Critical Passions

Jean Franco's work as a path-breaking theorist, cultural critic, and scholar has helped to define Latin American studies over the last three decades. In the process, Franco has played a crucial role in developing cultural studies in both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. Critical Passions is the first volume to gather a wide-ranging selection of Franco's influential essays. A key participant in all the major debates in Latin American studies - beginning with the "boom" period of the 1960s and continuing through debates on ideology and discourse, Marxism, mass culture, and postmodernism - Franco is recognised for her feminist critique of Latin American writing. While her principal books are all readily available, Franco's several dozen articles are dispersed in a variety of periodicals in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Although many of these essays are considered pioneering and classic, they have never before been collected into a single work. In this volume, Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman have organised the essays into four interrelated sections: feminism and the critique of authoritarianism, mass and popular culture, Latin American literature from the "boom" onward, and the cultural history of Mexico. As a group, these writings demonstrate Franco's ability to reflect on and judge with equal seriousness all spheres of expression, whether subway graffiti, a fashion manual, or an avant-garde haiku. A bona fide fan of popular and mass media, Franco never allows her critiques to dissolve into the puritanical or reductive, instead she finds ways to present and debate complex theoretical questions in direct and accessible language. Making some of Franco's most important work accessible for the first time, this volume will draw an extensive readership in Latin American, cultural, and women's studies. Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the winner of the 1996 PEN award for lifetime contribution to disseminating Latin American literature in English, and has been recognized by both the Chilean and Venezuelan governments with the Gabriela Mistral medal and the Andres Bello medal for advancing literary scholarship on Latin American literature in the United States. Her previous books include Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, Cesar Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence, and A Literary History of Spain and Spanish.