About

Cara Kinnally is an Associate Professor at Purdue University, specializing in Latin American and Latinx literature and culture, with a focus on border studies and (post) colonial theory. She holds a combined Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures and American Studies from Indiana University, earned in 2013. Her research explores Mexican and Mexican American literature and culture, emphasizing colonial and postcolonial contexts. Kinnally's scholarly work includes contributions to understanding Latin American and Latinx cultural expressions, with a particular interest in colonial histories and contemporary issues. She is affiliated with the School of Languages and Cultures (SLC) and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) at Purdue, and she is involved in various academic initiatives related to her fields of expertise.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Art
• History
• Criminology
• Art history

Selected publications

• Cruelty and Violence in the Borderlands: Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant

  American studies · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Criminology
  • Psychoanalysis

  Cruelty and Violence in the Borderlands:Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant Cara Anne Kinnally (bio) Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's (2015) Oscar-winning film The Revenant fictionalizes the true-life story of frontiersman Hugh Glass and his struggle to survive after being severely mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead, without a gun or any other weapons, in the wilderness of U.S.-controlled northern Louisiana Territory (present-day South Dakota) in 1823.1 Like other westerns, the film builds up the myth of the self-sufficient, resourceful, and bold mountain man of U.S. folklore, here instantiated by the character of Glass.2 Glass is unequivocally the hero and the focus of the film. But The Revenant differs from more paradigmatic western films, which often celebrated westward expansion as a civilizing force that opposed the "savage" wilderness of the frontier, by instead critiquing many parts of this process.3 When compared to the historical archive of documents related to Glass's life and Michael Punke's novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge (2002), on which the film is loosely based, Iñárritu's version of Glass's life story deviates in important ways. Only in the film, for example, does Glass marry a Pawnee woman and have a son with her. Only in the film does Glass murder a military officer in order to defend his son during an attack on the Pawnee village in which they live. And only in the film do we see the kidnapping and rape of a Sahnish (Arikara)4 woman, which provokes the Sahnish to violently resist the incursion of white men into the region.5 These changes highlight the violence involved in modern nation-building, [End Page 29] including ethnic genocide, dispossession, forced displacement, sexual violence, exploitation of natural resources, and the establishment of the geopolitical and ethnoracial borders that helped to create a national "us" and an othered "them" and that disrupt Indigenous communities that do not adhere to these imposed new borders. Iñárritu's choice to make these and other changes to Glass's life story—to make Glass's relationship with the Indigenous communities in the region a central focus of the film—turns viewers' eyes, if only momentarily, to the margins of the settler nation-state and the Indigenous peoples who lived there during a foundational moment in U.S. history: the so-called exploration and settlement of the West, a process in which emergent capitalist enterprises, namely, fur trapping, were heavily involved, with the support of the U.S. government. In portraying a key period in U.S. nation formation, while simultaneously highlighting the violence against Indigenous communities that characterized that period, the film explores how the subalternization of certain people and groups is a product of modern capitalist nation-state formation. In this sense, the film comments on the contested construction of geopolitical, linguistic, racial, and cultural borders, the lasting implications of the construction of such borders, and how modern nation-states—and their borders—are built on and through physical and epistemological violence and colonization. I thus begin by examining The Revenant as a border film by exploring how the film creates a space of geopolitical ambiguity and cultural, racial, and linguistic mixing—all traits broadly associated with the idea of a borderland. However, as I will subsequently discuss, the film emphasizes not only the existence of this borderland but also the processes by which the modern U.S. nation-state creates borderlands and border dwellers. This process is characterized by and realized through cruelty and violence, which, according to Latin American cultural critic Jean Franco, are co-opted, rationalized, and openly embraced by nation-states as necessary methods that will ultimately help to create a cohesive and "modern" nation. I end by considering the transnational aspects of Iñárritu's cinematic oeuvre as a whole and explore what it might mean to understand Iñárritu himself as a type of border crosser, as other critics have suggested. While recent research on Iñárritu tends to examine him solely in the context of international and independent art house cinema or U.S. film history, to...

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gothic Geoculture: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Cuba in the Transamerican Imaginary, by Ivonne M. García

  New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • History
  • Art
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Oral Culture: Literacy, Religion, Performance

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature · 2019-01-25 · 2 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract While cultural critics and historians have demonstrated that print culture was an essential tool in the development of national, regional, and local communal identities in Latin América, the role of oral culture, as a topic of inquiry and a source itself, has been more fraught. Printed and hand-written texts often leave behind tangible archival evidence of their existence, but it can be more difficult to trace the role of oral culture in the development of such identities. Historically, Western society has deeply undervalued oral cultures, especially those practiced or created by non-Westerners and non-elites. Even before the arrival of the first printing presses to the Americas, starting with the very first encounters between Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the Americas in the late-15th and early-16th centuries, European conquerors understood and portrayed European alphabetic written script as a more legitimate, and therefore more valuable, form of history and knowledge-making than oral forms. Those cultures without alphabetic writing were deemed barbaric, according to this logic. Despite its undervaluation, oral culture was one of the principal ways in which vast numbers of Latinas/os were exposed to, engaged with, and exchanged ideas about politics, religion, social change, and local and regional community identity during the colonial period. In particular, oral culture often offers the perspective of underrepresented voices, such as those of peasants, indigenous communities, afro-Latinas/os, women, and the urban poor, in Latina/o historical, literary, and cultural studies. During the colonial period especially, many of these communities often did not produce their own European script writing or find their perspectives and experiences illuminated in the writings of the letrados, or lettered elites, and their voices thus remain largely excluded from the print archive. Studies of oral culture offer a corrective to this omission, since it was through oral cultural practices that many of these communities engaged with, contested, and redefined the public discourses of their day. Oral culture in the colonial period comprised a broad range of rich cultural and artistic practices, including music, various types of poetry and balladry, oral history, legend, performance, religious rituals, ceremonies, festivals, and much more. These practices served as a way to remember and share ideas, values, and experiences both intraculturally and interculturally, as well as across generations. Oral culture also changes how the impact of print culture is understood, since written texts were often disseminated to the masses through oral practices. In the missions of California and the present-day US Southwest, for example, religious plays served as one of the major vehicles for the forced education and indoctrination of indigenous communities during the colonial period. To understand such a play, it is important to consider not just the printed text but also the performance of the play, as well as the ways in which the audience understands and engages with the play and its religious teachings. The study of oral culture in the Latina/o context, therefore, includes an examination of how literate, illiterate, and semi-literate Latinas/os have engaged with, resisted, or repurposed various written forms, such as poetry, letters, theater, testimonios, juridical documents, broadsides, political treatises, religious texts, and the sermon, through oral cultural practices and with various objectives in mind. Oral culture, in all of its many forms, has thus served as an important means for the circulation of knowledge and the expression of diverse world views for Latinas/os throughout the colonial period and into the 21st century.

  PublisherDOI

• Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-12-13

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts traces the existence of a now largely forgotten history of inter-American alliance-making, transnational community formation, and intercultural collaboration between Mexican and Anglo American elites. This communion between elites was often based upon Mexican elites’ own acceptance and reestablishment of problematic socioeconomic, cultural, and ethno-racial hierarchies that placed them above other groups—the poor, working class, indigenous, or Afro-Mexicans, for example—within their own larger community of Greater Mexico. Using close readings of literary texts, such as novels, diaries, letters, newspapers, political essays, and travel narratives produced by nineteenth-century writers from Greater Mexico, Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts brings to light the forgotten imaginings of how elite Mexicans and Mexican Americans defined themselves and their relationship with Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Anglo America in the nineteenth century. These “lost” discourses—long ago written out of official national narratives and discarded as unrealized or impossible avenues for identity and nation formation—reveal the rifts, fractures, violence, and internal colonizations that are a foundational, but little recognized, part of the history and culture of Greater Mexico. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

  PublisherDOI

• Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts: Transnational Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century Greater Mexico

  Bucknell Digital Commons (Bucknell University) · 2019-05-17

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts traces the existence of a now largely forgotten history of inter-American alliance-making, transnational community formation, and intercultural collaboration between Mexican and Anglo American elites. This communion between elites was often based upon Mexican elites’ own acceptance and reestablishment of problematic socioeconomic, cultural, and ethno-racial hierarchies that placed them above other groups—the poor, working class, indigenous, or Afro-Mexicans, for example—within their own larger community of Greater Mexico. Using close readings of literary texts, such as novels, diaries, letters, newspapers, political essays, and travel narratives produced by nineteenth-century writers from Greater Mexico, Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts brings to light the forgotten imaginings of how elite Mexicans and Mexican Americans defined themselves and their relationship with Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Anglo America in the nineteenth century. These "lost" discourses—long ago written out of official national narratives and discarded as unrealized or impossible avenues for identity and nation formation—reveal the rifts, fractures, violence, and internal colonizations that are a foundational, but little recognized, part of the history and culture of Greater Mexico. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

  PublisherDOI

• Fragmented Histories, Racial Erasures, and Color-Blindness in Héctor Tobar's The Barbarian Nurseries

  Arizona journal of Hispanic cultural studies/Arizona journal of hispanic cultural studies · 2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Héctor Tobar's novel, The Barbarian Nurseries (2011), portrays Los Angeles as a city of contrasts, paradoxes, and fragmentation. This essay examines representations of architecture, language, and nostalgic objects in The Barbarian Nurseries as commentaries on not only this fragmentation of U.S. society but also what has been left out of cultural and historical narratives in the United States that renders them incomprehensible and fragmentary: race and racism. Somewhat paradoxically, Tobar shows how different forms of (racial) erasure help to create and sustain—not diminish or erase—racial hierarchies. Ultimately, this essay seeks to understand Tobar's discussion of the erasures of race and racism in The Barbarian Nurseries as a response to and critique of popular discourses and racial ideologies of color-blindness circulating in contemporary U.S. culture.

  PublisherDOI

• Race, slavery, and liberalism in Lorenzo de Zavala’s "Viage a los Estados-Unidos del Norte de América"

  LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · 2015-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In late 1829, Lorenzo de Zavala, an influential Mexican statesman, writer, and editor, fled Mexico and traveled to the United States as a political exile. In 1834 he published Viage a los Estados Unidos del Norte de América [Journey to the United States of North America], one of the earliest known meditations on U.S. democracy. While ostensibly written about the United States, Viage is directed at his fellow Mexicans and is intended as a tool for learning about democratic ideals and their potential realization\n\t\t\t\t in Mexico. In this article, I examine Zavala’s ideas about degeneracy and barbarism as presented through his discussion of slavery and slave-like imitation in both the U.S. and Mexico. Throughout his narrative, Zavala points to different types of slavery as part of each country’s past and present that continue to impede the realization of republican ideals and national democratic projects. I argue that Zavala uses a comparative mode,\n\t\t\t\t highlighting the similarities between Mexican and U.S. degeneracy. He thus presents both countries as young republics embroiled in similar fights for “civilization” as part of a hemispheric community moving away from barbarism and towards a broadly\n\t\t\t\t American concept of “progress.”

  Publisher

• Ambiguous Modernity, National Identities in Transition: Miguel De Carrion's Las Impuras

  Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2014-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, Doris Sommer interprets the romantic novels of nineteenth-century Latin America as allegories that helped both to write the new nation and to define a national identity; she maintains that the books fueled a desire for domestic happiness that runs over into dreams of national prosperity; and nation-building projects invested private passions with public purpose (7). As Sommer explains, it was after independence, in the mid- to late-nineteenth century that the novel (also called the Romance) emerged in Latin America. Sommer reads these novels of the nineteenth century as fictions--that is, they are interested in not only discussing the nation but also helping to construct the emergent national identity of their respective countries. Yet in Cuba, there is a very different history that has to be taken into account when attempting to discuss Cuban national identity. Unlike most of the other countries in Latin America, Cuba did not achieve full independence from Spain until the very end of the nineteenth century, in 1898. Therefore, although individuals living in Cuba had doubtlessly already begun to develop a sense of Cuban identity before independence, Cuba was still in the process of defining and constructing its newly recognized political and national identity in the first few decades of the twentieth century. It is also important to note the involvement of the United States in the independence--and in the economic, political, and development--of Cuba. Because of Cuba's late independence and its close involvement with the United States, therefore, the level of economic and material development in Cuba would have been very different during its formational years than in other Latin American countries that had emerged as new countries much earlier, in the nineteenth century. Sommer notes that marriage is an important concept in many of these novels because it often serves as an allegory for the nation; in these fictions, marriage becomes such a central concern and key element in these novels quite simply because marriages bridged regional, economic, and party differences during the years of national consolidation (18). Inextricably linked to the concept of marriage is the role of women, for it is the women who give birth to the new generation--the new nation--with a new sense of national identity. Considering this, it seems important that Miguel de Carrion decided to write two novels explicitly about women, Las impuras (1919) and Las honradas (1918), set in the turbulent years of Cuba's early nationhood, the Republican Period. In his book, The Logic of Fetishism: Alejo Carpentier and the Cuban Tradition, James M. Pancrazio notes that these two novels, Las honradas and Las impuras, appear in a moment of cultural crisis in which national identity was hotly debated among the country's intellectuals (71). It seems no coincidence that Carrion is writing during a moment of such ambivalence and open contemplation (and critique) of the nation. Just like the fictions that Sommer discusses in her book, Carrion's novels also voice concerns, through their characters and narrators, regarding Cuban national identity. Although I will be focusing on Las impuras, I argue that both of Carrion's novels, Las impuras and Las honradas, form a new type of for Cuba (although perhaps a foundational fiction gone wrong); they contemplate the future of the new nation and examine the newly emerging sense of nationalism in Cuba. However, these novels contemplate and envision nationalism and the new nation in a very different manner than the nineteenth-century fictions that Sommer discusses. Las impuras, in particular, examines not only the Cuban nation, but also its relation to modernity and modern consumer culture, which are important parts of this new nation's identity in the early twentieth century. …

  Publisher

Education

• Ph.D., Spanish and Portuguese

  Indiana University

  2013

• M.A., Spanish and Portuguese

  Indiana University

  2007

• B.A.

  Augustana College

  2005