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Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru studies how literature, drama, film, and the visual arts contest the dominant narrative of national peace and reconciliation, as constructed by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Established in 2001, the Commission aimed to ‘investigate and make public the truth’ of the country’s twenty-year civil war, drawing upon homologous predecessors that provided a highly scripted model of truth-gathering and national healing. In this model, a predetermined collective mourning, catharsis, and reconciliation would move the nation forward in a consensually-determined fashion. Andean Truths shows that the Peruvian case proves internationally-endorsed models insufficient for arriving at the ‘truth’ of a national trauma that primarily affected disenfranchised ethnic groups, namely, the Andean Quechua speaking populations that accounted for the overwhelming majority of victims of the violence. Even as scholars recognize the importance of bringing multiple voices to the table in discussing post-Shining Path Peru, the question remains of what a more Andean-oriented transitional justice process might entail. Drawing on theories of decoloniality, intercultural communication and epistemological diversity (following scholars such as Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano and Boaventura de Sousa Santos), this book analyzes cultural products, from the theater of Yuyachkani to the narrative of Oscar Colchado Lucio, the art of Edilberto Jiménez, and other popular artistic responses, that highlight Andean understandings of the conflict and its aftermath. These cultural products challenge dominant understandings of the conflict and question Peru’s ability to overcome its collective trauma without seriously reconsidering prevailing cultural paradigms.

This book is a challenging new study about the production, spread, and use of understandings of national history and identity for political purposes in twentieth-century Argentina. Based on extensive research of primary and published sources, it analyses how nationalist views about what it meant to be Argentine were built into the country's long-drawn-out crisis of liberal democracy from the 1930s to the 1980s. Eschewing the notion of any straightforward relationship between cultural customs, ideas, and political practices, the study seeks to provide a more nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between popular culture, intellectuals, and the state in the promotion, co-option, and repression of conflicting narratives about the nation's history. Particular attention is given to the conditions for the production and political use of cultural goods, especially the writings of historians. The intimate linkage between history and politics, it is argued, helped Argentina's partisan past of the period following independence to cast its shadow onto the middle decades of the twentieth century. This process is scrutinized within the framework of recent approaches to the study of nationalism, in an attempt to communicate the major scholarly debates of this field with the case of Argentina.

This book studies the political role of the Chilean military during the years 1808–1826. Beginning with the fall of the Spanish monarchy to Napoleon in 1808 and ending immediately after the last royalist contingents were expelled from the island of Chiloé, it does not seek to give a full picture of the participation of military men on the battlefield but rather to interpret their involvement in local politics. The main categories deployed in this study are 1) armies, 2) politics and 3) revolution, and the three are presented with the purpose of demonstrating that, as Peggy K. Liss has claimed, after 1810 Spanish American public life ‘became militarized; and the military, privileged’. I argue that the Chilean military became privileged because the demise of the Spanish monarchy in 1808 made them protagonists of the decision-making process. In so doing, this book aims to make a contribution to the understanding of Chile’s revolution of independence, as well as to discuss some of the most recent historiographical contributions on the role of the military in the creation of the Chilean republic. Although the focus has been placed on the career and participation of Chilean revolutionary officers, this book also provides an overview of both the role of royalist armies and the influence of international events in Chile.

This is a study of the interactions between Indians and Spaniards in the Chocó throughout much of the colonial period, revealing the complexity of inter-ethnic relations in frontier regions. The book considers the changing relationships not only between Spaniards and Indians but also between factions of both groups, showing how Spaniards and Indians sometimes allied with each other against other ethnically mixed groups with different agendas.

This book explores the relations between globalization and the Caribbean since 1492, when Columbus first arrived in the region, to the present day. It aims to help change prevalent ways of thinking, not only about the Caribbean archipelago as a complex field of historical enquiry and cultural production, but also about the nature of globalization. It argues that the region has long been — and remains — a theatre of conflict between, as well as a site of emergence for, different forms of globalization. It thereby offers the opportunity to focus research and debate across the interdisciplinary spectrum by reflecting upon and re-imagining the idea of globalization in a specifically Caribbean context. It does so at a time when the Caribbean is urgently rethinking its own identity and place in a world where the Western economic model of globalization is more in question than ever.

How did Latin Americans represent their own countries as modern? By treating modernity as a ubiquitous category in which ideas of progress and decadence are far from being mutually exclusive, this book explores how different groups of intellectuals, between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, drew from European sociological and medical theories to produce a series of cultural representations based on notions of degeneration. Through a comparative analysis of three country case studies − Argentina, Uruguay and Chile − the book investigates four themes that were central to definitions of Latin American modernity at the turn of the century: race and the nation, the search for the autochthonous, education, and aesthetic values. It takes a transnational approach to show how civilisational constructs were adopted and adapted in a postcolonial context where cultural modernism foreshadowed economic modernisation. In doing this, this work sheds new light on the complex discursive negotiations through which the idea of ‘Latin America’ became gradually established in the region.

The diverse approaches to the Amazon collected in this book focus on stories of intimate, quotidian, interpersonal experiences (as opposed to those that take place between companies and nations) that, in turn, have resisted or else have been ignored by larger historical designs. This is why we propose a literary geography of the Amazon. In this space made out of historias, we will show the always already crafted, and hence political, ways in which this region has been represented in more “scientific”, often nationalizing histories. This includes, of course, understanding the “gigantic” discourses on Amazonia as rooted––if rarely discussed––in different quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The intimate interactions between one human being and another, or between men and animals, plants, or the natural space more generally as we see it, are not, as one might expect, comforting. Instead they are often disquieting, uncanny, or downright violent. This book argues that the Amazon’s “gigantism” lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness that inhabits its archive of historias in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.

Overseas department of France in Amazonia and ‘ultraperipheral region’ of the EU, Guyane (French Guiana) is at the juncture of Europe, the Caribbean and South America. This collection of essays explores historical and conceptual locations of Guyane, as a relational space characterised by dynamics of interaction and conflict between the local, the national and the global. Does Guyane have, or has it had, its own place in the world, or is it a borderland which can only make sense in relation to elsewhere: to France and its colonial history, for example, or to African and other diasporas, or as a ‘margin’ of Europe? This edited collection will be the first volume to study Guyane from multiple historical and contemporary perspectives. It subjects the enduring clichés and negative stereotypes regarding Guyane to critical examination. It addresses how and why discourse on this DOM has come to be characterised by paradoxes and lacunae, and suggests ways in which this can be redressed. Chapters explore geographical, literary and cultural ‘locations’ of Guyane, past and present. They challenge its relegation to the ‘periphery’, whilst also historicising the production of its marginal status.  Finally, the collection aims to outline possible future directions for research on Guyane.

This book is intended for not only students and academics who undertake research on the history of Mexico during the half-century prior to the onset in 1910 of the Mexican Revolution, but also the parallel community of specialists on the history of ideas, philosophy and science throughout Latin America in this period. Its principal focus is to revisit the influential thesis of the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea that the ideological group dubbed ‘the scientists’ by their opponents were guided by Positivism, particularly as interpreted by Herbert Spencer. It begins by reviewing previous research upon the formation and differentiation of ‘the scientists’, and the black legend which assumes that they legitimised the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Having established what Spencer himself believed and wrote, it analyses the prolific writings of two of the leading ‘scientists’, Francisco Bulnes and Justo Sierra. It explains the eclectic nature of their discourses, derived from the works of not only Spencer but also Charles Darwin, Auguste Comte and other European writers, which reached Mexico in a fragmented fashion. It concludes that, far from forming a homogeneous elite clearly committed to to a conservative insistence, derived from Spencerian Positivism, on political stability and modernisation, ‘the scientists’ had an ambivalent relationship with Díaz.

This book explores the ideological conflict between neoliberalism and nationalism that has been at the core of economic and political developments in Latin America since the mid-1980s. It focuses on Mexico, which offers a unique opportunity to study one of the ruptures in twentieth-century political thought that has come to define an era of unprecedented globalisation. The book examines how neoliberals dismantling the statist economy in Mexico under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994) confronted the dominant, official ideology upon which the country's development had hitherto been based: revolutionary nationalism. It also considers how intellectuals and the main political forces to the left and right of the PRI grappled with the issues generated by the climate of market reform, in a period when there appeared to be few ideological alternatives to it, and the broader effort to reconcile economic liberalism with revolutionary nationalism that Salinas was attempting. Showing that the case of Mexico during the 1990s had important implications for the study of nationalism, the book examines national responses to globalisation and the form taken by debates about the most appropriate vision of political economy in Latin America. The highly contested result of Mexico's 2006 election demonstrated the extent to which the ideological conflict between neoliberalism and nationalism remains unresolved.

The struggles for independence in Latin America during the first half of the nineteenth century were accompanied by a wide-ranging debate about political rights, nationality, and citizenship. This book investigates the neglected role of gender in that discussion. Examining women writers from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Colombia, it traces the contradictions inherent in revolutionary movements that, while arguing for the rights of all, remained ambivalent, at best, about the place of women. Through studies of both published and unpublished writings, the book reveals the complex role of women in shaping the vexed ideologies of independence.