This anthology "decolonizes" the voices of Latin Americans who travel abroad and engage in cultural critiques of their homelands in counterpoint to foreigners' better known accounts of Latin America. The 17 contributions by North and South American academics examine--including entertaining first person accounts--the themes of constructing nations/a national identity post- independence, touring modernity, taking sides, and the art of living and working abroad. References include suggested films (e.g. Carmen Miranda: Bananas is My Business, 1994) as well as readings. Lacks an index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

From the award-winning pen of Achmat Dangor comes a subtle and multi-layered collection of short stories that showcases an unusual and illuminating take on ‘the struggle years’, and how the past impacts on us in a variety of ways. The journeys, which are the subject matter of the stories, operate on both a literal and metaphorical level. The reader is introduced to various characters in a variety of situations; the link between them is that each undertakes a ‘pilgrimage’ into the past and shows the impact this has on their lives. Central to much of this are ‘the struggle years’. This has seen some sent into exile, but few ever forget their ‘South Africanness’, for the pull of ‘nostalgia’ is an ever-present force. Some question the value of what they did during those years, others see it in a rather ambivalent light, while others want to forget, want to move on, want to be relieved of the ‘baggage’ of their past. For many of them, sex becomes the means of escape from the shackles of memory. This is not just another encomium to the ‘struggle’ years; instead, what makes this book stand out is the author’s unusual and illuminating take on that period of our history. It is not viewed, then, in a way we’ve become accustomed to, but from a different perspective. Additionally, each story is decidedly ‘relevant’ and, most importantly, all make for easy and engrossing reading.

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims retraces the steps of five intrepid “lady travelers” who ventured into the geography of the New World—Mexico, the Southern Cone, Brazil, and the Caribbean—at a crucial historical juncture, the period of political anarchy following the break from Spain and the rise of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Traveling as historians, social critics, ethnographers, and artists, Frances Erskine Inglis (1806–82), Maria Graham (1785–1842), Flora Tristan (1803–44), Fredrika Bremer (1801–65), and Adela Breton (1849–1923) reshaped the map of nineteenth-century Latin America. Organized by themes rather than by individual authors, this book examines European women’s travels as a spectrum of narrative discourses, ranging from natural history, history, and ethnography. Women’s social condition becomes a focal point of their travels. By combining diverse genres and perspectives, women’s travel writing ushers a new vision of post-independence societies. The trope of pilgrimage conditions the female travel experience, which suggests both the meta-end of the journey as well as the broader cultural frame shaping their individual itineraries.

Following ancient footsteps, today's pilgrims travel, not as tourists, but as spiritual seekers with a sense that their destination has sacred meaning far beyond its literal surroundings. Pilgrimage traces twenty great, age-old journeys to sites all over the world. It evokes the aspirations of pilgrims past and present and describes the beauty and strangeness of the roads they travel. Some journeys are arduous---the long trek to Mount Khailasa in Tibet, for instance, or the one to Mecca every devout Muslim dreams of making. Others are poignant, such as the one the dwindling number of Native American Zuni people make to Corn Mountain, New Mexico, in the tradition of their once flourishing civilization. But all such journeys---whether to Jewish/Muslim/Christian Jerusalem or to Hindu Pandharpur; whether to the Black Madonna in Czestochowa, Poland, or to the Buddhist shrines in Kyoto, Japan; whether to the healing waters of Lourdes, France, or to the Mormon Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah--are enacted in dramatic affirmation to achieve transformation. Illustrated in full color, this book is a stunning celebration of those journeys.

Three generations of English merchant adventurers-not the Pilgrims, as we have so long believed-were the earliest founders of America. Profit-not piety-was their primary motive. Some seventy years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed "The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown," the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-sixteenth century, England was a small and relatively insignificant kingdom on the periphery of Europe, and it had begun to face a daunting array of social, commercial, and political problems. Struggling with a single export-woolen cloth-the merchants were forced to seek new markets and trading partners, especially as political discord followed the straitened circumstances in which so many English people found themselves. At first they headed east, and dreamed of Cathay-China, with its silks and exotic luxuries. Eventually, they turned west, and so began a new chapter in world history. The work of reaching the New World required the very latest in navigational science as well as an extraordinary appetite for risk. As this absorbing account shows, innovation and risk-taking were at the heart of the settlement of America, as was the profit motive. Trade and business drove English interest in America, and determined what happened once their ships reached the New World. The result of extensive archival work and a bold interpretation of the historical record, New World, Inc. draws a portrait of life in London, on the Atlantic, and across the New World that offers a fresh analysis of the founding of American history. In the tradition of the best works of history that make us reconsider the past and better understand the present, Butman and Targett examine the enterprising spirit that inspired European settlement of America and established a national culture of entrepreneurship and innovation that continues to this day.

Mar'a Lugones, one of the premiere figures in feminist philosophy, has at last collected some of her most famous essays, as well as some lesser-known gems, into her first book, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes. A deeply original essayist, Lugones writes from her own perspective as an inhabitant of a number of different 'worlds.' Born in Argentina but living for a number of years in the United States, she sees herself as neither quite a U.S. citizen, nor quite an Argentine. An activist against the oppression of Latino/a people by the dominant U.S. culture, she is also an academic participating in the privileges of that culture. A lesbian, she experiences homophobia in both Anglo and Latino world. A woman, she moves uneasily in the world of patriarchy. Lugones writes out of multiple and conflicting subjectivities that shape her sense of who she is, resisting the demand for a unified self in light of her necessary ambiguities. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes explores the possibility of deep coalition with other women of color, based on 'multiple understandings of oppressions and resistances'—understandings whose logic she subjects to philosophical investigation.

Unlike the religiously-oriented pilgrims who visit Marian shrines such as Lourdes, the modern Road of St. James attracts an ecumenical mix of largely wel.