http://afdoug.wmblogs.net Ideas and Research Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:10:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Some Hispanic Studies majors instinctively gag when they hear the term "imagined community." There's a reason for drilling it into our heads, though: nations are social constructs and a good deal of politics, especially politics of migration, come down to how we imagine our nation. I've taken a look here ... http://afdoug.wmblogs.net/2008/12/19/imagined-communities-immigrants-transnationalism-and-the-spanish-language-media/ Roberto Bolaño is an dead Latin American novelist recently proclaimed the most influential of his generation. He wrote The Savage Detectives and 2666. Strangely, he is both canonical and vanguard; he publicly insulted most of his famous predecessors but has inherited their mantle. The attached essay (in Spanish) examines what Bolaño's canonization tells ... http://afdoug.wmblogs.net/2008/12/19/roberto-bolano-and-the-bastard-canon/ In this essay from last year (in Spanish) I outlined the course of scientific discovery presented in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and argued that Márquez blames colonial intervention for the lack of progress but expects the problem to disappear given time. The essay in Spanish: Ciencia ... http://afdoug.wmblogs.net/2008/07/09/colonial-science-in-one-hundred-years-of-solitude/ Economists have illuminated a number of interesting issues by using numbers--often dollars--to quantify things we don't normally think of numerically. Some people, however, find this offensive. What's the rub? Tyler Cowen uses a parable to explain the significance of money in Discover Your Inner Economist. According to Cowen, it's a ... http://afdoug.wmblogs.net/2008/07/09/stress-and-the-dirty-dishes-parable/ A friend mentioned to me yesterday that foreign direct investment in developing countries is correlated to corruption. We mused that the causation may run in either direction: perhaps corruption gives rich foreign investors an upper hand, or perhaps foreign investment creates opportunities for corruption. Of course, they could have a ... http://afdoug.wmblogs.net/2008/06/21/resource-curse/ As I mentioned in the previous post, Hispanic Studies usually analyzes cultural products (often narratives) to understand how they construct a system of meaning. In William and Mary's HS lingo, this is the "struggle for interpretive power"-- competing with other sources to have one's cultural products tell the definitive version ... http://afdoug.wmblogs.net/2008/05/30/the-hispanic-studies-perspective-on-economics/ The other day I was trying to further map out the intersection of my two majors, and I approached the problem like this: Economics is, at heart, the study of choices; Hispanic Studies is, ignoring the context of the Spanish-Speaking world, about cultural products, which are essentially about establishing meaning. ... http://afdoug.wmblogs.net/2008/05/27/the-economics-of-hispanic-studies/ The summer after my freshman year, I took a Monroe grant from the Charles Center at William and Mary and explored Don Quixote in Spain: "Although many of us are familiar with the universal themes in Don Quixote, some evidence suggests that it can also be read as a "national" novel ... http://afdoug.wmblogs.net/2008/05/18/don-quixote-universal-literature-read-as-a-national-novel/ Here's another one of my final papers from this semester. The basic idea is that dictatorships attempt to legitimize their power by associating themselves with hierarchical gender narratives. I approach the topic by examining the distinct approaches of two resistence plays: "Death and the Maiden" by Chilean Ariel Dorfman and ... http://afdoug.wmblogs.net/2008/05/08/dictatorship-resistence-and-gender/ Here's an Econ paper I just finished writing: amnesty_and_wages.pdf It's not particularly conclusive, but it takes a stab at the question of whether legal status increases immigrants' wages directly. http://afdoug.wmblogs.net/2008/05/07/legal-status-and-wages/