Suchergebnisse

Carmen Nestares's novel Venus en Buenos Aires (2001) chronicles a transatlantic lesbian love affair between a Spaniard and an Argentinean that begins in cyber-space and culminates in reality. At first, the novel reads "innocently" as an uncomplicated cyber-romance fiction, but once the romance becomes physical after the lovers meet on Latin American soil, certain unsettling elements arise. Online, the Spanish and Argentinean cultures, supposedly "united" by the same language, seem to intermingle easily and graciously, but offline, they are more conflicted, as the Spanish lover adopts a neocolonialist stance. From a distance she considers Argentina a land of capitalist promise and potential wealth, but once there she reveals a lack of comprehension of Argentine reality. Hence this article focuses on the disturbing semantics of neocolonialist politics that lurk beneath neo-utopian transatlantic Lesbos and its "pseudo-democratic" online rhetoric.

Founded in 1919, UCLA is nearing its first centenary, but the university builds on humanistic and liberal arts traditions that are many centuries long and globally diffused. The core disciplines that we recognize today as comprising the Humanities have deep roots in these institutional, cultural, and technological histories. But yet, for all its grand ambitions for reckoning with the world, the university has remained by and large an isolated institution, walled in and often walled off from its surrounding community, accessible to a chosen few, stratified by economic, social, and racial differences, and perhaps too invested in the security of its storied past. The Urban Humanities initiative is an attempt both to apply conventional tools in unconventional ways and to invent new tools by respecting the fundamental virtue of bricks, namely their porous nature. Is it possible to decolonize knowledge? If so, the studio courses it develops will have profound implications for the role of the classroom, syllabus, and for rethinking and developing new knowledge and practices.