Faculty Publications

 

Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz

In Tropical Riffs Jason Borge traces how jazz helped forge modern identities and national imaginaries in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century. Across Latin America jazz functioned as a conduit through which debates about race, sexuality, nation, technology, and modernity raged in newspapers, magazines, literature, and film. For Latin American audiences, critics, and intellectuals—who often understood jazz to stem from social conditions similar to their own—the profound penetration into the fabric of everyday life of musicians like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker represented the promises of modernity while simultaneously posing a threat to local and national identities. Brazilian antijazz rhetoric branded jazz as a problematic challenge to samba and emblematic of Americanization. In Argentina jazz catalyzed discussions about musical authenticity, race, and national culture, especially in relation to tango. And in Cuba, the widespread popularity of Chano Pozo and Dámaso Pérez Prado popularity challenged the United States' monopoly on jazz. Outlining these hemispheric flows of ideas, bodies, and music, Borge elucidates how "America's art form" was, and remains, a transnational project and a collective idea.

Author Professor Jason Borge.

 

Avances de Hollywood: Crítica cinematográfica lat., 1915-1945

Para los intelectuales latinoamericanos de las décadas de 1920 y 1930, gran parte de ellos enloquecidos por el cine y al mismo tiempo profundamente amenazados por los Estados Unidos y lo que se percibe como la vulgarización de la cultura en general, Hollywood constituye un signo sumamente problemático que se pretende resolver por los varios modismos de la escritura.

Author Professor Jason Borge.

 

Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

This book analyzes the initial engagement with Hollywood by key Latin American writers and intellectuals during the first few decades of the 20th century. The film metropolis presented an ambiguous, multivalent sign for established figures like Horacio Quiroga, Alejo Carpentier and Mário de Andrade, as well as less renowned writers like the Mexican Carlos Noriega Hope, the Chilean Vera Zouroff and the Cuban Guillermo Villarronda.

Author Professor Jason Borge.