
Debra A. CastilloCornell University | CU · Department of Comparative Literature
Debra A. Castillo
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Publications (67)
The idea of the serious game as a metaphor and as an actuality comes up in constantly in border surveillance. This article looks at two contrasting examples of interactive performances that we are asked (asked?) to take seriously (?): the US border–related reenactment pieces 'Pulpo' and' Oracle' by Mexico City–based artist Yoshua Okón, and the “Cam...
In El próximo oriente/The Next Orient (2006), director Fernando Colomo takes on the always controversial issue of immigration from Muslim countries and the European struggle to understand and come to terms with its new multilingual, multicultural reality. In this case, the focus is on the once-again multicultural Spain, which has been dealing in he...
This meditation on the pedagogy of fieldwork-based courses is based on the author’s experience as an instructor for Cornell’s oldest fieldwork course, a collaborative class anchored in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, but open to a wide interdisciplinary audience. In recent years, it has been located in the southern Mexican state of Ch...
This introduction explores what happens to fieldwork when it shifts discipline, shifts form, shifts audience, shifts medium, shifts end point, and shifts traditions of interaction: in short, when information gleaned from the field is routed back into an undisciplining form of inquiry. It situates the project of fieldwork in the humanities in relati...
In some theatre communities in Latin America, devised projects (creación colectiva) became a dominant presence throughout the 1960s-1980s, grounding a practice that remains fundamental today, though such work presents a challenge to study in traditional, script-based classrooms. For those of us who work with Latin American theatre in an academic se...
This article looks at the boom in outsourced, international-assisted reproduction, as shown in websites, literature and films from India and Latin America. It analyses assisted reproduction websites aimed at international clients, alongside texts such as Shoojit Sircar’s Vicky Donor (2012) and Rocío Vásquez de Velasco’s short story “Vientre de alqu...
This volume, the first of its kind, launches a conversation amongst humanities scholars doing fieldwork on the global south. It both offers indispensable tools and demonstrates the value of such work inside and outside of the academy. The contributors reflect upon their experiences of fieldwork, the methods they improvised, their dilemmas and insig...
This article explores social educator actions by academe as cultural agency’s natural partner in ways that echo, connect and create plural discourse among the many dimensions and disciplines of society. Based on collaborations with Mexican partners, we argue this goal is achieved with multiplicative effects when students and faculty, key agents the...
Some years ago, my students performed a play by Argentine Nora Glickman, Una tal Raquel, in a number of different locales: our home university in Ithaca, as well as in New York City, Belgium, and Mexico. We were very pleased by the enthusiastic reception in all these sites, and intrigued by the differences in the audiences’ responses.
This paper studies Rivera's 12-year-old spoof outsourcing website, with particular attention to the 4.5 minute 1997 video that served as its original point of departure (he is now best know for his 2008 feature film, "Sleep Dealer."). Rivera’s work in general involves a practice he calls a “rasquache aesthetic” of filmmaking. In a recent interview...
Since June 2008, the homepage of Alex Rivera’s1 over ten-year-old spoof migrant labor outsourcing website has begun with a warning: “PLEASENOTE: Cybracero warns people that the movie Sleep Dealer opening this weekend is an inaccurate and undeservedly critical portrait of our pioneering business model and is not representational of our business.” In...
What public do public intellectuals engage? What aspect of their intellectual work finds the most resonance with their audiences? One surprising answer might be that they provide local color for tourists, where the public intellectual, often unwittingly or unwillingly, collaborates in creating/producing the exportable veneer of an authentic, folklo...
Already in late 2011 things were heating up, a year away from the elections of 2012, one of those unusual years in the political cycle in which citizens of both the United States and Mexico were voting in presidential contests. Candidacies were bruited about, and the press lamented the anti-intellectualism pervading so-called political debates. On...
When i was invited to participate in this special issue, it was suggested that I meditate on a long-term research project I did in collaboration with the public-health scholar María Gudelia Rangel Gómez and the demographer Armando Rosas Solís, on people working in prostitution in Tijuana, a city on the United States–Mexico border. That work began i...
Laura Lomas's new book complements a strong body of work, by talented scholars with a transnational Americas focus, that has emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century: important work by people like Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Robert McKee Irwin, and Raúl Coronado, whose formal disciplinary locations vary widely, but who are chipping away at...
Despite histories that share a deep, wounded sensibility about borders, Mexico and India have relatively few overt meditations on potential parallels. This paper proposes to look at a 2010 Indian action film set in Las Vegas and Mexico featuring Bollywood mega-star Hrithik Roshan and the Mexican-Japanese-Uruguyan telenovela actress Bárbara Mori — w...
The final chapter of Miguel Rubio Zapata’s El cuerpo ausente (performance político) ‘Absent body (political performance)’ begins with an epigraph from Antonin Artaud, at first glance a very unexpected inspiration for a group famed for its politically-charged performances...
For several years now, at least since the 2000 census, the United States has in one way or another told itself that it needs to come to terms with what it means to live in a country of over forty million Latinos/as. Latina actors grace the covers of People magazine, Latin beats percolate through the earbuds of iPods, and McDonald's serves up breakf...
CR: The New Centennial Review 1.1 (2001) 283-296
A NUMBER OF LATIN AMERICANISTS HAVE IN RECENT YEARS TURNED OUR attention to the historical legacy of the long European colonial experience in the Americas, and to the Eurocentric tinge that remains part and parcel of the postcolonial theorizing that frequently—although not exclusively—circulates thro...
In many border-related discussions—whether philosophical, anthropological, critical, or fictional—there are typical themes or narrative tics: allusions to the flexible geography that makes the border region both an isolated territory and an analogue for the postmodern condition, the puzzlement over how to understand the role of the "maquiladoras" '...
In 1997 I was asked to organize humanities outreach activities at the University of California, Irvine. The result was the formation of Humanities Out There (HOT). In our workshops, faculty members and graduate students supervise teams of undergraduates in order to take the methods and materials of the university into the larger community. I believ...
Debra A. Castillo is a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she also serves as Director of the Latin American Studies Program. She specializes in contemporary Hispanic literature, women's studies, and post-colonial literary theory. She is author of The Translat...
This paper examines the concrete social situation of women working as prostitutes in Tijuana Mexico and understanding the articulations among the competing social and cultural formations. Data were gathered from ongoing published work primarily in education and public health policy with both male and female prostitutes and from the researchers two-...
Modern Fiction Studies 42.4 (1996) 854-856
Carl Gutiérrez-Jones. Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 219 pp.
In this book, Gutiérrez-Jones addresses a significant and puzzling absence in American studies as a whole, and specifically in the study of Chicano/a literature. He argu...
MLN 111.2 (1996) 417-420
Stephanie Sieburth, Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994. 280 pp.
This new book addresses an important gap in modern Peninsular cultural studies by looking at the interrelationship of literature and social change in the context of the...
Elena Poniatowska's recent Luz y luna, Ias lunitas immediately impresses the reader with its beauty; it is akin to a "coffee table book" in its sheer gorgeousness. I intend to explore the question of how to read the gorgeous object within the context of Poniatowska's oeuvre and within the frame of a pedagogical endeavor. Poniatowska, of course, rep...
Modern Fiction Studies 41.1 (1995) 35-73
--D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, 471.
Cultural circulation between Latin America and the First World offers a number of edifying exchanges. Before the "Boom" novel of the 1960s traveled outside Latin American borders to amaze and enchant us with a literary form often hailed as a Third World version of p...
With this superb new translation of Molloy's 1979 book, English-speaking fans of poet, essayist, and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges finally have access to this important study of the Argentine master. This is a book to read cover-to-cover, in order to delight in the fluid interplay of Borges' texts and Molloy's interpretations, to enjoy the f...
The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee are frequently criticized for their lack of specific application to the social and political concerns of his country. In Dusklands, the first and least studied of these texts, the author makes an implicit response to the controversial and weakly defined question of the political value of literary...
It would be deceptively easy for a critic defining the central conflict of The Back Room, Carmen Martín Gaite's first post-Franco novel, to sort out a series of polar forces-chaos and order, memory and memoir, fantasy and reality, "loose" woman and Falangist supporter. While the narrator recognizes the impossibility of emancipation from these neces...