In the decades following World War II, the creation and expansion of massive domestic markets and relatively stable economies allowed for mass consumption on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to the consumer society that exists today. Many avant-garde artists explored the nexus between consumption and aesthetics, questioning how consumerism affects how we perceive the world, place ourselves in it, and make sense of it via perception and emotion. Delirious Consumption focuses on the two largest cultural economies in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, and analyzes how their artists and writers both embraced and resisted the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in late capitalism. Sergio Delgado Moya looks specifically at the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark to determine how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic production balanced between high modernism and consumer culture. He finds in their works a provocative positioning vis-à-vis urban commodity capitalism, an ambivalent position that takes an assured but flexible stance against commodification, alienation, and the politics of domination and inequality that defines market economies. In Delgado Moya’s view, these poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication—all markers of the aesthetic—while drawing on the terms proper to a world of consumption and consumer culture.

In the decades following World War II, the creation and expansion of massive domestic markets and relatively stable economies allowed for mass consumption on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to the consumer society that exists today. Many avant-garde artists explored the nexus between consumption and aesthetics, questioning how consumerism affects how we perceive the world, place ourselves in it, and make sense of it via perception and emotion. Delirious Consumption focuses on the two largest cultural economies in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, and analyzes how their artists and writers both embraced and resisted the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in late capitalism. Sergio Delgado Moya looks specifically at the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark to determine how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic production balanced between high modernism and consumer culture. He finds in their works a provocative positioning vis-à-vis urban commodity capitalism, an ambivalent position that takes an assured but flexible stance against commodification, alienation, and the politics of domination and inequality that defines market economies. In Delgado Moya's view, these poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication—all markers of the aesthetic—while drawing on the terms proper to a world of consumption and consumer culture.

The celebrated anthropologist and author of The Corn Wolf examines the Colombian culture of plastic surgery and its surprising relationship to violence. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the audacious and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction. He balances an examination of surgeries meant to enhance an individual’s beauty with their often-overlooked counterparts, surgeries performed—often on high profile criminals—to disguise one’s identity. Exploring this global phenomenon through Colombia’s economic, cultural, and political history, Taussig links the country’s long civil war and history of torture to the beauty industry at large, sketching Colombia as a country whose high aesthetic stakes make it a staging ground for some of the most important and problematic ideas about the body. Central to Taussig’s examination is George Bataille’s notion of depense, or “wasting.” While depense is often used as a critique, Taussig also looks at its position as a driving economic force. Depense, he argues, is precisely what these procedures are about, and the beast on the other side of beauty should not be dismissed as simple recompense. At once theoretical and colloquial, public and intimate, Beauty and the Beast is a true-to-place ethnography that tells a layered story about the lengths to which people will go to be physically remade.

David Alfaro Siqueiros was perhaps the most important communist painter of the twentieth century. This book, the first sustained engagement with Siqueiros’s work in the English language, focuses on the artist’s late murals, which are both aesthetically innovative and politically provocative. It places Siqueiros in an international context, revealing that the dogmatism he has been charged with was in reality a complex phenomenon. It provided a foundation for – rather than an obstacle to – his efforts to create an art embedded in the day-to-day concerns and theoretical debates of the world-wide mass movement he saw himself as a part of.

In Creative Transformations, Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary and cultural history, translation becomes a way of navigating and representing the resulting encounters between languages, interactions with Spanish Americans, and negotiations of complex identities. While Creative Transformations engages extensively with theories of translation from different national and disciplinary contexts, it also constructs a vision of translation uniquely attuned to the place of Brazil in the Americas. Brune reveals the hemispheric underpinnings of works by renowned Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Sousândrade, Mário de Andrade, Silviano Santiago, and Adriana Lisboa. In the process, she rethinks the dynamics between cosmopolitan and national desires and between center and periphery in global literary markets.

"Collection of essays analyzing a wide array of Latin American narratives through the lens of food studies"--

This volume provides palliative care physicians, specialist nurses, neurologists, psychiatrists, and other health professionals with a clear account of how to recognise and treat delirium, the most common neuro-psychiatric complication encountered by patients in the terminal phase of illness.

In the West, a specific ideal for female genitalia has emerged: one of absence, a "clean slit," attained through the removal of pubic hair and, increasingly, through female genital cosmetic surgery known as FGCS. In The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic Surgery in the Twenty-First Century, Lindy McDougall provides an ethnographic account of women who choose FGCS in Australia and the physicians who perform these procedures, both in Australia and globally, while also examining the environment in which surgeons and women come together. Physicians have a vested interest in establishing this surgery as valid medical intervention, despite majority medical opinion explicitly acknowledging that a wide range of genital variation is normal. McDougall offers a nuanced picture of why and how these procedures are performed and draws parallels between FGCS and anthropological discussions of female genital circumcision (cutting). Using the neologism biomagical, she argues that cosmetic surgery functions as both ritual and sacrifice due to its promise of transformation while simultaneously submitting the body to the risks and pain of surgery, thus exposing biomedicine as an increasingly cultural and commercial pursuit. The Perfect Vagina highlights the complexities involved with FGCS, its role in Western beauty culture, and the creation and control of body image in countries where self-care is valorized and medicine is increasingly harnessed for enhancement as well as health.

Blood, according to Gil Anidjar, maps the singular history of Christianity. As a category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought from ancient Greece to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone.