Lexington Books Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Nature, Gender, and Agency

Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Nature, Gender, and Agency analyzes child and adolescent protagonists in Latin American cinema. This book contends that child characters have taken on a critical representational role within Latin American cinema because of their position on the threshold between "nature" and "culture," which converts them into a focus of, and a limit to, state or colonial biopower. Rachel Randall provides a comprehensive examination of the key themes and developments in boys' and girls' cinematic representations since the adoption of children's rights discourses in the region. Recommended for scholars interested in Latin American studies, film studies, and cultural studies. Review "Rachel Randall's Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema [...] stands out as an exciting and original study, solidly grounded in historical and social research on the countries covered, and delivering a series of compelling readings of films ranging from the well-known to the little-studied. [The book contains] multiple valuable insights and emphases [...] from the sustained focus on gender, which complements well existing work in the field, to the attention to middle-class, as well as to more commonly studied underprivileged childhoods, and to Chilean film, in which childhood has been less studied. Randall's range in terms of primary material is impressive too: from film representations of indigeneity, to televisual culture; from documentary and animation to feature-length fiction, this is a rich and varied study which constitutes an important contribution to the field." --Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Nature, Gender, and Agency brims with crisp analyses and theoretical sophistication. As a highly accomplished treatise, Rachel Randall's book is bound to generate much interest among students and scholars alike of Latin American cinema and cultures, childhood studies, and film studies.--Bulletin of Hispanic Studies The corpus of films is geographically and generically diverse (including both fiction films and documentaries), and explores cinematic children from a variety of social, geographic and economic milieus; the theoretical frameworks are well chosen, solidly contextualized and smoothly integrated, as is relevant material on the social and political history of the countries in question. This is a clear and cogent book that makes a crucial contribution to the field, foregrounding questions of ethics and agency without eliding the child's difference from the adult as cinematic subject and scholarly object.--Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas In this skillful study of the representations and potential meanings of child figures and childhood in a fascinating range of contemporary films from Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, Rachel Randall provides extensive contextualisation (socio-historical, psychoanalytic, and theoretical) of the situations in which they were produced, as well as incisive and revealing analyses. She explores the ways in which these films, which range from conventional narratives to more experimental works and documentaries, portray children's subjectivity and how the child characters' status 'on the threshold' between nature and culture, innocence and knowledge, immaturity and maturity, comes to symbolize so much more.--Claire Williams, University of Oxford This is a highly accomplished book that makes a significant contribution to the field. Randall draws together in new and fruitful ways an impressive range of theories and approaches relating to the representation of the child in cinema. Her readings of the films are superbly nuanced and insightful.--Joanna Page, University of Cambridge About the Author Rachel Randall is Leverhulme Post-Doctoral Fellow in Portuguese and Spanish at the University of Oxford.