This volume offers a new reading of the Spanish-American novela de la selva genre, often interpreted as a belated imitation of European travel literature. Arguing against the commonly held opinion of the genre’s derivative nature, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks examines how novela de la selva fiction reimagined the tropics from a Latin American perspective and redefined tropical landscape aesthetics and ethnography through parodic rewritings of European perspectives. Analyzing four emblematic novels of the genre, this book considers the crucial place of the jungle as a locus for the contestation of national and literary identity by post-independence Latin American writers.

The author analyzes three books on escapism and the various ways in which it is represented in them. He focuses on Alex Garland’s backpacker cult novel 'The Beach' and William Sutcliffe’s satire of the gap-year traveler 'Are You Experienced?' as well as Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction book 'Into the Wild'.The first part of the analysis deals with the influence of literary genres like the Bildungsroman and travel literature. Unreliable narration as a narrative strategy is taken into consideration, as well as the colonial subtext of 'The Beach' and 'Are You Experienced?'. In 'Into the Wild' nature writing and road narratives are an integral part of the narrative.The second part deals with cultural aspects such as questions of authenticity that are raised during the narratives, the role of drugs as a means of escape, and also the problematic relationship between travelers and tourists. Finally, the author compares two film adaptations, Danny Boyle’s 'The Beach' (2000) and Sean Penn’s 'Into the Wild' (2007), with their corresponding literary source texts.

In this engaging book, Maria Chiara D’Argenio delineates a turn in recent Latin American filmmaking towards inter/cultural feature films made by non-Indigenous directors. Aimed at a global audience, but played by Indigenous actors, these films tell Indigenous stories in Indigenous languages. Over the last two decades, a growing number of Latin American films have screened the Indigenous experience by combining the local and the global in a way that has proved appealing at international film festivals. Locating the films in composite webs of past and present traditions and forms, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema examines the critical reflection offered by recent inter/cultural films and the socio-cultural impact, if any, they might have had. Through the analysis of a selection of films produced between 2006 and 2019, the book gauges the extent to which non-Indigenous directors who set out to engage critically with colonial legacies and imaginaries, as well as with contemporary Indigenous marginalization, succeed in addressing these concerns by ‘unthinking’ and ‘undoing’ Western centrism and coloniality. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and considering the entire cinematic process – from pre-production to the films’ production, circulation and critical reception – Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema makes the case for a holistic cultural criticism to explain the cultural and political work cinema does in specific historical contexts.

Developed over six chapters, Pakistan’s Nuclear Exclusion provides an account of how orientalism is a lived experience of post-colonial racism, injustice, and inequality amongst members of the nuclear community in Pakistan. The account is produced through interviews with members of the community consisting of students, academics, and physicists in Pakistan. Rahim offers unique insights into how Pakistan’s nuclear community is not only perceived and represented but also how it seeks to operate in a wider nuclear community dominated by Western nuclear powers. The provision of such highly contextualised insights is enabled by the book setting out to both (a) provide analytical space for and (b) ‘give voice’ to how orientalism is experienced in the everyday of their lives. Consequently, the work provides (1) an analysis of how ‘dominant discourses’ of nuclear management and their ‘pictures of reason’ are exclusionary, (2) an analysis of the core features of orientalism as they pertain to Pakistan’s nuclear community; and (3) empirical findings which produce categories of the experience of orientalism into areas of the everyday – exclusion, making a career, Islamophobia, technology denial and self-reliance. Pakistan’s Nuclear Exclusion is enormously valuable to the research community as well as extremely well-conceived and researched. In addition, much of the methodology chapter offers a level of sophistication and self-reflection that translates well in the interview material and its subsequent analysis.

The volume asks how the literatures of the Americas and the Caribbean present multiple or internally differentiated spaces and how these are distinguished or traversed by different temporalities. The historical and (post)colonial experiences of these areas turns them into especially fertile ground for the exploration of the connections between landscape/geography and historical/temporal palimpsests as well as the specificities of literary form. The contributions are dedicated to individual, yet conceptually interconnected studies of staggered, multiple, non-simultaneous temporalities in modern and contemporary literature. The volume adopts a comparative perspective throughout and intends to foster the dialogue between the study of Latin/American and Caribbean literatures—in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Therefore, the individual essays are not grouped according to geographical or linguistic areas, but follow a trajectory from spatiotemporal constellations of the 19th century to ruined/catastrophic landscapes and the geopoetic inscriptions of time in regions. The essays should appeal to all readers interested in World Literature, Hemispheric Studies as well as temporal approaches to space and geography.

During the twenty-first century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. Subjunctive Aesthetics studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico's present and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative forms of territoriality (ways of being in relation to the environment) through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation. Whereas ecocritical studies have often focused on art's evidentiary role—its ability to visualize and prove the urgency of environmental damage—author Carolyn Fornoff argues that what unites the artists under consideration is their use of more hypothetical, uncertain representational modes, or "subjunctive aesthetics." In English, the subjunctive is a grammatical mode that articulates the imagined, desired, and possible. In the Spanish language, it is even more widely used to express doubts, denials, value judgments, and emotions. Each chapter of Subjunctive Aesthetics takes up one of these modalities to examine how Mexican artists, writers, and filmmakers activate approaches to the planet not just as it is, but as it could be or should be.

Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon analyzes the ways in which the Amazon has been represented in twentieth century cultural production. With contributions by scholars working in Latin America, the US and Europe, Intimate Frontiers reads against the grain commonly held notions about the region —its gigantism, its richness, its exceptionality, among other— choosing to approach these rather from quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The multinational, pluriethnic corpus of texts critically examined here, explores a wide range of cultural artifacts including travelogues, diaries, and novels about the rubber boom genocide, as well as indigenous oral histories, documentary films, and photography about the region. The different voices gathered in this book show that the richness of the Amazon lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness of its histories/stories in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.

The heroes of the British and French empires stood at the vanguard of the vibrant cultures of imperialism that emerged in Europe in the second-half of the nineteenth century. Their stories are well known. Scholars have tended to assume that figures such as Livingstone and Gordon, or Marchand and Brazza, vanished rapidly at the end of empire. Yet imperial heroes did not disappear after 1945, as British and French flags were lowered around the world. On the contrary, their reputations underwent a variety of metamorphoses in both the former metropoles and the former colonies. This book develops a framework to understand the complex legacies of decolonisation, both political and cultural, through the case study of imperial heroes. We demonstrate that the ‘decolonisation’ of imperial heroes was a much more complex and protracted process than the political retreat from empire, and that it is still an ongoing phenomenon, even half a century after the world has ceased to be ‘painted in red’. Whilst Decolonising Imperial Heroes explores the appeal of the explorers, humanitarians and missionaries whose stories could be told without reference to violence against colonized peoples, it also analyses the persistence of imperial heroes as sites of political dispute in the former metropoles. Demonstrating that the work of remembrance was increasingly carried out by diverse, fragmented groups of non-state actors, in a process we call ‘the privatisation of heroes’, the book reveals the surprising rejuvenation of imperial heroes in former colonies, both in nation-building narratives and as heritage sites. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.