 | On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture Subjects: Latin America -- Cultural policy; Privatization -- Social aspects -- Latin America; Intercultural communication -- Social aspects -- Latin America; Culture diffusion -- Latin America; On the Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture lays out the parameters of the issues: ethnicity, race, oppositional culture (popular), liberal democracy, the discrediting of the Left, and the women's movement. In total, this collection provides a good overview of significant issues in Latin American thought. Journal of Communication. These essays by authors from a wide range of fields and nationalities explore problems and possibilities that the postmodernism debate poses to the reconfigurations of cultural identity in different Latin American contexts. Diacritics. On Edge is where the reader will be, anxiously at the margins of Latin America's elite centers, throughout this excellent collection of essays on cultural and political innovations. It is a most welcome hands-on guide to some of the post-modern challenges to projects of national modernization, a cultural analogue to studies of new political movements. Doris Sommer. John Martin Flores was born in Alexandria, Virginia on September 29, 1943. He received a bachelor's degree in German-language studies at Queens College and a master's degree and Ph.D. in German literature at Yale University. He began teaching German at Stanford University in 1970. While there, he became involved in the movement to develop Chicano studies curriculums in California. He also changed his name to Juan. In 1975, he returned to New York to work at Centro, where the Latino studies curriculum was being developed for the City University system. Through his work there, he was hired as a professor of black and Puerto Rican studies at Hunter College, where he taught before becoming a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University in 2006. He was a leading theorist of Latin American studies and a pioneer in the field of "Nuyorican" culture, the arts and language of Puerto Ricans in New York. He wrote more than a dozen books and edited many collections of essays. His books included From Bomba to Hip-Hop and The Diaspora Strikes Back. He died from complications of Guillain-Barre syndrome on December 2, 2014 at the age of 71. (Bowker Author Biography) |
