Struggles for Recognition

"A remarkable book that is poised to become required reading in film and media studies, Latin American studies, and urban studies--it's quite possibly the most innovative study of Latin American melodrama that I have read in recent memory."--Colin Gunckel, author of Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II "Struggles for Recognition is unique in reassessing Argentine, Colombian, and Mexican modernities by analyzing the effects of the conventions of melodrama on public participation and political subjectivity."--Cynthia M. Tompkins, author of Affectual Erasure: Representations of Indigenous Peoples in Argentine Cinema "Breaks new ground by bringing together recent critiques of Eurocentric conceptions of modernity with new framings of melodrama. Understanding the form as a highly adaptable site for mediating experiences of social change, Ospina León offers an illuminating analysis of melodrama's diverse manifestations in early Latin-American cinemas. Historically illuminating and conceptually astute."--Christine Gledhill, coeditor of Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures