Politics of Children in Latin American Cinema explores the trend of portraying children and adolescents in a subjective, adult-constructed point of view in Latin American cinema. This trend, in which the filmmakers are able to express their own anxieties while subordinating the child’s, draws new political implications to these constructions of children’s subjective character. Chapters in this volume touch on intersectional historic contexts, such as the Brazilian judicial system, Mexico’s youth protest, Venezuelan social crisis, the Southern Cone’s post-dictatorships, and race and gender issues in Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina to elucidate these implications and how they affect child agency. Contributors to this book argue for children’s increased agency in film and in society as they analyze films in which children have more active roles. These films mirror the shift toward filmmaking that emphasizes innovative narratives and aesthetic techniques that allow children to be portrayed as social commentators, rather than passive figures. Scholars of Latin American studies, film studies, history, sociology, race studies, and gender studies will find this book particularly useful.

What is the child for Latin American cinema? This book aims to answer that question, tracing the common tendencies of the representation of the child in the cinema of Latin American countries, and demonstrating the place of the child in the movements, genres and styles that have defined that cinema. Deborah Martin combines theoretical readings of the child in cinema and culture, with discussions of the place of the child in specific national, regional and political contexts, to develop in-depth analyses and establish regional comparisons and trends. She pays particular attention to the narrative and stylistic techniques at play in the creation of the child's perspective, and to ways in which the presence of the child precipitates experiments with film aesthetics. Bringing together fresh readings of well-known films with attention to a range of little-studied works, The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema examines films from the recent and contemporary period, focussing on topics such as the death of the child in ‘street child’ films, the role of the child in post-dictatorship filmmaking and the use of child characters to challenge gender and sexual ideologies. The book also aims to place those analyses in a historical context, tracing links with important precursors, and paying attention to the legacy of the child’s figuring in the mid-century movements of melodrama and the New Latin American Cinema.

The Feeling Child: Affect and Politics in Latin American Literature and Film compiles a series of essays focusing on the figure of the child within the specific context of the “affective turn” in the study of contemporary sociocultural settings across Latin America. This edited volume looks specifically at the intersection between cultural constructions of childhood and the affective turn within the contemporary sociopolitical landscape of Latin America. The editors and contributors share a common aim in furthering comprehension of the particular intensity of the child’s affective presence—spectatorial, haptic, silent, and spectral, among others—in contemporary Latin American cultural expression. The contributions herein approach this theoretical challenge through an interdisciplinary lens which brings together two burgeoning strands of inquiry. The first is the notion of childhood as a significant, and inherently political, sociocultural space; the second is the recognition that affect is integral and fundamental to gaining a more complex understanding of the manner in which contemporary social worlds are made. In each case, this affective presence is teased out as a register of society, shedding light on the issues marking out the current sociopolitical landscape—in particular the traces of the recent past—in the regions represented. This book brings together established international scholars and young academics focusing on Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, and Peru.

A Companion to Latin American Cinema offers a wide-ranging collection of newly commissioned essays and interviews that explore the ways in which Latin American cinema has established itself on the international film scene in the twenty-first century. Features contributions from international critics, historians, and scholars, along with interviews with acclaimed Latin American film directors Includes essays on the Latin American film industry, as well as the interactions between TV and documentary production with feature film culture Covers several up-and-coming regions of film activity such as nations in Central America Offers novel insights into Latin American cinema based on new methodologies, such as the quantitative approach, and essays contributed by practitioners as well as theorists

Studying the case of Latin American cinema, this book analyzes one of the most public - and most exportable- forms of postcolonial national culture to argue that millennial era globalization demands entirely new frameworks for thinking about the relationship between politics, culture, and economic policies. Concerns that globalization would bring the downfall of national culture were common in the 1990s as economies across the globe began implementing neoliberal, free market policies and abolishing state protections for culture industries. Simultaneously, new technologies and the increased mobility of people and information caused others to see globalization as an era of heightened connectivity and progressive contact. Twenty-five years later, we are now able to examine the actual impact of globalization on local and regional cultures, especially those of postcolonial societies. Tracing the full life-cycle of films and studying blockbusters like City of God, Motorcycle Diaries, and Children of Men this book argues that neoliberal globalization has created a highly ambivalent space for cultural expression, one willing to market against itself as long as the stories sell. The result is an innovative and ground-breaking text suited to scholars interested in globalization studies, Latin-American studies and film studies.

The chapters in this book show the important role that political documentary cinema has played in Latin America since the 1950s. Political documentary cinema in Latin America has a long history of tracing social injustice and suffering, depicting political unrest, intervening in periods of crisis and upheaval, and reflecting upon questions about ideology, cultural identity, genocide and traumatic memory. This collection bears witness to the region's film culture's diversity, discussing documentaries about workers' strikes, riots, and military coups against elected governments; crime, poverty, homelessness, prostitution, children's work, and violence against women; urban development, progress, (under)development, capitalism, and neoliberalism; exile, diaspora and border cultures; trauma and (post)memory. The chapters focus on documentaries made in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela, as well as on the work of Latino and diasporic Latin American political documentarians. The contributors to the anthology reflect the cultural and linguistic diversity of current Latin American film scholarship, with some writing in Spanish and Portuguese from Argentina and Brazil (with their original works especially translated), and others writing in English from Australia, Europe, and the USA. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Identities.

Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema is the first volume to delve into the construction of children's subjectivity and agency in Latin American film, and addresses such questions as: How and to what extent do films express the point of view of the child? How do plots and film practices represent children’s subjectivity and agency? Childhood studies has demonstrated the importance of examining the lives of children. Building on those insights, together with current research from film studies and Latin American cultural studies, the essays in this volume analyze the development of agency and voices of minors in contemporary Latin American film. The theoretical perspectives used—gender studies, psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, film studies, play and performance studies, and emotion studies, among others—take into account innovative approaches to filmic techniques as they explore the varied representations of children.

This collection seeks to broaden the discussion of the child image by close analysis of the child and childhood as depicted in non-Western cinemas. Each essay offers a counter-narrative to Western notions of childhood by looking critically at alternative visions of childhood that does not privilege a Western ideal. Rather, this collection seeks to broaden our ideas about children, childhood, and the child’s place in the global community. This collection features a wide variety of contributors from around the world who offer compelling analyses of non-Western, non-Hollywood films starring children.

In 1803 in the colonial South American city of La Plata, Doña Martina Vilvado y Balverde presented herself to church and crown officials to denounce her husband of more than four years, Don Antonio Yta, as a “woman in disguise.” Forced to submit to a medical inspection that revealed a woman’s body, Don Antonio confessed to having been María Yta, but continued to assert his maleness and claimed to have a functional “member” that appeared, he said, when necessary. Passing to América is at once a historical biography and an in-depth examination of the sex/gender complex in an era before “gender” had been divorced from “sex.” The book presents readers with the original court docket, including Don Antonio’s extended confession, in which he tells his life story, and the equally extraordinary biographical sketch offered by Felipa Ybañez of her “son María,” both in English translation and the original Spanish. Thomas A. Abercrombie’s analysis not only grapples with how to understand the sex/gender system within the Spanish Atlantic empire at the turn of the nineteenth century but also explores what Antonio/María and contemporaries can teach us about the complexities of the relationship between sex and gender today. Passing to América brings to light a previously obscure case of gender transgression and puts Don Antonio’s life into its social and historical context in order to explore the meaning of “trans” identity in Spain and its American colonies. This accessible and intriguing study provides new insight into historical and contemporary gender construction that will interest students and scholars of gender studies and colonial Spanish literature and history. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of New York University. Learn more at the TOME website: openmonographs.org.

Historically, Los Angeles and its exhibition market have been central to the international success of Latin American cinema. Not only was Los Angeles a site crucial for exhibition of these films, but it became the most important hub in the western hemisphere for the distribution of Spanish language films made for Latin American audiences. Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles builds upon this foundational insight to both examine the considerable, ongoing role that Los Angeles played in the history of Spanish-language cinema and to explore the implications of this transnational dynamic for the study and analysis of Latin American cinema before 1960. The volume editors aim to flesh out the gaps between Hollywood and Latin America, American imperialism and Latin American nationalism in order to produce a more nuanced view of transnational cultural relations in the western hemisphere.