Lan American Coups: Have They Vanished or Taken New Shapes?

In the following pages, three well-known Latinoamericanists share their views on the current prospects for coups in Latin America. They are: Rut Diamint of the University Torcuatto de Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Pablo Policzer of the University of Calgary in Canada; and Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, DC. Each looks at the potential for coups from different perspectives but, all three come to similar conclusions. That is, that despite substantial gains in democracy, the threat of coups in Latin America remains latent. The authors agree that democracy is growing in the region. Opinion surveys such as the Americas Barometer consistently show that citizens in Latin America have gradually incorporated democracy as part of their core value system. Yet, the authors argue convincingly that Latin America faces new types of interruptions to its democratic process that should be considered coups, even if not following the traditional style of military coup that predominated in the past. Situations that have taken place in Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras and other countries serve to illustrate the new trends. More specifically, Professor Diamint argues that in Latin America a culture of intolerance, demonization of the opposition, and the utilization of any method to achieve power prevails. In a region with a very high threshold of violence, governments fail to set an example of establishing a culture of debate, consensus, and transparency. This culture is inclined to uncontrollable political expressions, preferring confrontational means to resolve conflict. Within this scenario, “messianic” solutions are promoted and coups cannot be discarded as an option that would never transpire. Professor Policzer looks more closely to the constitutional loopholes that allow for a transformation of limited into absolute power. He argues that coups can be constitutional or unconstitutional, and that a constitutional coup can occur when violations to democracy actually stem from the constitutions themselves. In Honduras, for example specific provisions in the Constitution itself created conditions for a constitutional crisis; similar provisions have also led to constitutional authoritarianism in Venezuela and other countries. Dr. Policzer stresses that when a head of state or the military take absolute power, even temporarily, based on provisions in their constitutions; they are in essence staging a constitutional coup. These blind spots in constitutions, he argues, may be more serious threat to democracy than that of traditional coups. Lastly, Dr. Shifter argues that some kind of coup should be expected in Latin America in coming years, not only because fundamental institutions remain weak in some countries, but because the regional political environment is less prepared to respond effectively to transgressions than it was a few years ago. The good news, however, is that only a handful of countries, show no interest in governing. The bad news is that in those few countries where situations are indeed shaky, they are also in some cases aggravated by rising food and fuel prices, and spreading criminality, which pose serious risks to the rule of law and democratic governance.

Toward understanding the study experience of culturally sensitive graduate students in *American distance education programs

The purpose of this research was to gain an understanding of the study experience of non-American graduate students living outside of the United States and formally engaged in graduate studies in an American Distance Education (DE) Program. These students have been labeled “culturally sensitive.” The nature of this study dictated a qualitative case study methodology using in-depth interviews to collect the data and the hermeneutic approach to understanding and description. This study aims at generating questions and hypotheses that will lead to further investigations that explore the need for cultural and contextual sensitivity in order to provide more equitable and accessible higher education for all. ^ The study attempted to answer the question: What is the study experience of “culturally sensitive” graduate students in American DE Programs? The underlying issue in this study is whether education designed and provided by educators of different socio-cultural backgrounds from that of the students could be content relevant and instructionally appropriate, resulting in educational enhancement and/or prepare students to function adequately in their own communities. ^ Participants in this study (n = 12) were engaged in Master's level (n = 2) and Doctoral level (n = 10) DE programs at American Universities, and were interviewed by E-mail, face-to-face, or using a combination of the two. Data analysis compared interviews and highlighted repetitive patterns. Interview data was triangulated with recent related literature and data from document reviews of archived E-mail conversations between students and their professors. The patterns that emerged were coded and categorized according to generative themes. The following themes were identified in order to analyze the data and confirmed through participant check-back: program benefits, communication, technology, culture and methodology, and reflectivity. ^ Major findings in this study indicate that culture plays an important role in cross-cultural encounters for students in American DE programs vis-à-vis student perceptions as to whether their study needs were being met. Most notably, it was found that the coupling of cultural perceptual differences with transactional distance created a potential barrier to communication that could affect short-term success in American DE programs. To overcome this barrier, students cited good communication as essential in meeting student's needs, especially those communications that were supportive and full of detail and context and from a primary source (ex. directly from the professor). Evaluation was a particularly sensitive issue, especially when students were unaware of their professor's cultural and contextual intricacies and therefore were uncertain about expectations and intended meaning. CSGS were aware of their position and the American rather than global context in which they were participating. Students appear to have developed “extended identities”, meaning that they acculturated in varying degrees in order to be successful in their program but that their local cultural identity was not compromised in any way. For participants from Venezuela access to higher DE has been a limiting factor to participation, due to the high cost of technology and telephone lines for communication. ^

Living in Transition: The Politics of Popular Music in Contemporary Cuba , Lecture by Nora Gámez Torres

This flyer promotes the event "Living in Transition: The Politics of Popular Music in Contemporary Cuba : Lecture by Nora Gámez Torres".

The African Roots of Cuban Culture : Artistic and Religious Expressions, A Symposium

This flyer promotes the event "The African Roots of Cuban Culture: Artistic and Religious Expressions, A Symposium", cosponsored by the Frost Art Museum and the African & African Diaspora Studies Program at FlU.

Tracing Antilles: History, Culture, and Art in the Work of Humberto Castro

This flyer promotes the event "Tracing Antilles: History, Culture, and Art in the Work of Humberto Castro" cosponsored by the Cuban Research Institute and the Frost Art Museum.

Contemporary Cuban Culture: Notes on Alternative Thinking, Lecture by Madeline Cámara Betancourt

This flyer promotes the event "Contemporary Cuban Culture: Notes on Alternative Thinking Lecture by Madeline Cámara Betancourt ". Credit for image on flyer: Baruj Salinas, Punta Cana VI, 1999.

Como un milagro: The Musical Influence of Juanito Márquez on the Popular Song of Four Continents, Lecture by Benjamin Lapidus

This flyer promotes the event "Como un milagro: The Musical Influence of Juanito Márquez on the Popular Song of Four Continents, Lecture by Benjamin Lapidus" Cosponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Center and the Green Library.

A educação popular para todos de uma cidade educadora (Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, 1957-1964)

This work has as a research subject of popular education policies of the city of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, in the years 1957 to 1964. It aims to identify and analyze popular education policies developed and implemented by the Municipality of Natal in these years. To get the historical data, we establish as a guiding reserch question the following: Which elaborated educational policies were implemented by the Municipality of Natal in the years 1957-1964? and took over as the method Evidential Paradigm as proposition in Pinheiro (2009). This is anchored in documentary sources of Educational Legislation at National, State and Municipal levels as well as in the newspapers Folha de Tarde and Jornal de Natal; in existing documents from the archives of the Historical and Geographical Institute of Rio Grande do Norte (IHGRN), the Municipal Public Archives of Natal; iconographic sources; interviews and academic publications. In addition to these sources, we were inspired by the works of Aristotles (2011), Hobbes (2009), Freire (2011), Góes (1980), Germano (1989), Cortez (2005) and Galvão (2004). This research allowed us to understand that policies of popular education of Natal (RN) were based on a democratic educational practice, supported on three pillars, namely: participation and involvement of Natal population; construction and reconstruction of teaching practices in prioritizing their action programs to mass literacy and the training of lay teachers; and the democratization of culture. This historical process made Natal on educating city.

Movimento de educação e cultura popular no Brasil dos anos 1960: resistência desfeita

In this work we defend the thesis that the movements of culture and popular education in the 1960s in Brazil, manifested itself into resistance to hegemonic thought, coming from the North, which reduced the popular individuals and their knowledge to the ignorant condition. The focus of our study lies on the resistance produced by these movements in the history of the Country. We used as theoretical reflective foundation the thinking of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and his thesis about the construction of rationalities focused in the fight against indolent reason and the deconstruction of the inferiority in the colonized plan. But the analysis also favors approaches of other authors in the proportion that deals with the action of social actors of culture and popular education movements that have marked their presence in the public space, whose views and interests were invented and reinvented constantly in the relacional game. From the point of empirical view, the research makes use of bibliographies and written documentary sources such as newspaper articles, speeches, statements, manifests and documents like these. The research intends to seek in the past the understanding of those Movements in an effort to enable the viewing of certain remnants of the past that have relevance as social and academic wealth of experience. From the popular and the local, movements of culture and popular education in the 1960s, they overcame the barriers of invisibility and raised Itself to the plan of the global history, when they began to become protagonists of their own history, until their dreams were buried by the 1964 tragedy.

Movimento de educação e cultura popular no Brasil dos anos 1960: resistência desfeita

In this work we defend the thesis that the movements of culture and popular education in the 1960s in Brazil, manifested itself into resistance to hegemonic thought, coming from the North, which reduced the popular individuals and their knowledge to the ignorant condition. The focus of our study lies on the resistance produced by these movements in the history of the Country. We used as theoretical reflective foundation the thinking of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and his thesis about the construction of rationalities focused in the fight against indolent reason and the deconstruction of the inferiority in the colonized plan. But the analysis also favors approaches of other authors in the proportion that deals with the action of social actors of culture and popular education movements that have marked their presence in the public space, whose views and interests were invented and reinvented constantly in the relacional game. From the point of empirical view, the research makes use of bibliographies and written documentary sources such as newspaper articles, speeches, statements, manifests and documents like these. The research intends to seek in the past the understanding of those Movements in an effort to enable the viewing of certain remnants of the past that have relevance as social and academic wealth of experience. From the popular and the local, movements of culture and popular education in the 1960s, they overcame the barriers of invisibility and raised Itself to the plan of the global history, when they began to become protagonists of their own history, until their dreams were buried by the 1964 tragedy.

A COMUNICAÇÃO POPULAR NA CONSTRUÇÃO E PRESERVAÇÃO DA MEMÓRIA DAS LUTAS POPULARES NO BRASIL (décadas de 1970 e 1980)

Nas décadas de 1970 e 1980 houve a eclosão de experiências comunicacionais populares, em todo Brasil, com vasta produção de materiais, especialmente arquivados pelos centros de documentação. Em sua maioria, criados e financiados por setores progressistas da Igreja Católica e Protestante. Entre eles, o Centro de Pastoral Vergueiro (CPV) e o Centro de Comunicação e Educação Popular de São Miguel Paulista (CEMI) que também tiveram importante papel na construção e preservação da memória das lutas populares no período de reorganização social, no contexto de distensão da ditadura militar. No entanto, tais acervos estão em iminente risco, por falta de investimento e vontade política. O que seria um prejuízo histórico e científico para movimentos sociais atuais e à pesquisa acadêmica. O objetivo do estudo é identificar a que se deve este desinteresse. A abordagem se dá pelo método da história oral e como técnicas de investigação adotamos a pesquisa bibliográfica, documental e a pesquisa de campo, por meio da entrevista em profundidade. A falta de uma política pública que garanta a preservação dos documentos é sinal de que no Brasil predomina uma cultura que não privilegia a memória, sobretudo das camadas empobrecidas da população. Além do que, a memória pode ser subversiva. Afinal tais documentos expressam a força da participação popular no processo de transformação social e podem despertar novas ações, o que não interessa aos grupos que estão no poder.

Étude du syncrétisme de l’assiko à travers le geste et le foyer socioculturel d’un guitariste Bassa

Ce mémoire porte sur le rôle du geste musical dans le développement de styles musicaux devenus syncrétiques. Il s’attarde à définir dans le détail le style de guitare populaire assiko propre aux Bassa du Cameroun du Sud lequel est représenté internationalement par le guitariste et percussionniste traditionnel Atna Njock. Grâce à une approche dialogique et participative, les techniques du jeu assiko sont explorées et comparées à des exemples de jeu de guitare européenne, afro-américaines et africaines. Les influences qui définissent le jeu d’Atna découlent de la culture Bassa et de son histoire marquée par l’influence coloniale et missionnaire, mais sont aussi alimentées par la «philosophie» (voire la spiritualité) et le passé musical de l’artiste. L’approche participative fournit une perspective émique, c’est-à-dire interne à la culture, de la gestuelle et de la structure du jeu assiko même si nous confrontons les propos du musicien à notre propre regard analytique. La comparaison avec divers instruments de percussion auxquels Atna a été initié montre comment ceux-ci ont forgé son jeu guitaristique. Son rôle de « garant » de la tradition musicale Bassa influence son approche et se manifeste par une préoccupation particulière pour l’« authenticité » dans la reproduction des rythmes d’un « langage » musical donné. Ses liens avec la culture Bassa, s’expriment notamment par le biais de sa reproduction du style de jeu de son maître, Jean Bikoko « Aladin ». La contribution particulière d’Atna à la technique de guitare de Bikoko est comprise comme un ajout à la lignée ancestrale. Une analyse d’un morceau du répertoire assiko issu du plus récent album d’Atna illustre d’ailleurs comment son incorporation de styles « modernes » reproduit les processus traditionnels en intégrant des éléments culturels étrangers.

Full of Hot Air? Three Examinations of Climate Change in the American Political Information Environment

Climate change is thought to be one of the most pressing environmental problems facing humanity. However, due in part to failures in political communication and how the issue has been historically defined in American politics, discussions of climate change remain gridlocked and polarized. In this dissertation, I explore how climate change has been historically constructed as a political issue, how conflicts between climate advocates and skeptics have been communicated, and what effects polarization has had on political communication, particularly on the communication of climate change to skeptical audiences. I use a variety of methodological tools to consider these questions, including evolutionary frame analysis, which uses textual data to show how issues are framed and constructed over time; Kullback-Leibler divergence content analysis, which allows for comparison of advocate and skeptical framing over time; and experimental framing methods to test how audiences react to and process different presentations of climate change. I identify six major portrayals of climate change from 1988 to 2012, but find that no single construction of the issue has dominated the public discourse defining the problem. In addition, the construction of climate change may be associated with changes in public political sentiment, such as greater pessimism about climate action when the electorate becomes more conservative. As the issue of climate change has become more polarized in American politics, one proposed causal pathway for the observed polarization is that advocate and skeptic framing of climate change focuses on different facets of the issue and ignores rival arguments, a practice known as “talking past.” However, I find no evidence of increased talking past in 25 years of popular newsmedia reporting on the issue, suggesting both that talking past has not driven public polarization or that polarization is occurring in venues outside of the mainstream public discourse, such as blogs. To examine how polarization affects political communication on climate change, I test the cognitive processing of a variety of messages and sources that promote action against climate change among Republican individuals. Rather than identifying frames that are powerful enough to overcome polarization, I find that Republicans exhibit telltale signs of motivated skepticism on the issue, that is, they reject framing that runs counter to their party line and political identity. This result suggests that polarization constrains political communication on polarized issues, overshadowing traditional message and source effects of framing and increasing the difficulty communicators experience in reaching skeptical audiences.

Other Than a Citizen: Vernacular Poetics in Postwar America

Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.

In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.

My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.

Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.

Unnatural History: Ecological Temporality in Post-1945 American Literature

While environmental literary criticism has traditionally focused its attention on the textual representation of specific places, recent ecocritical scholarship has expanded this focus to consider the treatment of time in environmental literature and culture. As environmental scholars, activists, scientists, and artists have noted, one of the major difficulties in grasping the reality and implications of climate change is a limited temporal imagination. In other words, the ability to comprehend and integrate different shapes, scales, and speeds of history is a precondition for ecologically sustainable and socially equitable responses to climate change.

My project examines the role that literary works might play in helping to create such an expanded sense of history. As I show how American writers after 1945 have treated the representation of time and history in relation to environmental questions, I distinguish between two textual subfields of environmental temporality. The first, which I argue is characteristic of mainstream environmentalism, is disjunctive, with abrupt environmental changes separating the past and the present. This subfield contains many canonical works of postwar American environmental writing, including Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. From treatises on the ancient ecological histories of particular sites to meditations on the speed of climate change, these works evince a preoccupation with environmental time that has not been acknowledged within the spatially oriented field of environmental criticism. However, by positing radical breaks between environmental pasts and environmental futures, they ultimately enervate the political charge of history and elide the human dimensions of environmental change, in terms both of environmental injustice and of possible social responses.

By contrast, the second subfield, which I argue is characteristic of environmental justice, is continuous, showing how historical patterns persist even across social and ecological transformations. I trace this version of environmental thought through a multicultural corpus of novels consisting of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Some of these novels do not document specific instances of environmental degradation or environmental injustice and, as a result, have not been critically interpreted as relevant for environmental analysis; others are more explicit in their discussion of environmental issues and are recognized as part of the canon of American environmental literature. However, I demonstrate that, across all of these texts, counterhegemonic understandings of history inform resistance to environmental degradation and exploitation. These texts show that environmental problems cannot be fully understood, nor environmental futures addressed, without recognizing the way that social histories of inequality and environmental histories of extraction continue to structure politics and ecology in the present.

Ultimately, then, the project offers three conclusions. First, it suggests that the second version of environmental temporality holds more value than the first for environmental cultural studies, in that it more compellingly and accurately represents the social implications of environmental issues. Second, it shows that “environmental literature” is most usefully understood not as the literature that explicitly treats environmental issues, but rather as the literature that helps to produce the sense of time that contemporary environmental crises require. Third, it shows how literary works can not only illuminate the relationship between American ideas about nature and social justice, but also operate as a specifically literary form of eco-political activism.