In the current "global" moment, the study of Latin American cinema has become insistently national -- a phenomenon fully explored in this collection of essays by some of the most interesting and innovative scholars of media and Latin American culture working today.The contributors to Visible Nations consider different national film and video histories in Latin America since the silent period. From the perspectives of feminism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, and reception theory, among others, they consider the styles through which -- and the ends toward which -- the nation has been represented, desired, and contested in films, film industries, and alternative video work in Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba. The result is nothing less than a rewriting of Latin American film history.This project begins with an ironic observation: in the current “global” moment, the study of Latin American cinema has become insistently national, struggling in the space between the residual and emergent metanarratives that have set the terms through which the entire region is understood and studied. I use “residual” and “emergent” to signal the concurrent presence and influence of two modes of understanding Latin American history as well as to suggest that one mode is becoming dominant as the other loses ideological force.