2020 Books published

Dr. Phillip Penix-Tadsen. Video Games and the Global South (ETC Press at Carnegie Mellon University, 2019). This new edited anthology aims to redefine games and game culture, from south to north. While video games are a quintessentially global technology, with game consumption, production and related practices taking place in virtually every country in the world today, players in different regions have received, created and even played video games differently, because cultural and national context impact the circulation and meaning of games in countless ways. Many geographical locales once considered part of the high-tech "periphery" are in fact home to longstanding and widespread technocultures with their own unique characteristics. This is readily evident in the contributions to this anthology, which examine the cultural impact of video games in regions including Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, Oceania and Asia.

Video Games and the Global South came together through a series of panels and workshops Dr. Penix-Tadsen organized for conferences including Society for Film and Media Studies in Chicago; Latin American Studies Association in Lima, Peru and Digital Games Research Association in Melbourne, Australia. Its eighteen chapters from thirty contributing scholars bring together perspectives from a range of disciplines, critical methodologies and theoretical approaches. Together, the anthology's contributors offer a clear view of how global technologies become locally situated, helping redefine how we look at games and game culture, from south to north. 

De La Celestina a la Farsa de la Costanza: La auto-modelación como lugar común (From La Celestina to Farsa de la Costanza: Self-fashioning as Commonplace). Madrid: Verbum Press, 2019. This book examines Stephen Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning in Fernando de Rojas Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea and Cristóbal de Castillejo's recently discovered Farsa de la Costanza. Dr. Rio connects self-fashioning with the studies of performance and grotesque realism in order to explore how identity formation influenced the works of Rojas and Castillejo. Themes studied include: the establishment of the Inquisition on the lives of converts, the role played by Rojas' Jewish ancestry in his social self-configuration, and Castillejo's court life and identity as a monk. Dr. Rio argues that the concomitances between La Celestina and La Farsa de la Costanza constitute fundamental elements that enable the examination of the various social and historical aspects of these works through the prism of self- fashioning, performance, and grotesque realism.