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La Ley Maldita: The Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy

James Lockhart

in Chile, the CIA and the Cold War: A Transatlantic Perspective

This chapter explains Chileans' contributions to the origins of the larger Cold War from 1947 into the 1950s. It incorporates the González administration's conflicts with Chilean Communists and the ... More

This chapter explains Chileans' contributions to the origins of the larger Cold War from 1947 into the 1950s. It incorporates the González administration's conflicts with Chilean Communists and the Soviet bloc, from events in Santiago and Chile's coal mining regions to those in Prague, Bogotá, and the United Nations, into the unfolding global conflict, thus reframing the passing of the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy, which banned the Chilean Communist Party.Less

Reimagining the Left in Neruda: Inclusivity and Encounters with Secondary Characters

Rachel VanWieren and Victoria L. Garrett

in ReFocus: The Films of Pablo Larraín

Pablo Larraín’s Neruda centers on the poet’s escape into exile during the government of González Videla, elected in 1946 with the support of the Chilean Communist Party. Once in office, he ... More

Pablo Larraín’s Neruda centers on the poet’s escape into exile during the government of González Videla, elected in 1946 with the support of the Chilean Communist Party. Once in office, he illegalized the party and initiated a campaign of intense persecution against known members, including then Senator Pablo Neruda. While the focus of the film is Cold War-type conflicts between the political left and right, certain interactions between key secondary characters in the film and Neruda highlight spaces of tensions on the left. This portrayal seems to be informed by the importance that contemporary leftist political movements and parties in Chile place on fully incorporating women, the LGBTQ community, and youth in their agendas, not central concerns in the late 1940s. These character’s emotions show their frustrations with the party and cultural icon Neruda, both of whom they choose to support but challenge to be more inclusive. This chapter analyzes these secondary characters and their affective power as spectral figures that highlight the excluded zones of the Communist Party. Their performances cast a critical light on the party’s past while also reminding the viewer of the inclusiveness that will be possible in its future.Less

Scenes from a Class Struggle

Alan M. Wald

in American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War

This chapter considers the fortunes of the postwar proletarian tradition in criticism and the synthetic intellectual world of Communist literary critics, primarily Samuel Sillen and Charles Humboldt. ... More

This chapter considers the fortunes of the postwar proletarian tradition in criticism and the synthetic intellectual world of Communist literary critics, primarily Samuel Sillen and Charles Humboldt. In Communist Party publications, Sillen's specialty became U.S. literature and literary history, but he wrote on many other subjects, including theater and politics. Charles Humboldt was the true genius of the Communist cultural movement in the 1940s and 1950s. In contrast to Sillen, he also represented a semisecret opposition to the worst excesses of socialist realism, seeing a margin of hope in the work of Communist artists such as Picasso and Neruda.Less

Nanción’s Cancións: Nancy Cunard and the Spanish Civil War

Jane Marcus

Jean Mills (ed.)

in Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger

This chapter covers Nancy Cunard’s experiences as a war reporter during the Spanish Civil War. Marcus argues that Cunard and her leftist comrades “produced an international and multiracial ... More

This chapter covers Nancy Cunard’s experiences as a war reporter during the Spanish Civil War. Marcus argues that Cunard and her leftist comrades “produced an international and multiracial cross-class culture of protest against fascism in journalism” throughout the thirties. The chapter also restores their efforts in poetry, theatre, poster art, film, radio, collage, and pamphlets in an effort to correct a history of radicalism that has been “so systematically erased or buried” that this “work of recovery has of necessity become oppositional to an established nationalist and elitist (male) canon.”Less

Romeo y Julieta: A Spanish-Language Shakespeare in the Park

Daphnie Sicre

in Shakespeare and Latinidad

This chapter focuses on the author’s experiences directing the first ever-Spanish production of Shakespeare in the Park in Miami, Florida in 2006. The author directed Romeo y Julieta. Having directed ... More

This chapter focuses on the author’s experiences directing the first ever-Spanish production of Shakespeare in the Park in Miami, Florida in 2006. The author directed Romeo y Julieta. Having directed in Spanish but not necessarily Shakespeare in Spanish, Sicre embraced the challenge. This chapter addresses the practitioner-pedagogical challenges of mounting such production and shares the ways Sicre was able to overcome the challenges of casting various Spanish speaking actors, finding the perfect translation, and mounting a production in the park in the middle of the summer to engage the Latinx community in Miami. Needless to say, mounting Romeo y Julieta was not only a crash course in Shakespeare, but also a course on how to mount a Spanish translation of a classic in to various Latinx audiences.Less

Politics, Poetry and Popular Music: Remixing Neruda’s Romeo y Julieta

Jerry Ruiz

in Shakespeare and Latinidad

This chapter focuses on Jerry Ruiz’s work directing a staged reading of Neruda’s play in 2016 as part of The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit Shakespeare program, which tours to correctional facilities, ... More

This chapter focuses on Jerry Ruiz’s work directing a staged reading of Neruda’s play in 2016 as part of The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit Shakespeare program, which tours to correctional facilities, homeless shelters, and community centers throughout New York City. This unique project tried to overcome the barriers that Spanish-speaking communities potentially face in accessing Shakespeare. In the summer of 2016, following the Mobile Unit’s formula of stripped down stagings and texts, an abridged version of Neruda’s work was performed. During the rehearsal process, my collaborators and I discovered the power of music to illuminate Shakespeare’s play for Spanish-speaking audiences. Ruiz explains how interpolating well known Spanish-language songs by Violeta Parra and Luis Alberto Spinetta helped blossom the play into Mala Estrella, an evening of music and excerpts from Romeo y Julieta.Less

A Revolutionary Proposal

Toba Singer

in Fernando Alonso: The Father of Cuban Ballet

Touring takes company to Miami and Puerto Rico. Government withholds funding, another Hurok offer rejected. Alberto is choreographing new works, Fernando authors proposal for Latin American ballet ... More

Touring takes company to Miami and Puerto Rico. Government withholds funding, another Hurok offer rejected. Alberto is choreographing new works, Fernando authors proposal for Latin American ballet company to 1953 Continental Culture Congress in Chile which is presented by Nicolás Guillén. U.S. embassy withdraws Fernando’s work visa.Less

Introduction

Alfred Thomas

in Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City

The visitor to Prague, one of the oldest sites in Europe, cannot fail to be impressed by the architectural diversity of this lovely city: Romanesque, Gothic, baroque, Sezession, and cubism succeed ... More

The visitor to Prague, one of the oldest sites in Europe, cannot fail to be impressed by the architectural diversity of this lovely city: Romanesque, Gothic, baroque, Sezession, and cubism succeed each other in a dazzling layering of styles. A major reason for Prague's miraculous preservation is the fact that it was spared the wartime destruction that reduced to ashes other central European cities such as Warsaw, Berlin, and Dresden. In a particularly ironic twist of history, Adolf Hitler deliberately preserved the remains of the city's ancient Jewish Quarter—including the medieval Old–New Synagogue and the nearby cemetery—as a museum of Europe's “extinguished race.” This book presents Prague as a constantly rewritten or revised text in which history and imagination, memory and forgetting have been impossible to disentangle. Most cultural accounts of Prague treat the city either as an unbroken historical continuum or as a site of the imagination tout court.Less

Caudillos, Poets, and Sopranos: Articulating Mapuche Identities on the National and International Stage, 1938–1964

Joanna Crow

in The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History

Chapter 3 analyzes the writings of Chile’s two Nobel laureates, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, the political machinations of Mapuche caudillo Venancio Coñuepán as he worked his way up through the ... More

Chapter 3 analyzes the writings of Chile’s two Nobel laureates, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, the political machinations of Mapuche caudillo Venancio Coñuepán as he worked his way up through the corridors of power, and the rise and fall of Mapuche opera singer Rayén Quitral, in order to show how Chile contributed to and was impacted by developments in continental discourses of indigenismo and modernization. It suggests that all four figures managed to blur the boundaries between indigenista and indigenous, as they campaigned to try to make Chilean governments (of Radical Party leader Pedro Aguirre Cerda through to the populist presidency of former army general Carlos Ibáñez) and national society listen to the demands and problems of the Mapuche.Less

The Synecdochic Series of Pablo Larraín: The Castro Cycle of Chilean Complicity in Fuga, Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No, El Club, and Neruda

Amanda Eaton McMenamin

in ReFocus: The Films of Pablo Larraín

This chapter seeks to fill the scholarly gap in the dialogue about the Pablo Larraín’s latest films located in the Chilean milieu, as well as to propose a rereading of his cinematic corpus, firmly ... More

This chapter seeks to fill the scholarly gap in the dialogue about the Pablo Larraín’s latest films located in the Chilean milieu, as well as to propose a rereading of his cinematic corpus, firmly establishing the connections between what has previously been considered the “dictatorial trilogy” (Tony Manero, Post mortem, and No) and the more recent El club and Neruda. Therefore a review (re-viewing) of all five features as a series provides an opportunity for an “interserial interpretation” of the central role that star Alfredo Castro plays in each of the works, in fact suggesting that the actor becomes representative—as synecdoche—of the Chilean nation and its positionality of subservience to the hegemonic social, political, and economic forces of the United States in the region. Larraín equally excoriates Chilean capitulation to U.S. interests throughout the entire “synecdochic series,” via the characters that Castro interprets. Thus, this chapter proposes a filmic frame for the Larraínian cinematic cosmos that is centered on the dogged denunciation of Chilean complicity with the neoliberal, North-American model, which persistently permeates both the Castro characters and their national nexus in the auteur’s oeuvre.Less

Hemispheric Solidarities: Wartime Poetry and the Limits of the Good Neighbor

Harris Feinsod

in The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures

This chapter introduces the unlikely roles poets played at the center of hemispheric cultural diplomacy initiatives in 1938–1945, the years when Good Neighbor diplomacy was motivated by a broad ... More

This chapter introduces the unlikely roles poets played at the center of hemispheric cultural diplomacy initiatives in 1938–1945, the years when Good Neighbor diplomacy was motivated by a broad antifascist coalition. The chapter discusses major diplomat-poets like William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Archibald MacLeish, and Langston Hughes, and compares these writers to Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, Ecuadorian Consul General Jorge Carrera Andrade, soldier-poet Lysander Kemp, and others who coalesced around the anthologies, translations, and congresses of Good Neighbor initiatives. Borrowing metaphors of bridging and broadcasting from new infrastructures of hemispheric modernization, and invoking strategies of apostrophic address to an impossibly large hemispheric public, Good Neighbor poetry promoted Popular Front antifascism, but also enabled advocates of decolonial politics, racial democracy, and international feminism.Less

The Ruins of Inter-Americanism

Harris Feinsod

in The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures

During the early Cold War, inter-Americanism often took shape in the genre of postromantic meditations on pre-Columbian ruins. These ruin poems are usually understood as expressions of universal ... More

During the early Cold War, inter-Americanism often took shape in the genre of postromantic meditations on pre-Columbian ruins. These ruin poems are usually understood as expressions of universal humanism, exercises in postmodern tourism, symptoms of neo-imperial fortune hunting, or preludes to 1970s ethnopoetics. By contrast, the chapter argues that ruin poems galvanized by Pablo Neruda’s “Heights of Macchu Picchu” and Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers” respond to the rapid demise of the movement for hemispheric democracy. Through their identifications with indigenous civic histories, poets critiqued the collapse of political and cultural inter-Americanism. Moving beyond poets like Neruda and Olson who had previously maintained a formal relation to Good Neighbor diplomacy, it shows how even Allen Ginsberg’s poetic theories developed during sojourns in Mayan Mexico, and the tropes of ruin poetry subtend the “destroyed” generation in “Howl” (1956), as well as poems by writers in his cohort such as Philip Lamantia and Ernesto Cardenal.Less