The “war on drugs” gets inverted commas because otherwise it becomes normalised and this phrase, burdened by a terrible history tainted by the blood of many, can be in danger of sounding neutral and even positive otherwise. It has largely been played out in the US and Latin America but can be glimpsed in the different…
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Remember Them Exhibition and 5TH E. ALLISON PEERS SYMPOSIUM. Remember Them: Artistic and Academic responses to Femicide in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
I have been wearing pink for a week. Often considered a weak colour, condemned as symbolic of the rigid gender binaries being fomented by the marketplace to sell consumer goods to young girls, when thinking about Juárez it means something else. It was first used as a warning sign for women that certain areas were…
Dictatorships in the Hispanic World
This arrived in the post on Friday. It’s great to see the book in its final form. Here is the table of contents to give a sense of the range of topics covered. My own chapter considers two films Voces inocentes (Luis Mandoki, 2004) and La lengua de mariposas (José Luis Cuerda, 1999). The first…
The lady with the tutti-frutti hat
Review: Lisa Shaw Carmen Miranda London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. I recently reviewed the first three books in this series: Martin Shingler’s Star Studies: A Critical Guide, Ginette Vincendeau on Brigitte Bardot, Susan Smith on Elizabeth Taylor and Pam Cook’s Nicole Kidman. The review will appear in the Celebrity Studies journal. Shingler’s text is an overview…
Monkey Business in Hollywood and Mexico
Me Cheeta: The Autobiography James Lever London: Fourth Estate (2008) 2009. I spoke at the Revisiting Star Studies conference in June held at the University of Newcastle about the online presence of Mexican male stars from the so-called Mexican Golden Age. As part of this I made reference to my article on María Félix and…
Revolution and Rebellion in Mexican Film
I’m delighted to announce that my monograph, Revolution and Rebellion in Mexican Film is out. The final cover image is slightly altered from the alternatives posted here some months ago. Here it is: To find out more about the book, click here: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/revolution-and-rebellion-in-mexican-film-9781441168122/. Read, share and enjoy.
In defense of Pacific Rim
Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) has gotten quite a drubbing from film critics. Jonathan Romney in The Independent described it as an example of where “even smart, idiosyncratic directors can make dumb, impersonal movies. And Pacific Rim is the flashiest, clumsiest, most heavily armed in the salvo of Stupid Bombs that Hollywood has been bombarding us with”. He is…
On death and its representation in Mexico
There is a frequent trope in reporting about Mexico that suggests that Mexicans have a special relationship with death. The Mexican poet and essayist, Octavio Paz wrote an influential essay in his Laberinto de la soledad/Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) exploring the particularities of the Mexican attitude to death through the lens of the annual day of the…
LASA 2013 – Roundtable
I blogged about an inspirational roundtable at the 2013 Latin American Studies Association conference held in Washington on the Women in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies website. You can read it here.
Juana in a Million programme notes
I posted about the performance Juana in a Million here. On the back of that I was thrilled when Vicky Araico Casas got in touch and asked me to write some programme notes for her tour around the UK. Here is the programme, it has a comprehensive array of material: and, here are my…