This volume explores how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas permeated every aspect of the continent’s cultural production at the turn of the century. We are interested not only in understanding how literature and the arts confronted the unprecedented penetration of global capital in Latin America, but also in exploring the ways in which rapidly transforming technological and labor conditions contributed to forging new intellectual networks, creating original discourses, exploring innovative forms of knowledge, and reimagining the material and immaterial worlds. This volume shows the new directions in turn-of-the-century scholarship that developed over the last two decades by investigating how the experience of capitalism produced an array of works that deal with primitive accumulation, transnational crossings, and an emerging technological and material reality in diverse geographies and a variety of cultural forms. The various contributions provide a novel understanding of the period as they discuss the ways in which particular commodities, intellectual networks, popular uprisings, materialities, and nonmetropolitan locations redefined cultural production at a time when the place of Latin America in global affairs was significantly transformed.

This introductory chapter poses the book’s main questions, surveys the literature on the Arab Spring, places the Arab Spring in historical and comparative perspectives, introduces the book’s explanatory framework and methodology, and provides an overview of the book. Of the countries involved in and affected by the Arab Spring protests, why was Tunisia the only country to embark on a procedural and consensual democratic transition? Why not Egypt? Why did the Bahraini monarchy call on outside military assistance to repress the protests, while the Moroccan monarchy quickly agreed to constitutional amendments? Why did Libya, Syria, and Yemen descend into internationalized civil conflicts? More broadly, what prevented a region-wide democratic transition? We present our thesis regarding the salience of type of state, civil society, gender relations and women’s mobilizations, and international influences in shaping transition possibilities and trajectories. Tables and figures illustrate the argument and situate the 2011 uprisings along a historical continuum of protest and mobilization in the MENA region.