Latin America at Fin-de-Siècle Universal Exhibitions / New Directions in Latino American Cultures (PDF)

Alejandra Uslenghi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Comparative Literary Studies program at Northwestern University, USA. She is the editor of Walter Benjamin: Culturas de la Imagen (2007). Uslenghi specializes in nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin American literature, with an emphasis on visual culture. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University, USA and her MA in Liberal Studies from the New School for Social Research, USA.

"At the fin de siècle, Latin America speaks the new international language of modernity: cosmopolitism, transnational spectacles, travels, and visuality. Uslenghi brilliantly analyzes the articulations, nuances, and controversies of that language in Brazilian, Argentine, and Mexican culture." - Graciela Montaldo, Columbia University, USA
 
"The book's guiding argument militates against a facile casting of Latin American presence at the exhibitions as an exotic display for European spectators, and instead focuses on Latin American intellectuals availing themselves of the exhibitions as a point of departure for crafting and partaking of a cosmopolitan modernity on behalf of their transnational reading and viewing publics, a modernity that nevertheless finds itself incorporated into nationalist narratives. The study is particularly successful in asserting the relevance of literature and photography for grasping the international exhibitions' long-standing impact on Latin American societies." - Claire F. Fox, University of Iowa, USA
 
"In three acts, drawing on a wealth of archive material, Uslenghi charts Latin Americans' attempts at 'conquering the image' the monumental mirrors of nineteenth-century world fairs shone back at them. This is truly pioneering work: a densely textured, theoretically acute study of the global circuits opened up by novel modes of making and circulating images and of the performances of spectatorship these called forth." - Jens Andermann, author of The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil