Kirjahaku

Across Mexico, human rights abuses take many forms, as do the strategies designed to denounce and resist them. Political street art thrives; murals, stencils, and posters challenge authorities and commemorate the missing and the disappeared.Pasting Up Protest explores the sociopolitical engagement of contemporary Mexican artists, introducing the concept of memory activism, the guiding philosophy behind their efforts to expose human rights violations such as forced disappearances and feminicides. Through her analysis of street art interventions from the collectives ASARO, URT-Arte, ARMARTE, and MuGRe over the past decade, Annik Bilodeau argues that these artists are shaping a new collective memory. By depicting real-life victims and referencing past acts of state-sponsored violence, their works create a familiar visual vocabulary that elicits empathy and compassion in the viewer. A reliance on a tradition of printmaking, a highly reproducible medium, further amplifies the emotional impact of the images.A critical examination of the role of art in creating public memory, Pasting Up Protest sheds light on how Mexican artists document crimes of the state, transforming citizens into political agents of change.

Belonging Beyond Borders maps the evolution of cosmopolitanism in Spanish American narrative literature through a generational lens. Drawing on a new theoretical framework that blends intellectual studies and literary history with integrated approaches to Spanish American narrative, this book traces the evolution from aesthetic cosmopolitanism through anti-colonial nationalism to modern political cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism in Latin America has historically been associated with colonialism. In the mid-twentieth-century, authors who presented cosmopolitan narratives were harshly criticized by their nationalist peers. However, with the intensification of cultural globalization Spanish American authors have redefined cosmopolitanism, rejecting a worldview that relies on the creation of an other for the definition of the self. Instead, this new generation has both embraced and challenged global citizenship, redefining concepts to address human rights, identity, migration, belonging, and more. Taking the work of Elena Poniatowka, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Jorge Volpi as examples, this book presents innovative scholarship across literary traditions. It shows how Spanish-American authors offer nuanced understandings of national and global affiliations, and identities and untangles the strings of cosmopolitan thought and activism from those of nationalist criticism.