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"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)
"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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.