Libros premiados
Primer Lugar
Mejor Libro en Humanidades
Media Laboratories
Late Modernist Authorship in South America
Northwestern UP
SARAH ANN WELLS
Mención Honrosa,
Mejor Libro en Humanidades
After Human Rights
Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990–2010
U of Pitt P
FERNANDO ROSENBERG
Primer Lugar
Mejor Libro en Ciencias Sociales
The Wars inside Chile's Barracks
Remembering Military Service under Pinochet
UW Press
LEITH PASSMORE
Media Laboratories explores a pivotal time for South American literature of the 1930s and ’40s. Cinema, radio, and the typewriter, once seen as promising catalysts for new kinds of writing, began to be challenged by authors, workers, and the public. What happens when media no longer seem novel and potentially democratic but rather consolidated and dominant? Moving among authors from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and among the genres of fiction, the essay, popular journalism, and experimental little magazines, Sarah Ann Wells shows how writers on the periphery of global modernity were fashioning alternative approaches to these media. Analyzing authors such as Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, and Felisberto Hernández, along with their lesser-known contemporaries, Media Laboratories casts a wide net: from spectators of Hollywood and Soviet montage films, to inventors of imaginary media, to proletarian typists who embodied the machine-human encounters of the period. The text navigates contemporary scholarly and popular debates about the relationship of literature to technological innovation, media archaeology, sound studies, populism, and global modernisms. Ultimately, Wells underscores a question that remains relevant: what possibilities emerge when the enthusiasm for new media has been replaced by anxiety over their potentially pernicious effects in a globalizing, yet vastly unequal, world?
SARAH ANN WELLS is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Tesis premiadas
Excelencia en Tesis Doctoral
Becoming Political Subjects in the City’s Peripheries:
Pobladores and Housing Struggles in Santiago, Chile
PhD Anthropology
U of California, Berkeley
MIGUEL PÉREZ
Professor J Holston, Chair
After Human Rights explores Latin American artistic production concerned with the possibility of justice after the establishment, rise, and ebb of the human rights narrative around the turn of the last century. He grounds his study in discussions of literature, film, and visual art (novels of political refoundations, fictions of truth and reconciliation, visual arts based on cases of disappearance, films about police violence, artistic collaborations with police forces, and judicial documentaries). In doing so, he provides a highly original examination of the paradoxical demands on current artistic works to produce both capital value and foster human dignity.
FERNANDO J. ROSENBERG is professor in the department of Hispanic studies and comparative literature at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America.
From 1973 to 1990 in Chile, approximately 370,000 young men—mostly from impoverished backgrounds—were conscripted to serve as soldiers in Augusto Pinochet's violent regime. Some were brutal enforcers, but many themselves endured physical and psychological abuse, survival and torture training, arbitrary punishments, political persecution, and forced labor. Leith Passmore examines the emergence, in the early twenty-first century, of a movement of ex-conscripts seeking reparations. The former soldiers challenged the politics of memory that had shaped Chile's truth and reconciliation efforts, demanding recognition of their own broken families, ill health and incapacity to work, and damaged sense of self.
Relying on unpublished material, testimony, interviews, and field notes, Passmore locates these individuals' narratives of victimhood at the intersection of long-term histories of patriotism, masculinity, and cyclical poverty. These accounts reveal in detail how Pinochet's war against his own citizens—as well as the "almost-wars" with neighboring Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina—were also waged inside Chile's army barracks.
LEITH PASSMORE is a historian at the Universidad Andrés Bello in Santiago, Chile, and the author of Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction: Performing Terrorism.