José Rabasa teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. His publications include Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (1993) and Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of New Mexico and Florida and The Legacy of Conquest (2000). He is in the process of collecting together into one volume his numerous articles on postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, and is completing a study of the intersection of pictography, orality, and alphabetical writing in Nahuatl colonial texts.
Juan G. Ramos is an associate professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA) where he teaches courses in both Spanish and English on Latin American and world literature. He is the author of Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts (University of Florida Press, 2018) and coeditor of Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures (Palgrave, 2016). He has also published on twentieth-century Latin American poetry, fiction, and film with a particular emphasis on the Andes. He has received a fellowship at the National Humanities Center (2021–2022) to continue working on his current book project on Andean modernismos.
Luis Fernando Restrepo is university professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he directs the graduate program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. His areas of research are colonial Latin America, Indigenous literatures, and literature and human rights. Among his publications and editions are Un nuevo reino imaginado, Antología Crítica de Juan de Castellanos, El Estado impostor, Narrativas en vilo entre la estética y la política and El malestar del posconflicto. His current book project examines early modern humanitarianism. He has received a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana Literary Criticism Award.
Fernando J. Rosenberg is Professor of Romance Studies, Latin American and Latino and Caribbean Studies, and Film and Television Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Avant-garde and Geopolitics in Latin America (Pittsburgh UP, 2006) and After Human Rights. Literature, Visual Arts and Film in Latin America (1990–2010) (Pittsburgh UP, 2016). He is currently working on contemporary literary and artistic production at the intersection of posthumanism and gender theories.
Javier Sanjinés C. is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He has also been a visiting professor at Duke University and at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, in Quito, Ecuador. Sanjinés has published three books. His most recent is Mestizaje Upside-Down (2004). He has just fi nished a manuscript on the crisis of historical time in the Andean region.
Freya Schiwy is Professor of Media Cultural Studies and a cooperating faculty member in the Hispanic Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of Indianizing Film. Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology (Rutgers University Press, 2009) and The Open Invitation. Activist Video, Mexico, and the Politics of Affect (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Together with Byrt Wammack Weber, she coedited Adjusting the Lens. Community and Collaborative Video in Mexico (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and she is one of the editors of the Journal for Latin American Cultural Studies.
Nicolas Shumway is the Tomás Rivera Regents Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. His book The Invention of Argentina (1991) was selected by The New York Times as a “Notable Book of the Year” and appeared in a revised version in Spanish in 2005. He has also published numerous articles on the literature and cultural history of Spanish America, Brazil, and Spain, and been a visiting professor at the Universidade de São Paulo as well as at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and the Universidad San Andrés in Buenos Aires.
Amanda M. Smith is Assistant Professor of Latin American literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding co-chair of the Amazonia section of the Latin American Studies Association. She publishes and teaches on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American cultural production in dialogue with the environmental humanities, spatial humanities, and Indigenous studies. Her book, Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom, examines how literary texts have both overlapped and clashed with institutional projects that divide Amazonia into cultural and economic spaces.
Abril Trigo is Distinguished Humanities Professor of Latin American Cultures at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Caudillo, estado, nación: Literatura, historia e ideología en el Uruguay (1990), ¿Cultura uruguaya o culturas linyeras? (Para una cartografía de la neomodernidad posuruguaya) (1997), Memorias migrantes: Testimonios y ensayos sobre la diáspora uruguaya (2003) and The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, coauthored with Ana Del Sarto and Alicia Ríos (2004). Currently, he is working on Muerte y transfi guración de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos, a book-length essay on the effects of globalization on Latin American cultures, and Crítica de la economía politico-libidinal, a theoretical inquiry on the political economy of contemporary culture.
Gustavo Verdesio is Associate Professor of Spanish and Native American Studies at the University of Michigan. A revised version of his book La invención del Uruguay. La entrada del territorio y sus habitantes a la cultura occidental (1996) has been published as Forgotten Conquests. Rereading New World History from the Margins (2001). He coedited (with Alvaro F. Bolaños) Colonialism Past and Present. Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America Today (2002), and edited issue 52 of the journal Dispositio/n (2005), dedicated to the Latin American Subaltern Studies group. His articles have appeared in journals such as Settler Colonial Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, and Arqueología Suramericana.
Lesley Wyllie is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. She works on Latin American literature and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on the intersections between literature and the environment. She has published books on the novela de la selva and the literary geography of the Putumayo. In 2017 she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete her most recent monograph, The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). She is Associate Editor of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies.
Editor’s Acknowledgments
For the second edition, I want to acknowledge the dedication and generosity of all the colleagues who, despite the disruption, hardships, and turmoil brought about by the pandemic of 2020, not only agreed to write for this Companion but sent a set of brilliant, insightful, and intensely researched essays. The Companion has not only been updated but it has gained gravity as scholars writing in the awareness of this fateful year, the deep transformational forces at play that the pandemic has brought to the fore, implicitly reflect on the meaning of this broad, pervasive, and irreversible change.
I need to thank all graduate and undergraduate students who over the years—long after graduation—have worked with me in the most stimulating, singular, and long-lasting scholarly dialogue. The youngest among them is Mariangela Ugarelli who has also assisted with the preparation of the manuscript for this second edition.