Vanderbilt University Press

About Vanderbilt University Press

Established in 1940, Vanderbilt University Press is the principal publishing arm of one of the nation’s leading research universities. The Press’s primary mission is to select, produce, market, and disseminate scholarly publications of outstanding quality and originality. In conjunction with the long-term development of its editorial program, the Press draws on and supports the intellectual activities of the university and its faculty. Although its main emphasis falls in the area of scholarly publishing, the Press also publishes books of substance and significance that are of interest to the general public, including regional books. In this regard, the Press also supports Vanderbilt’s service and outreach to the larger local and national community.

The editorial interests of Vanderbilt University Press include most areas of the humanities and social sciences, as well as health care and education. The Press seeks intellectually provocative and socially significant works in these areas, as well as works that are interdisciplinary or that blend scholarly and practical concerns. At present, Vanderbilt publishes around twenty-five new titles each year.

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Monstrous Politics

Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City

BEN GERLOFS

Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth century urbanization and political revolution. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.

Ben Gerlofs is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong.

January 2023

304 pages Urban Studies Rights: World

October 2022

282 pages Social Science / Emigration & Immigration Rights: World

November 2022

308 pages Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American Rights: World Migration from the Global South through the Americas ANDREW NELSON and ROB CURRAN

Based on five years of collaborative research between a journalist and an anthropologist, this book makes an engrossing, sometimes surreal, narrative-driven critique of how statelevel immigration policy fails extracontinental migrants. The book begins with Kidane, an Eritrean migrant who has left his pregnant wife behind to make the four-year trip to North America; it then picks up the natural disaster–riddled voyage of Roshan and Kamala Dhakal from Nepal to Ecuador; and it continues to the trials of Cameroonian exile Jane Mtebe, who becomes trapped in a bizarre beachside resort town on the edge of the Darién Gap—the gateway from South to Central America. Journey without End follows these migrants as their fitful voyages put them in a semi-permanent state of legal and existential liminality as mercurial policy creates profit opportunities that transform migration bottlenecks—Quito’s tourist district, a Colombian beachside resort, Panama’s Darién Gap, and a Mexican border town— into spontaneous migration-oriented spaces rife with race, gender, and class exploitation.

Andrew Nelson is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of North Texas. Rob Curran is a freelance journalist and frequent contributor to Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.

The Mexican Transpacific

Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, and Performance

IGNACIO LÓPEZ-CALVO

Forward by EMMA NAKATANI

This book, a continuation of the author’s previous research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry, focuses mostly on texts, films, and artworks produced by Asian Mexicans, rather than on the Japanese or Chinese as mere objects of study. However, it will also be contrasted with the representation of Asians by Mexican authors with no Asian ancestry. With this interdisciplinary study, the author hopes to bring to the fore this silenced community’s voice and agency to historicize their own experience.In spite of the unquestionable influence of the Nikkei communities in Mexico’s history and culture, and the numerous historical studies recently published on these two communities, the study of their cultural production and, therefore, their self-definition and how they conceive themselves has been, for the most part, overlooked.

Ignacio López-Calvo is a professor and UC Merced Presidential Chair in the Humanities at UC Merced.

Fashioning Men and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain

NICHOLAS WOLTERS

Based on years of archival research in Madrid and Barcelona, this interdisciplinary study offers a fresh approach to understanding how men visualized themselves and their place in a nation that struggled to modernize after nearly a century of civil war, colonial entanglement, and imperial loss. Masculine Figures is the first study to provide a comprehensive overview of competing models of masculinity in nineteenth-century Spain, and is particularly novel in its treatment of Catalan texts and previously unstudied evidence (e.g., department store catalogs, commercial advertisements, fashion plates, and men’s tailoring journals). Through specific and recurring figures like the student, the priest, the businessman, and the heir, male novelists represent an increasingly middle-class world at odds with the values and virtues it inherited from an imperial Spanish past, and those it imported from more industrialized nations like England and France. The visual culture of the time and place marks the material turn in middle-class masculinity and sets the stage for discussions of race and sexuality.

Nicholas Wolters is an assistant professor of Spanish at Wake Forest University.

Goya and the Mystery of Reading

LUIS MARTÍN-ESTUDILLO

Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828) was fascinated by reading, and Goya’s attention to the act and consequences of literacy—apparent in some of his most ambitious, groundbreaking creations—is related to the reading revolution in which he participated. It was an unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available, accompanied by a profound shift in the way they were consumed and, for the artist, represented. Goya and the Mystery of Reading studies the way Goya’s work heralds the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his art, multiplying its potential for meaning. While the reading revolution resulted from and contributed to the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya and the Mystery of Reading explains how this transition can be tracked in the work of Goya, an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to read it.

Luis Martín-Estudillo is a professor of Spanish and Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa.

December 2022

304 pages History / Europe / Spain & Portugal Rights: World

February 2023

288 pages, 79 color illustrations History / Social History Rights: World

June 2023

296 pages, 68 illustrations Social Science / Media Studies Rights: World

June 2023

296 pages History / Latin America / Mexico Rights: World Storytelling Across Media, From Nationhood to Now

AMY E. WRIGHT

Serial Mexico responds to a continued need to historicize and contextualize seriality, particularly as it exists outside of dominant US/European contexts. In Mexico, serialization has been an important feature of narrative since the birth of the nation. Amy Wright’s exploration begins with a study of novels serialized in pamphlets and newspapers by key Mexican authors of the nineteenth century, showing that serialization was essential to the development of both the novel and national identities—to Mexican popular culture—during its foundational period. In the twentieth century, a technological explosion after the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) set Mexico’s transmedial wheels into motion, as a variety of media recycled and repurposed earlier serialized tales, themselves drawn from a repertoire of oral traditions to national nostalgic effect. Along the way, Serial Mexico responds to the following series of questions: How has serialized storytelling functioned in Mexico? How can we better understand the relationship of seriality to transmediality through this historical case study? Which stories (characters, themes, storylines, and storyworlds) have circulated repeatedly over time? How have those stories defined Mexico? The goal of this book is to begin to understand some of the possible answers to these questions through five case studies, which highlight five key artifacts, in five different media, at five different historical points spanning nearly two hundred years of Mexico’s history. Serial Mexico offers important insights into not only the topic of serialized storytelling, but to larger notions of how national identities are created through narrative, with crucial cultural and sometimes political implications.

Amy Wright is an associate professor of Hispanic studies at Saint Louis University

Mexico, Interrupted

Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence

SERGIO GUTIÉRREZ NEGRÓN

Mexican independence was, in a sense, an economic event. It was so on two counts. First, it was in the realm of the economic that elites managed to create a common ground with nonelites in their demands against foreign domination. Second, it was an economic event in that, throughout the 19th century, independence was imagined by the lettered men of Mexico as a feat that nationalized, or that could have nationalized, a rich and productive economic apparatus. Mexico, Interrupted: Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence investigates the fate of these economic hopes during the difficult decades between the year of the country’s definite separation from Spain and the year of the defeat of the French occupation and the restoration of the Republic, which many took to be the second and final independence of the territory. Drawing on the writings of politicians, journalists, intellectuals, industrialists, and novelists, this book studies the Mexican intelligentsia’s obsessive engagement with the labor and idleness of the citizenry in their attempts to create a wealthy, independent nation. By focusing on work and its opposites in the period between, Mexico, Interrupted reconstructs the period’s “economic imaginaries of independence”: the repertoire of political and cultural discourses that structured the understandings, beliefs, and fantasies about the relationships between “the economy” and the life of an independent polity. All told, by bringing together intellectual history, critical theory, and cultural studies, this project offers a new account of the Mexican nineteenth century and complicates existing histories of the spread of the “spirit of capitalism” through the Americas.

Transpacific Modernity and Nikkei Literature in Argentina

KOICHI HAGIMOTO

The Argentine vision of “transpacific modernity” was in part informed by historical imaginings of Japan in the early twentieth century. Intellectuals such as Eduardo Wilde and Manuel Domecq García celebrated Japanese customs and traditions as important values that can be integrated into Argentine society. But a new generation of Nikkei or Japanese Argentines is rewriting this conventional narrative in the twenty-first century. Nikkei writers such as Maximiliano Matayoshi and Anna Kazumi Stahl are challenging the earlier, unapologetic view of Japan based on their own immigrant experiences. Compared to the experience of political persecution against Japanese immigrants in Brazil and Peru, the Japanese in Argentina generally lived under a more agreeable sociopolitical climate. In order to understand the “positive” perception of Japan in Argentine history and literature, Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho turns to the current debate on race in Argentina, particularly as it relates to the discourse of whiteness. One of the central arguments is that Argentina’s century-old interest in Japan represents a disguised method of (re)claiming its white, Western identity. Through close readings of diverse genres (travel writing, essay, novel, short story, and film) Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho yields a multi-layered analysis in order to underline the role Japan has played in both defining and defying Argentine modernity from the twenty century to the present.

Koichi Hagimoto is an associate professor of Spanish at Wellesley College.

July 2023

212 pages History / Latin America / South America Rights: World