Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Teaching

• HISP-S 324: Introduction to the Study of Hispanic Cultures
• HISP-S 280: Spanish Grammar in Context

Specializations

• Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Cultural Studies (emphasis on Central America and Central American diaspora)
• Neoliberalism and/as Culture
• The Global South
• Public Humanities
• Urban Studies

About Andrew Bentley

I specialize in Latin American and Latinx Cultural Studies and my research lies at the nexus of culture, urban space, and violence in the aftermath of the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996). These currents intersect in my first book project, entitled In and Out of the Peripheral Network City: Urban Spaces Written by Violence in Postwar Guatemala. I offer a new trope—peripheral network city [ciudad-red periférica]—to understand how the infrastructures of state violence coalesce with creative citizen strategies of documenting and countering such violence in literature and related cultural production. By attending to both historical trajectories and lived experiences that constitute postwar Guatemalan culture, my research argues that state-sanctioned violence reconfigures the city as a social imaginary. In this way, I contend, postwar Guatemala emerges as a focal point of Central/Latin America and other parts of the Global South where the aftermath of state violence continues to transform urban space and subjectivities in the 21^st century.

I am currently co-editing a special journal issue about the performative strategies of Central American LGBTQ+ people to affirm their right to space, both in the isthmus and the diaspora. I am also working on articles about postwar photography and literature from Guatemala and El Salvador. Much like my research, my teaching draws generously from Latin American Cultural Studies to promote linguistic proficiency and cultural competency, with the goal that my students further develop as thoughtful global citizens with a deep understanding of the relativity of their own cultures. To this end, I envision the classroom as an inherently community-oriented space where my students and I collectively think about the Spanish-speaking world through the lens of the L2 or Heritage Language.

Publications

• “The Fiction of Javier Payeras: Framing Discourses of Queerness in Postwar Guatemala.” Submitted to Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades.
• “Divas en huipiles y tacones altos: espacios urbanos de agencia para mujeres trans en la Guatemala de posguerra.” Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos 39. Forthcoming 2020.
• Co-editor and introduction, with John Petrus (Grinnell College). Special issue of Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos. (In)visibilidad en el istmo: Perspectivas queer y trans de Centroamérica. Forthcoming 2020.
• “Three Houses Behind Pollo Campero.” CentroMariconadas: A Queer and Trans Central American Anthology. Ed. Maya Chinchilla. San Francisco: Kórima Press. Accepted, forthcoming 2020.
• “From Artistic Artillery to Fully Automated Cultural Production.” Review of Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America, by Sophie Esch. Confluencia 35.1 (2019). Solicited Review, forthcoming.
• “Traversing the Zones, Transcending the Nonhuman: Urban Ecologies in Postwar Guatemala.” Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos 34 (2017): Web.
• “Rigoberta Menchú Visits Michigan.” Habla Guate (September 2017): http://hablaguate.com/articles/15464-rigoberta-menchu-visits-michigan.
• “El Gringo Chapín.” The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. Eds. Leticia Hernández Linares, Rubén Martínez, and Héctor Tobar. Los Angeles: Tía Chucha Press, 2017. 270-276.
• Twelve translations (poems and biographical information) in Women’s Poems of Protest and Resistance: Honduras (2009-2014). Spanish-English Bilingual Edition. Gen. Ed. Lety Elvir. Trans Ed. María Roof. Washington, DC: Casasola, 2015. Best Multi-Author Translated Poetry Book at the 2016 International Latino Book Awards.
• “The U.S. Dollar as a Transformative Agent of Cultural Identity in Ecuador: A Proposal.” SUNY Buffalo Romance Studies Journal 3.1 (2014): 55-65.