I have written dozens of reviews but only started collating them here in recent years. Here is a small selection.
Reviewed for the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Stephanie N. Saunders, Fashion, Gender and Agency in Latin American and Spanish Literature, Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2021, 207 pp. ISBN: 9781855663428: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/W3BCAYJFZNQBBDGWDSUB/full?target=10.1080/14753820.2021.2019488
Written in a lively and engaging style that makes full use of sewing and tailoring language, Fashion, Gender and Agency in Latin American and Spanish Literature is a book that provides applied and insightful readings of a selection of largely understudied literature and is an important contribution to what is a growing field. If for nothing else, for all those interested in a survey of the key literature on fashion globally and, more specifically, on Spain and Latin America, chapter one is a must read.
Reviewed for the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 98 (2021), pp. 729-730, Viviana Beatriz MacManus, Disruptive Archives: Feminist Memories of Resistance in Latin America’s Dirty Wars, Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2020, 218 pp., ISBN: 978-0-252-08543-7
Disruptive Archives: Feminist Memories of Resistance in Latin America’s Dirty Wars is concerned with re-thinking how Dirty Wars are framed and it challenges gendered assumptions about those who have resisted state violence. Acts of violent resistance have conventionally been associated with men and women’s role has been ignored and even erased. Vivana MacManus has carried out interviews with women survivors of the Dirty Wars in Mexico and Argentina in order to extend and expand our understanding of these histories.
Reviewed for Screen Volume 61, Issue 3, Autumn 2020, Pages 492–496, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa038: Adriana Estrada Álvarez, Nicolás Défossé y Diego Zavala Scherer Cine Político en México (1968-2017) (Transamerican Film and Literature Series) Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2019, 350 pp.
Cine Político en México (1968–2017) is an insight into the breadth of research that is being undertaken in Mexico on film. Its publication by a European-based editorial provides a welcome opportunity to access such scholarship on this side of the Atlantic.
Reviewed for Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World: Livia K. Stone. Atenco Lives! Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico. Vanderbilt University Press, 2019. Print. 202 pp. Review due in 2020.
“Interrogating underpinning assumptions that activist filmmaking should conform or be analysed in these ways, Livia K. Stone proposes that we need to find new paradigms for assessing activist filmmaking. Instead of approaching such films and assessing their formal aesthetic qualities (or lack thereof), she considers their function as process, objects of exchange, and record for those who are engaged in acts of resistance.”
Reviewed for the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 97 (2020): Will Pansters (ed) La Santa Muerte in Mexico: History, Devotion, and Society Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019, 230 pp.
“The strength of this volume lies in the ways that the different authors approach a single figure from a multitude of angles, providing a lively and in-depth survey of La Santa Muerte’s value and resonance in twenty-first century Mexico. One consequence of this approach is the occasional overlap in details provided about her, but rather than being a weakness, this furthers the shared thesis that the cult-like following around La Santa Muerte is neither fixed nor formalized. Instead it is a series of shared practices, understandings, and meanings attributed to a figure that serves a range of purposes for devotees.”
Reviewed for the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 95 (2018): Dunja Fehimovic and Rebecca Ogden (eds), Branding Latin America: Strategies, Aims, Resistance. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2018, 232 pp., ISBN 978-1-4985- 6827-2.
“Branding Latin America is an engaging, original, and refreshing new approach to understanding how the nation is conceptualized by governments, inhabitants, and outsiders in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.”
Reviewed for Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas
16.3 (2019): Maricruz Castro Ricalde, Mauricio Díaz Calderón and James Ramey (eds) Mexican Transnational Cinema and Literature, Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2017, 312 pp., ISBN 978-1-78707-066-0.
Mexican Transnational Cinema and Literature is “a book that foregrounds the political and the urgency of reconsidering rigid disciplinary and geopolitical boundaries”
Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle y Christian Wehr (eds) ‘Nationbuilding’ en el cine mexicano desde la Época de Oro hasta el presente Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert/México D. F.: Bonilla Artigas Editores. 2015, 289 pp.
In ‘Nationbuilding’ en el cine mexicano desde la Época de Oro hasta el presente “The chapters cover considerable ground in looking at how nation-state politics and representation intersect with identity, sexuality, class, religion and gender, as well as with production and distribution.”