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Paz Mendoza Guazon’s Notas de viaje (1929) is a collection of commentaries written during her one-year trip in the US, Europe and the Middle East as part of an education program of the Filipino government. The travelling notes of Doctor Mendoza, one of the first female graduates in Medicine of the University of the Philippines, are not only an archive of cosmopolitan knowledge but constitute Mendoza’s imaginary of her national project. Mendoza’s national project is based on the cultural transformation of the Philippines in terms of its assimilation to cultural models observed during the trip in order to make the Philippines a modern nation. I have called this desire of transformation an active transculturation. My aim in this article is to highlight the characteristics of such process based on Mendoza’s text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, Chinese immigration has left profound traces in Cuban culture, which, through the process of transculturation and mixture, still continue to this day. Taking into consideration Ramón Meza's Carmela (1887), a novel in which a Chinese character appears for the first time in Cuba, José Marti's "Un funeral chino" (1888), Alfonso Hernández Catá's "Los chinos" (1923), Regino Pedroso's E l rímelo de Yuan Pei Fu (1955), José Lezama Lima's Paradiso (1966), and Severo Sarduy's De donde son los cantantes (1967), this essay analyzes the way in which such a cultural dialogue is produced in the works of these writers and the organization of literary discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I suggest studying the exponential rising of sikuri ensembles in Buenos Aires, Santiago and Bogota as an integral part of a counter-hegemonic social movement. Particularly, I propose that the sonorities, discourses, and practices with which the sikuris intervene and appropriate those spaces, further complicate their urban experiences and transform these cities into “islands" of an extensive cultural archipelago whose dimensions transcend the national and geographic boundaries that are often imagined as an attribute of “lo andino." In this sense, the multi-directional flow of people, music, and ideas contribute to the consolidation of a transnational community that, being as heterogeneous as it may be conceived, imagines itself united by a set of sounds, symbols, discourses, and practices that form part of the organic development of a larger utopian project: a new Pachacuti. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The monumental character of Augusto Roa Bastos' Yo El Supremo continues to raise-despite almost four decades of international critique production—new questions, new articulations, and new reading perspectives. As a novel on history, on the writing of history, on writing, on power, on the power of writing, on language itself, it shapes a huge deconstruction work that systematically exposes the duplicity, the paradox, the contradiction. The constant tensions and duplicities that go through it (I/He; identity/otherness; orality/writing; language/reality; sign/reference; power/representation) configure the main and endless reflection objects of contemporary thinking, which at the same time, enable a transcultural work concerning some of the constitutive nuclei of the Guarani culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over time, the critical discourse of Ángel Rama experiences a number of complex inflections, a product of the combination of the permanent dialogue with new theoretical vocabulary and participation in debates regarding the study of Latin American literature. This shift can be reconstructed through the comparison of the different meanings and uses that Rama gives to three of the most important concepts in his readings: the reading public, the social class and culture. By studying the use of the prepositional phrase “de/para los pobres", which appears in three of the author's texts, it is possible to demonstrate how Rama's thinking has been revised and reformulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo epitomizes the translation novel that Arguedas is known for. In this essay, I argue that the novel is steeped in translations on many levels, and that Arguedas uses prehispanic history in Peru as a crux for creating new interpretations of Peruvian life. Balancing roles as both a transculturador and a cultural translator, Arguedas models his characters to represent many dimensions, mythical and political, of Peruvian history and society. I also reinforce the importance of the symbol of the zorro (fox) in this particular work, and how it is transculturally reproduced throughout the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the recent academic production on José María Arguedas' works since 1990. It classifies this production in ten categories: culture, translation, transculturation, autofiction, affection, poetry, erotism and sexuality, reception, ethics and letters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a reading of "spiritual decolonization" in the anthropological and literary work of José María Arguedas. It establishes connections between his critical essays and ideas of other Latin American thinkers who have expanded upon mestizaje, transculturation and the reception of popular texts. Additionally, it analyzes the expression of these ideas as aesthetic experiences in examples taken from Arguedas's novel Los ríos profundos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]