Este artigo reflete sobre a relação entre os recentes processos de mobilidade regional da América Central, os aspectos de conformação das subjetividades que respondem e as ações de controle com as quais são feitas tentativas para impedir os processos migratórios. Ele aborda alguns ângulos da abordagem da autonomia da migração e especifica exemplos específicos nos quais esses relacionamentos estão presentes.

El siguiente artículo plantea una reflexión sobre la historiografía del arte centroamericano y latinoamericano, para establecer algunas tendencias en cómo se han estudiado y qué aportes han realizado estos campos de conocimiento al entendimiento de las artes visuales regionales y la historia cultural centroamericana. Adicionalmente, en contraste con este estado de la cuestión, se plantean las contribuciones que realiza la tesis doctoral “Hacer exportable a Centroamérica: activación de circuitos artísticos internacionales y su impacto en la consolidación de los museos de (...) arte moderno y sus colecciones en Guatemala y Costa Rica, 1950-1996”, al conocimiento de esta historiografía. Se analizan dos aportes puntuales que realiza la tesis: por un lado, la investigación evidencia contundentemente que determinados/as artistas centroamericanos/as participaron con vigor de las redes artísticas internacionales en la segunda mitad del siglo XX; esto se logra reconstruir mediante un mapeo de los eventos en los que participaron. Seguidamente, se abarca otro aporte, en el que la investigación problematiza lo que se ha dicho sobre las características del arte moderno centroamericano mediante un análisis de las colecciones de tres museos regionales. (shrink)

Just last month, for example, John Negroponte went to Baghdad as US ambassador to Iraq, heading the world's largest diplomatic mission, with the task of handing over sovereignty to Iraqis to fulfil Bush's 'messianic mission' to graft democracy to the Middle East and the world, or so we are solemnly informed.

The paper aims to provide evidence on consistent condom use dynamics among sex workers in Central America between 1997 and 2000, and to examine the most important predictors of use behaviour important for policy and programme interventions in the region. Data on 3500 sex workers, 1500 from 1997 and 2000 from the year 2000, were analysed. The samples represented sex workers in low socioeconomic neighbourhoods who met their clients at known sex establishments or by the roadside. Sex workers were (...) more likely to have used condoms consistently in 2000 than in 1997 (Odds Ratio (OR)=1·4, p[less-than-or-equal]0·05). Sex workers who discussed condoms with their partners or lovers used them consistently with all clients more than those who did not (OR=1·3, p[less-than-or-equal]0·10). Knowledge of condom advantages had a positive influence on consistent use. Sex workers who reported using condoms to prevent pregnancy or STDs used them consistently with all clients more than those who did not (OR=1·2, and 1·3 respectively, p[less-than-or-equal]0·10). The source of condoms is an important predictor of consistent condom use. Sex workers who bought condoms from health establishments or from brothels used them consistently more than those who did not (both OR=1·3, p[less-than-or-equal]0·10, and p[less-than-or-equal]0·05, respectively). Self-efficacy had a positive effect on consistent condom use. Sex workers who reported that they would use condoms even if clients offered to pay more for unprotected sex used them consistently with all clients more than those who did not (OR=1·8, p[less-than-or-equal]0·001). The findings suggest that having condom skill is positively related to condom use. Sex workers who had all four skills used condoms more consistently than those who had none (OR=1·6, p[less-than-or-equal]0·01). In order to increase consistent condom use and avert more incidences of HIV/AIDS and other STIs, programme interventions need to use the most efficient way to provide quality information, and provide repeated training on condom negotiation and use skills to sex workers. (shrink)

The Northern Triangle of Central America is one of the most violent regions in the world. Although the violence has a long history, the countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are currently experiencing a critical situation with a new threat: criminal gangs. This article explores regional violence and elaborates a peacebuilding proposal based on a reading of the concept of jubilee. Jubilee is explained via the categories of inclusion, reconciliation and rest. The article concludes that for the countries (...) of the northern Central American triangle, the application of jubilee principles represents true peace in times of peace. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay reviews the 2013 Human Life International (HLI) propaganda video, Central America and Mexico: Fighting for Life, Faith, and Family, which, we argue, illustrates the well-orchestrated counteroffensive against reproductive and sexual rights movements occurring in the region. First we summarize the film's key themes, including the assertion that Catholicism is fundamental to Mexican and Central American identities and that the international “pro-abortion movement” is waging war against Catholics. Second, we note the development of a new strategic alliance (...) between Catholics and evangelicals that relies on lay religious activists working in the fields of medicine, bioethics, law, and government. Third, we show how the video appeals to HLI donors by asking them to support crisis pregnancy centres, homes for unwed mothers, adoption programs, and “natural” fertility assistance. We argue that the film conspicuously ignores the consequences of abortion bans already in place in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, and does not consider that what it terms “international pressures” also includes treaty obligations with the United Nations and Organization of American States. This essay offers insights into the strategies used by opponents of reproductive and sexual rights movements in Mexico and Central America. (shrink)

In this analysis I use the first regional Central America ethics code to discuss the wider problems of corruption and media complicity with central governments in the region. Luis Moreno Ocampo of Transparency International has noted that to understand corruption factors one must first study formalized rules for the system. Following Moreno's suggestion, in this article I focus on the code and the actions it inspired to highlight the widespread corrupt media practices of the region. Although the code (...) had an immediate effect, that effect has waned and in some cases has been forgotten. (shrink)

Andean philosophy of nature or pachasophy results from topography and mode of production that, merged together, have produced an integrated and interacting worldview that blurs the line between culture and nature. Respecting Pacha, or the interconnectedness of life and geography, maintaining complementarity and equilibrium through symbolic interactions, and caring for Pachamama, the feminine presence of Pacha manifested mainly as cultivable soil are the basis of Andean environmental and social ethics. Reciprocity or ayni is the glue that holds everything together. This (...) weaving of traditional beliefs, customs, and ecologi­cal knowledge is rooted in the landscape and has sustained Quechua and Aymara societies during many millennia of knowing, using, and transforming the varied environments of the central Andes of South America. Any environmental ethics that influences people’s lives and promotes respectful and sustainable relationships with nature will be framed by already held worldviews. In Bolivia indigenous intellectuals are drawing on the ancient tradition of Pacha to trace an environmental ethics of pacha qamaña or the harmonious and integral well-being of life, the Earth, and the cosmos, and the ethics of suma qamaña as an all em­bracing ethical framework for the “good life” or “living well.” Although pacha qamaña and suma qamaña are rooted in the Andean mythological worldview, they will interest Western philosophers because the values they promote can be correctives for Western cultural traits that see little more than instrumental value in nature. In this sense, pacha qamaña and suma qamaña contribute to the broader discussion of environmental ethics. (shrink)

This essay aims to show that the nations of Central America must create access to safe and legal abortion as well as promote a political dialogue on the subject that is based on reason and science, rather than religion. Not only does prohibiting abortion constitute a violation of women's human rights, but, based on international human rights law as well as the minimum duties of civil ethics, failing in to provide such access or dialogue would mean failing to meet (...) the standards of a legitimate democratic state. (shrink)

Archaeological facts have a perplexing character; they are often seen as less likely to “lie,” capable of bearing tangible, material witness to actual conditions of life, actions and events, but at the same time they are notoriously fragmentary and enigmatic, and disturbingly vulnerable to dispersal and attrition. As Trouillot (1995) argues for historical inquiry, the identification, selection, interpretation and narration of archaeological facts is a radically constructive process. Rather than conclude on this basis that archaeological facts and fictions are indistinguishable, (...) I identify a number of strategies that archaeologists rely on to make discerning use of “legacy” data – archaeological data recovered and curated over for decades, even centuries, often for very different purposes than those that animate contemporary archaeological inquiry. These include source criticism, secondary retrieval, repositioning and recontextualizing these data in ways that can, sometimes radically shift the “facts” associated with them. The construction of critical genealogies of these facts – the travels and transformations of the material, interpretive and narrative facts of archaeology – is a crucial condition for the successful exploitation of these epistemic possibilities. (shrink)

This collection is the first comprehensive history of Fichte's reception in America, highlighting the existence of a long and strong tradition of Fichtean studies throughout the continent and demonstrating the centrality of Fichtean ideas in contemporary discussions of issues such as feminism, social criticism, and decolonial thought. Read and reinterpreted in the highly diverse circumstances across the American continent, Fichte's ideas are presented in a radically new light, uncovering the Fichtean spirit of self-activity and autonomous thought in an American context.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 157-172 [Access article in PDF] Symposium: On Ken Burns's "Jazz" Jazz: America's Classical Music? 1 Lee B. Brown I VIEWERS OF KEN BURNS'S third cultural epic "Jazz" probably fell into one of three categories. 2 Some found it gripping. Some found it grating. Some found it both at once.The series has unforgettable moments: spectacular jitterbug sequences; Jimmy Lunceford's horn men fanning their trumpet bells (...) with hat mutes in sync; the close-up of the whirring cross-hand drumming of Art Blakey; the bitter-sweet glance Billie Holiday and Lester Young exchange in their last filmed appearance together; the occasional marriage of visuals to music. One riveting three minutes comes when the talking heads tune out, a 78-rpm disk of Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" is set spinning, and the thrilling notes pour out on a carousel of visual imagery—finally freeze-framing on the face of the young genius himself.On the downside, the series is massively repetitious. As a result of Burns's decision to track two major figures—Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington—from cradle to grave, the same cuts of Armstrong appear again and again, no matter what the time frame. Some of the series' commentators are particularly annoying—the fiddler of Burns's Civil War series, Matt Glaser, for instance, with his fatuous theories [End Page 157] about Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein. And the documentary's heavy load of social freight—by Wynton Marsalis, and his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch 3 —threatens to flatten the music.The series is designed as informative entertainment, not Jazz 101. But Burns pays a price here, as he did in his documentary about baseball, in which not even the basics of the game, let alone any of the subtleties, were explained. In "Jazz" we get no explanation of what Jelly Roll Morton did to transform ragtime into jazz. (The series could easily have pressed Morton himself into service. With no sacrifice of his considerable charm, Morton did explain it, beautifully, in his recorded Library of Congress interviews. 4) Although the swing era gets big billing, no attempt is made to explain how swing rhythm actually works, as contrasted with earlier practices. (I have watched swing drummer Panama Francis entertain a packed hall with a brief but riveting illustration of how it works.)As jazz history, the film also has problems. Some legendary figures are resurrected unconvincingly. When Marsalis tells us what the legendary trumpet player Buddy Bolden sounded like, the illustrative off-camera trumpet is Marsalis's, not Bolden's, who embedded not one note in a record groove. Further, we face the tiresomely obvious problem of omissions. We hear nothing of Albert Ayler, Keith Jarrett, Sun Ra, Mildred Bailey, Benny Carter, Lennie Tristano, Erroll Garner, Eric Dolphy, Art Pepper, or Woody Herman. All we learn about Bill Evans—whose influence on jazz piano was huge—is that Miles Davis hired him even though he was white. Omissions are inevitable, of course. But there is a muted pattern to the exclusions. It was impossible for the series to avoid Benny Goodman, given his central role in the swing era. But white figures are too often either ignored or treated as alienated outsiders. We hear New York Times columnist Margo Jefferson opine that Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death because he wasn't allowed to play with black musicians. In fact, many of the greatest players—white and black—never played with musicians of their own caliber.Most figures covered in the film are treated either with respect or with reverence. But things get nasty when matters turn to avant-gardists. Thus, Branford Marsalis—Wynton's talented brother—singles out the volcanic pianist Cecil Taylor for a particularly hostile attack. 5 Instead of explaining what Ornette Coleman meant by "free jazz," Albert Murray tells us that jazz is, by definition, free music—and by implication, that Coleman's concept must be fatuous. And Wynton has complained [End Page 158] elsewhere about a jazz avant-garde retreat into what he calls "a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 157-172 [Access article in PDF] Symposium: On Ken Burns's "Jazz" Jazz: America's Classical Music? 1 Lee B. Brown I VIEWERS OF KEN BURNS'S third cultural epic "Jazz" probably fell into one of three categories. 2 Some found it gripping. Some found it grating. Some found it both at once.The series has unforgettable moments: spectacular jitterbug sequences; Jimmy Lunceford's horn men fanning their trumpet bells (...) with hat mutes in sync; the close-up of the whirring cross-hand drumming of Art Blakey; the bitter-sweet glance Billie Holiday and Lester Young exchange in their last filmed appearance together; the occasional marriage of visuals to music. One riveting three minutes comes when the talking heads tune out, a 78-rpm disk of Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" is set spinning, and the thrilling notes pour out on a carousel of visual imagery—finally freeze-framing on the face of the young genius himself.On the downside, the series is massively repetitious. As a result of Burns's decision to track two major figures—Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington—from cradle to grave, the same cuts of Armstrong appear again and again, no matter what the time frame. Some of the series' commentators are particularly annoying—the fiddler of Burns's Civil War series, Matt Glaser, for instance, with his fatuous theories [End Page 157] about Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein. And the documentary's heavy load of social freight—by Wynton Marsalis, and his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch 3 —threatens to flatten the music.The series is designed as informative entertainment, not Jazz 101. But Burns pays a price here, as he did in his documentary about baseball, in which not even the basics of the game, let alone any of the subtleties, were explained. In "Jazz" we get no explanation of what Jelly Roll Morton did to transform ragtime into jazz. (The series could easily have pressed Morton himself into service. With no sacrifice of his considerable charm, Morton did explain it, beautifully, in his recorded Library of Congress interviews. 4) Although the swing era gets big billing, no attempt is made to explain how swing rhythm actually works, as contrasted with earlier practices. (I have watched swing drummer Panama Francis entertain a packed hall with a brief but riveting illustration of how it works.)As jazz history, the film also has problems. Some legendary figures are resurrected unconvincingly. When Marsalis tells us what the legendary trumpet player Buddy Bolden sounded like, the illustrative off-camera trumpet is Marsalis's, not Bolden's, who embedded not one note in a record groove. Further, we face the tiresomely obvious problem of omissions. We hear nothing of Albert Ayler, Keith Jarrett, Sun Ra, Mildred Bailey, Benny Carter, Lennie Tristano, Erroll Garner, Eric Dolphy, Art Pepper, or Woody Herman. All we learn about Bill Evans—whose influence on jazz piano was huge—is that Miles Davis hired him even though he was white. Omissions are inevitable, of course. But there is a muted pattern to the exclusions. It was impossible for the series to avoid Benny Goodman, given his central role in the swing era. But white figures are too often either ignored or treated as alienated outsiders. We hear New York Times columnist Margo Jefferson opine that Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death because he wasn't allowed to play with black musicians. In fact, many of the greatest players—white and black—never played with musicians of their own caliber.Most figures covered in the film are treated either with respect or with reverence. But things get nasty when matters turn to avant-gardists. Thus, Branford Marsalis—Wynton's talented brother—singles out the volcanic pianist Cecil Taylor for a particularly hostile attack. 5 Instead of explaining what Ornette Coleman meant by "free jazz," Albert Murray tells us that jazz is, by definition, free music—and by implication, that Coleman's concept must be fatuous. And Wynton has complained [End Page 158] elsewhere about a jazz avant-garde retreat into what he calls "a... (shrink)

This essay provides an overview of what is known about atheists in North America. It begins with estimates of the total number of atheists in North America, including Central America, Caribbean nations, Mexico, Canada, and the US. Demographic characteristics of atheists in Canada, Mexico, and the US based on the World Values Survey are also examined. What life is like for atheists in the US, including the discrimination they experience and the issues they must address in developing an atheist (...) identity in a predominantly religious country, are also detailed. The essay concludes with suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Rubin examines the central role of the imagination in Santayana’s life and works. He shows how the imagination is fundamental to Santayana’s sceptical inquiry in SAF and a necessary condition for knowledge about the material world and the mind. The imagination is a predominant theme in Santayana’s life and work. Even as a boy, he found himself solitary and unhappy in America and “attached only to a persistent dream life.” He published several literary works, including three plays, a novel, (...) and many poems. In his philosophic work, he repeatedly insisted on the continuity between the imaginative nature of ordinary perception and the great accomplishments of the human imagination. Santayana’s idea that all perception consists of the intuition of non-existent essences means that for you to experience anything that exists you must imaginatively connect the data given to consciousness with things and events in the world. In Scepticism and Animal Faith, references to imagination appear throughout the book. Santayana argues that to truly understand something observations alone, even ones repeated many times from different angles, are not sufficient, because knowing how things actually are requires “sympathetic imagination.” Imagination leads to the most “complete and adequate” knowledge when the object is another mind. But knowledge of the material world is also a product of the imagination. Taking non-existent essences to signify existing things enables us to know what exists and what doesn’t. This knowledge frees the imagination to peruse the unbounded realm of essence without penalty. This freedom is possible because “poetic, creative, original fancy” is the primary form of sensibility. This freedom is necessary because for a living creature “his play-life is his true life.” This freedom makes possible the comprehensive visions of great art, literature, philosophic systems, and scientific theories. These works are continuous with everyday moments of experience, which are also fundamentally imaginative. Philosophy is successful when it enables us to creatively adjust to the world by probing our desires and finding each intuition a possible source of imaginative reflection. (shrink)

This article synthesizes the results of several interviews with argumentation scholars from across the American continents to address three questions regarding the connections in argumentation studies between North and South/Central America: “What motivated the study of argumentation in the Americas?” “What commonalities, if any, exist in argumentation studies across the Americas?” and “What should the future of argumentation studies in the Americas look like?” Using these interviews in combination with existing textual sources, the article also provides motivated suggestions for (...) directions for the future of the community in the field. (shrink)

A large part of the Latin–American literature of the 19th and 20th century tried to deal with the national question intertwining different dimensions: the weight of colonial legacy, the cultural peculiarity of the nation and the inner relations between social classes and ethnic groups. Thinking the nation implied, in any case, to think the difference and the conflict with others, as well as the inner conflict and the logic of local colonialism. Analyzing some of these essays that played a (...) class='Hi'>central role in such process of recasting the origin of the nation, the author moves around three main axes: the formulation of dualist writings (colonial/national; white /indigenous; civilization/wilderness), the issue of language (the language inherited from the colonial experience versus the multilingual nature of indigenous Latin American societies), and the hypothesis about the birth of the nation – appointed to different groups – and its normal functioning as legitimization of the order sprung from independences. (shrink)

El epistolario del filósofo argentino Francisco Romero (Sevilla, 1891 - Buenos Aires, 1962) con colegas y discípulos de Chile y con extranjeros afincados voluntariamente o no en ese país, constituyó una notable red intelectual en torno al conocimiento de América, entre 1934 y 1962. La construcción del americanismo filosófico fue una de las preocupaciones aglutinantes, y las reflexiones que se produjeron se entroncaron con las circunstancias políticas, ideológicas, sociales, culturales y económicas de cada uno de sus miembros. The correspondence (...) of the argentine philosopher Francisco Romero (Seville, 1891 - Buenos Aires, 1962) with colleagues and disciples of Chile and foreign voluntarily or not settled in that country, constituted a remarkable intellectual network in the knowledge of America, between 1934 and 1962. The construction of Philosophical Americanism was a central concern, and reflections that occurred were connected with political, ideological, social, cultural and economic circumstances of each member. (shrink)

The thirty years war is being fought between promoters of liberty, individual rights, moral guidance on one side; and believers in human reason as the supreme power, with government as its central authority, on the other.

This book makes the powerful argument that Latin America needs to be a more central part of the discourse on emerging globalities and in the pursuit of an inter-civilizational focus to avoid West-centric perspectives. It deploys a cultural political economy approach that sees the global political economy as inescapably cultural and allows us to avoid the hyper-rational analysis of economics. It explores various aspects of contemporary Latin America from the revival of dependency theory, the ‘pink tide’ governments since 2000 (...) and, in particular, the potential of the Andean Buen Vivir political philosophy, to offer a distinctive paradigm for sustainable global development. The book provides a de-colonial frame and shows how many recent and new social science perspectives emerging globally are connected with Latin American scholars and Latin American social experiments: namely, dependency, decolonial and post-colonial epistemologies, post-neoliberalism, and the notion ofPluriverse. The book focuses on the cultural, the ethical, the economic and the political, and environmental dimensions of this transformation, which represents a reaction and alternative to the Western cultural, including ethical, economic, political, environmental crises. The readership for this book includes all who are fascinated by the globalization lens on the one hand, and the experience and lessons of Latin America on the other hand. (shrink)

The article analyzes the scope and depth of systemic differences between national economies in the modern world, focusing on the experience of Central Europe in the process of the enlargement of European Union. The core argument of the article is that the world needs not one model of development, but more diversity and more experimentation, encouraging entrepreneurship and institutional change. There is no one best model that can be implemented in any country, independent of its tradition and culture. Globalization (...) as well as integration is, beyond certain limits, harmful to future development. (shrink)

This article offers an historical-materialist account of the coup in Honduras on 28 June 2009, which ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. It draws on over two dozen interviews with members of theFrente Nacional de la Resistencia Popular[National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP], and participation in numerous marches and assemblies over two periods of fieldwork – January 2010, and June–July 2011. The paper steps back in time to provide an historical cartography of the basic material structures of the Honduran economy (...) and its integration into the world market, as well as the geopolitical role it played as a launching pad for Ronald Reagan’s counter-insurgency campaigns against guerrilla forces elsewhere in the region during the 1980s. We show how the defeat of mass guerrilla insurgencies in Guatemala and El Salvador, as well as the triumph over the Sandinista government in Nicaragua by 1990, allowed for the neoliberal pacification of Central America as a whole, including Honduras. We further demonstrate how the centre-leftist Manuel Zelaya, elected to the Honduran presidency in 2006, modestly encroached upon neoliberal orthodoxy and forged geopolitical alliances with left and centre-left governments elsewhere in the region, laying the bases for his violent overthrow. Finally, the paper traces the origins, trajectory, and heterogeneity of the resistance that emerged almost immediately after the coup had been carried out. (shrink)

El artículo analiza en primer lugar la idea de Europa en Condorcet, una idea que resultaba central en el discurso de los pensadores europeos del siglo XVIII. Pero la reflexión condorcetiana sobre Europa es a la vez una reflexión sobre América, una vez que se produce la llamada Revolución americana. Condorcet analiza el influjo de esta Revolución en la renovación de Europa y trata de encontrar tanto las convergencias como las diferencias entre la vía americana y la francesa (...) (europea) hacia la libertad política. (shrink)

This book studies the diverse societies, cities, nations, economies, and regions of the Americas as they emerged in the Western hemisphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on the paradigms of social imaginaries and civilizational analysis, it explores regions of Central America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America.

In this timely book, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., one of our nation’s rising young African American intellectuals, makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Central to Glaude’s mission is a rehabilitation of philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas, he argues, can be fruitfully applied to a renewal of African (...) American politics. According to Glaude, Dewey’s pragmatism, when attentive to the darker dimensions of life—or what we often speak of as the blues—can address many of the conceptual problems that plague contemporary African American discourse. How blacks think about themselves, how they imagine their own history, and how they conceive of their own actions can be rendered in ways that escape bad ways of thinking that assume a tendentious political unity among African Americans simply because they are black, or that short-circuit imaginative responses to problems confronting actual black people. Drawing deeply on black religious thought and literature, In a Shade of Blue seeks to dislodge such crude and simplistic thinking, and replace it with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for black life in all its variety and intricacy. Only when black political leaders acknowledge such complexity, Glaude argues, can the real-life sufferings of many African Americans be remedied. Heady, inspirational, and brimming with practical wisdom, In a Shade of Blue is a remarkable work of political commentary on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their history and to envision where they might head in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This article examines the importance of Calvinism in producing the public/political “mind-set” of the United States, and how, after the Second World War, the export of this mind-set was as significant as the export of democracy, rock-’n’-roll, jeans, and Coca-Cola. It discusses the historical legacy and evolution of Calvinism from a civil religion to a religion of civility, and how the form and manner of Calvinist thinking—more specifically its ethic and aesthetic—has persisted in a secular manner so that much that (...) Calvin would have found damnable is now intrinsic to the “religion of civility.” It then concludes that the central principles and practices of this religion of civility have had success within nations already “Christianized” but, perhaps understandably, not outside of that sphere. (shrink)

En este análisis de La música en Cuba (1946), de Alejo Carpentier, discutimos la inclusión del afrocubanismo en la conformación de la música y la cultura cubana, en conexión con los debates del nacionalismo y del vanguardismo. Tanto en este libro como en la literatura de Carpentier resuena su visión del tiempo y el concepto de lo real maravilloso, relacionados con la «autenticidad» de América Latina. Al mismo tiempo, su posición sobre las tareas del escritor latinoamericano gana acento particular (...) cuando la música se convierte en el principal elemento para forjar la nacionalidad. Esta obra, que propone el arte musical como la clave de la «originalidad» de la cultura cubana, también permite analizar el papel que cumplen los intelectuales, en una época en que la literatura “asumía un puesto central dentro de las fuerzas componentes de la cultura del país o de la región” (Ángel Rama, 1985). (shrink)