From ancient roots to its foundation by Pizarro, Lima was transformed into an imperial capital positioned between Atlantic and Pacific exchange networks. An international team of scholars examines issues ranging from literary history, politics, and religion to philosophy, historiography, and modes of intercontinental influence. The volume is divided into three sections: urban development and government, society, and culture. The essays collectively represent the scope of contemporary approaches, methodologies, and source materials pertinent to the study of sixteenth-century Lima, a city at the center of global interchange in the early modern world.
Beat Literature in Europe offers twelve in-depth analyses of how European authors and intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain read, translated and appropriated American Beat literature. The chapters combine textual analysis with discussions on the role Beat had in popular music, art, and different subcultures.
The book participates in the transnational turn that has gained in importance during the past years in literary studies, looking at transatlantic connections through the eyes of European authors, artists and intellectuals, and showing how Beat became a cluster of texts, images, and discussions with global scope. At the same time, it provides vivid examples of how national literary fields in Europe evolved during the cold war era.

Contributors are: Thomas Antonic, Franca Bellarsi, Frida Forsgren, Santiago Rodriguez Guerrero-Strachan, József Havasréti, Tiit Hennoste, Benedikt Hjartarson, Petra James, Nuno Neves, Maria Nikopoulou, Harri Veivo, Dorota Walczak-Delanois, Gregory Watson.
Holy Organ or Unholy Idol? focuses on the significance of the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and its accompanying imagery in eighteenth-century New Spain. Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank considers paintings, prints, devotional texts, and archival sources within the Mexican context alongside issues and debates occurring in Europe to situate the New Spanish cult within local and global developments. She examines the iconography of these religious images and frames them within broader socio-political and religious discourses related to the Eucharist, the sun, the Jesuits, scientific and anatomical ideas, and mysticism. Images of the Heart helped to champion the cult’s validity as it was attacked by religious reformers.
Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas is a trans-cultural collection of studies on visual treatments of the phenomena of suffering and pain in early modern culture. Ranging geographically from Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries to Chile, Mexico, and the Philippines and chronologically from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these studies variously consider pain and suffering as somatic, emotional, and psychological experiences.
From examination of bodies shown victimized by brutal public torture to the sublimation of physical suffering conveyed through the incised lines of Counter-Reformation engravings, the authors consider depictions of pain and suffering as conduits to the divine or as guides to social behaviour; indeed, often the two functions overlap.
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In Ornamental Nationalism: Archaeology and Antiquities in Mexico, 1876-1911, Seonaid Valiant examines the Porfirian government’s reworking of indigenous, particularly Aztec, images to create national symbols. She focuses in particular on the career of Mexico's first national archaeologist, Inspector General Leopoldo Batres. He was a controversial figure who was accused of selling artifacts and damaging sites through professional incompetence by his enemies, but who also played a crucial role in establishing Mexican control over the nation's archaeological heritage.
Exploring debates between Batres and his rivals such as the anthropologists Zelia Nuttall and Marshall Saville, Valiant reveals how Porfirian politicians reinscribed the political meaning of artifacts while social scientists, both domestic and international, struggled to establish standards for Mexican archaeology that would undermine such endeavors.
Art History as Social Praxis: The Collected Writings of David Craven brings together more than thirty essays that chart the development of Craven’s voice as an unorthodox Marxist who applied historical materialism to the study of modern art. This book demonstrates the range and versatility of David Craven’s praxis as a ‘democratic socialist’ art historian who assessed the essential role the visual arts play in imagining more just and equitable societies. The essays collected here reveal Craven’s lifelong commitment to exposing interstices between western and non-western cultures by researching the reciprocating influences between First- and Third-World artists, critics and historians.