As a national group, Canadians are frequently viewed as an outward-looking people with an innate thirst for knowledge about the social, economic, and political customs of other nationalities. Traditionally, such curiosity has extended to countries that have played a large role in shaping contemporary Canadian society, especially the United States and the former colonizing powers of Europe. More recently, however, owing at least partly to changing patterns of immigration to Canada and the growth in hemispheric cultural and economic ties, curiosity has turned more and more toward Canada's neighbors to the south, the countries of Latin America.

“Artists are originators who reflect their native land if they know how to understand the joys and sorrows in the soul of its people; if they interpret them in line, color, stone or clay, in music or by word. If they feel and comprehend its landscape. If they eternalize it.”

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1968 as a “living memorial” to the twenty-eighth president of the United States. Its aims are to support advanced research and writing on national and international issues by scholars and practitioners from all over the world, and to bring together the realms of scholarship and of public affairs, which Wilson himself combined.

The population “explosion” in latin america during the past 25 years has been followed by a veritable explosion of research into its origins, characteristics, and effects as seen from the points of view of many disciplines. Research on the economic determinants, concomitants, and consequences of population growth in Latin America has not been absent; but it has been notably less abundant than that pertaining, for example, to sociological dimensions of the phenomenon.

Este artículo analiza Todos los negros tomamos café (1976) de la narradora cubana Mirta Yáñez como un ejemplo de escritura que celebra la experimentación y que entra en tensión con los moldes estéticos dominantes en la literatura cubana posrevolucionaria. Particularmente, exploro la estratégica posicionalidad de una enunciación polifónica y fragmentada como espacio de contestación a las certezas desde las que se construyeron las narrativas testimoniales. Sugiero que la narrativa de Yáñez se proyecta como una lúcida interrogación acerca de la posición de las escritoras cubanas en un medio que se rehusaba a incorporar voces disidentes, aun cuando la disidencia se manifestara en el plano de la experimentación y la exploración estética. Deslizándose desde los márgenes creados por las normas y políticas de producción cultural, Yáñez configura una narrativa en la que la palabra asume plenamente su calidad de artefacto estético.

This essay reviews the following works:

Teerã, Ramalá e Doha: Memórias da política externa ativa e altiva. By Celso Amorim. São Paulo: Benvirá, 2015. Pp. 520. R$44.00 paperback. ISBN: 9788582401712.

Brazil and Latin America: Between the Separation and Integration Paths. By Jose Briceño-Ruiz and Andrés Rivarola Puntigliano. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. 198. $36.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781498538473.

Foreign Policy Responses to the Rise of Brazil: Balancing Power in Emerging States. Edited by Gian Luca Gardini and Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almeida. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xiv + 239. $49.99e-book. ISBN: 9781137516695.

Brazil as a Rising Power: Interventions Norms and the Contestation of Global Order. Edited by Kai Michael Kenkel and Philip Cunliffe. London: Routledge, 2016. Pp. 234. $57.95e-book. ISBN: 1138946788.

Política externa na Nova República: Os primeiros 30 anos. By Dawisson Belém Lopes. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2017. Pp. 284. R$47.00. ISBN: 9788542301915.

Brazil on the Global Stage: Power, Ideas, and the Liberal International Order. Edited by Oliver Stuenkel and Matthew M. Taylor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xvii + 228. $84.99 e-book. ISBN: 9781137491657.