Founded In    2008
Published   semiannually
Language(s)   English, Spanish
     

Fields of Interest

 

interdisciplinary

     
ISSN   ISSN: 1867-1519
     
Affiliated Organization   American Studies section of the English Department at Bielefeld University, Germany; "International Association of Inter-American Studies" (http://www.interam ericanstudies.net)
     
Editorial Board

General Editor:
Prof. Wilfried Raussert, Bielefeld University, Germany

Assistant Editors:
Alethea R. Wait, Bielefeld University
Christina Seeliger, Bielefeld University

Editorial Board Members:
Prof. Mita Banerjee, University Siegen, Germany
Prof. William Boelhower, University of Padua, Italy
Prof. Maryemma Graham, University of Kansas, USA
Dr. Luz Angélica Kirschner, Bielefeld University, Germany
Prof. John Carlos Rowe, University of Southern California, USA
Prof. David Ryan, University College Cork, Ireland
jun. Prof. Sebastian Thies, Bielefeld University, Germany

Main contact editor: Matthias Oppermann [matthias.oppermann@uni-bielefeld.de]

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

Before submitting an article to FIAR please send a one-page abstract to fiar [at] interamerica [dot] de
The editors invite the submission of articles, event-scenes, interviews and reviews, appropriate to FIAR. Generally, submissions should not exceed 7500 words. All papers and proposals should be send as e-mail attachments (in MS Word or similar format) to fiar [at] interamerica [dot] de with the word “submission” in the subject line.

Submission of a paper to FIAR will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work. Papers presented at conferences can, with appropriate changes, be considered for publication. All submissions will undergo a double-blind review process.
Further submission instructions can be found in the “Submission Guidelines” section on our website, http://interamerica.de

     
Mailing Address
     

Journal’s Contact Information:
E-mail: fiar [at] interamerica [dot] de
Phone: [+49] 521-106-3641 (European Standard Time)
Fax: [+49] 521-106-2996
Mail:
Forum for Inter-American Research
American Studies Program
Postfach 100131
D-33501 Bielefeld
Germany

FIAR: Forum for Inter-American Research

The Forum for Inter-American Studies (FIAR) is the official electronic journal of the International Association of Inter-American Studies. FIAR was established by the American Studies Program at Bielefeld University in 2008.

We foster a dialogic and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Americas. FIAR is a peer-reviewed online journal. Articles in this journal undergo a double-blind review process and are published in English and Spanish. We do not charge readers or institutions for full text access. In addition to written work we also publish selected audiovisual material of conference presentations, keynotes, and video features. The editorial board consists of a broad range of international scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds.

 

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, Volume 4, Number 1

Identity as a Political Project in the Americas Keynote Address by Sophia McClennen (Pennsylvania State University) 17 July 2009 at Bielefeld University


Entrevista a Cristina Rivera Garza


Cristina Rivera Garza, nacida en Matamoros (1964, México), es autora de numerosas obras de narrativa, ensayo y poesía. Se doctoró en Historia latinoamericana en la Universidad de Houston. Actualmente es profesora de creación literaria en el Departamento de Literatura de la Universidad de California en San Diego. Por sus novelas Nadie me verá llorar (2001) y La muerte me da ganó el Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Publica además la columna semanal La mano oblicua (en el Diario mexicano Milenio) y en su blog No hay tal lugar.

Canon y Cálculo: Jaime Escalante, Richard Rodriguez y el discurso educativo latino entre asimilación y diferencia cultural


The Mexican American writer Richard Rodríguez and the now retired Bolivian mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante are two of the most significant figures in public discourses about the situation of Latina/os in the United States educational system. Their positions have crucially informed the educational political debates about affirmative action and bilingual education in the 1980s and '90s far beyond educational political circles and the Latina/o community at issue. Rodríguez became famous for his autobiography Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1981) and Escalante for his work with minority students in the California public school system, which was brought to a larger public through the screen biography Stand and Deliver (1988). To different degrees, though, both men stirred controversy for advocating Latina/o assimilation to Anglo-American educational norms. The essay looks at Hunger of Memory and Stand and Deliver in the context of the public discourses on Latina/o education in the United States during the 1980s and '90s and also examines how Rodríguez and Esca-lante have become public actors in the larger national controversies over bilingual education, affirmative action, the ideal of multiculturalism, and Latina/o identity politics.

Fragmentos de la violencia fronteriza: Una lectura de La muerte me da (Cristina Rivera Garza) y 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)


In a comparative approach, this paper explores how two novels, La muerte me da (2008) by the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza and 2666 (2004) by the Chilenean writer Roberto Bolaño, represent violence and problematize sexual serial killing. Building on Judtih Butlers notion of performing gender, this study analyses the representations of sexual violence in this two novels as performance. The author´s inquiry focuses on the relation between body and text, performance and writing in order to show how language about and of violence articulates the unspeakable.

Heimat and Hybridity: Arnold Schoenberg, Exile, and the Crisis of Modernism


This essay explores contributions to the modernist movement in Southern California by exiled composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), with a focus on the twelve-tone cantata for speaker, male choir, and chamber orchestra, A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46. I argue that an important way for Schoenberg and other exiles in Southern California to find Heimat, or a sense of belonging, was through cultural hybridity: works that resulted from collaboration with other artists, either foreign or American. In order to survive as artists, the exiles had to reach out to American audiences, which meant adapting to American culture. This interest in hybridity resulted in part from what several scholars have called a "crisis of modernism," which resulted from the collapse of democracies in the 1930s in Europe and the supposed decline of the cultural ideals that those democracies had upheld. During an era in which foreign artists in the United States were often viewed with suspicion, cultural hybridity provided a means of finding acceptance among American audiences. A Survivor from Warsaw is a remarkable work on several grounds. It integrates two events: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 19, 1943, and the experience of Jews sent to the gas chamber of a Nazi death camp. The cantata is sung in Sprechstimme, and presents a tone row in which Jews and Nazis are in a dialectical conflict. The work concludes with a male choir singing the Hebrew hymn "Shema Yisrael" in unison while inmates march to the gas chambers. The text of the cantata draws on three languages: English, German and Hebrew; Schoenberg required the aide of another exile, rabbi Jacob Sonderling, to aide him in adapting the Hebrew text to music. For the English text, Schoenberg relied on an assistant from UCLA, Richard Hoffmann. As a montage of experience as well as of music, A Survivor from Warsaw is at once an indictment of Nazi atrocities and a plea for Jewish unity in the face of persecution and death.

Las universidades interculturales como un mecanismo para elevar el acceso a la educación superior de la población marginada (y de conocimiento) en México


El presente texto analiza las características de las Universidades Interculturales Mexicanas (UIM), así como los argumentos, actores y las políticas involucradas en su creación el 6 de septiembre de 2004. Estas instituciones fueron creadas por la Secretaría de Educación Pública, a través de la Coordinación General de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (CGEIB) y tras muchas cavilaciones y negociaciones, para atender la necesidad de establecer una nueva relación en la coexistencia entre el conocimiento "occidental" establecido en el currículo nacional y el conocimiento "originario" generado y custodiado por los diversos grupos étnicos. Se presentan algunas de sus características y prácticas más salientes al tiempo que se concluye que es aún prematuro decir si estas instituciones están logrando su objetivo.

Other Issues

Indigenous America - America Indígena, Volume 4, Number 2
Cine y Frontera - Cinema and the Border, Volume 3, Number 2
Tracing the Americas , Volume 3, Number 1
Ethnic Identity Politics, Transnationalization, and Transculturation in American Urban Popular Music, Volume 2, Number 2
Remembering and Forgetting: Memory in Images and Texts, 2
Identity Politics in the Americas and Beyond, 1