New Books In Latin American Studies

One of the great puzzles of electoral politics is how parties that commit mass atrocities in war often win the support of victimized populations to establish the postwar political order. Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Dr. Sarah Zuckerman Daly traces how parties derived from violent, wartime belligerents successfully campaign as the best providers of future societal peace, attracting votes not just from their core supporters but oftentimes also from the very people they targeted in war. Drawing on more than two years of groundbreaking fieldwork, Dr. Daly combines case studies of victim voters in Latin America with experimental survey evidence and new data on postwar elections around the world. She argues that, contrary to oft-cited fears, postconflict elections do not necessarily give rise to renewed instability or political violence. Daly demonstrates how war-scarred citizens reward belligerent parties for promising peace and security inst

Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that radical efforts to transform the social and geopolitical order trigger intense counterrevolutionary conflict, which initially threatens regime survival, but ultimately fosters the unity and state-building that supports authoritarianism. Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University. Lucan Way is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he co-directs the Petro Jacyk Program for the Stud

Common understandings drawn from biblical references, literature, and art portray deserts as barren places that are far from God and spiritual sustenance. In our own time, attention focuses on the rigors of climate change in arid lands and the perils of the desert in the northern Mexican borderlands for migrants seeking shelter and a new life. Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain (U Arizona Press, 2022) foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, for whom the desert was anything but barren or empty. Instead, they nurtured and harvested the desert as a bountiful and sacred space. Drawing together historical texts and oral testimonies, archaeology, and natural history, author Cynthia Radding develops the relationships between people and plants and the ways that Indigenous people sustained their worlds before European contact through the changes set in motion by Spanish encounters, highlighting the long process of colonial conflicts a

Philip Nanton's new book Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press, 2022) follows the life and work of Shake Keane, the peripatetic and creative poet and musician from St. Vincent. Keane was an influential figure in the 1960s London jazz scene, worked briefly for the government on his home island, and moved to New York where he built lasting relationships, all the while creating an extensive discography and numerous publications. Nanton's considerations of Keane's contributions to freeform jazz as well as his innovative approach to poetry will inspire readers to seek out the sounds and words he left behind. Alejandra Bronfman is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In 1967, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez published his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Because of that book, he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a story about life, death, endings, and beginnings. It is a novel that invites its readers to think about their own past, and accept the complex and mysterious forces that have shaped them. It calls into question our relationship to nostalgia, and the role memory plays in shaping our futures. Héctor Hoyos is an Associate Professor of Latin American literature and culture at Stanford University. He is the author of Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname (U Toronto Press, 2021) explores how ideas of self-knowledge and identity arise from a unique set of rituals in Suriname, a postcolonial Caribbean nation rife with racial and religious suspicion. Amid competition for belonging, political power, and control over natural resources, Surinamese Ndyuka Maroons and Hindus look to spirit mediums to understand the causes of their successes and sufferings and to know the hidden minds of relatives and rivals alike. But although mediumship promises knowledge of others, interactions between mediums and their devotees also fundamentally challenge what devotees know about themselves, thereby turning interpersonal suspicion into doubts about the self. Through a rich ethnographic comparison of the different ways in which Ndyuka and Hindu spirit mediums and their devotees navigate suspicion, Suspect Others shows how present-day Caribbean peoples come to experience selves that defy concepts of per

Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration (U Texas Press, 2022), documents a revealing irony in the latter sort: internal migration often is global in character, motivated by foreign affairs and international economic integration, and it is no less transformative than its cross-border analog. Iván Sandoval-Cervantes spent nearly two years observing and interviewing migrants from the rural Oaxacan town of Santa Ana Zegache. Many women from the area travel to Mexico City to work as domestics, and men are encouraged to join the Mexican military to fight the US-instigated “war on drugs" or else leave their fields to labor in industries serving global supply chains. Placing these moves in their historical and cultural context, Sandoval-Cervantes discovers that migrants' experiences dramatically alter their conceptions of gender, upsetting their traditional notions of masculinity an

Societies that are throwing off the yoke of authoritarian rule and beginning to build democracies face a daunting question: should they punish the representatives of the ancien regime or let bygones be bygones? In her interview, Professor Ruti Teitel talks both about these choices and more broadly about transitional justice as a field. Her book, Transitional Justice, published in year 2000 with Oxford University Press, takes this question to a new level with an interdisciplinary approach that challenges the very terms of the contemporary debate. The book explores the recurring dilemma of how regimes should respond to evil rule, arguing against the prevailing view favoring punishment, yet contending that the law plays a profound role in periods of radical change. In her interview, Teitel also touches on the growth of transitional justice as a field, the challenges to redress the past faced by Latin America, South Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as North America, the ways in which the International

Tens of thousands of Palestinians migrated to the Americas in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. By 1936, an estimated 40,000 Palestinians lived outside geographic Palestine. Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return Before 1948 (Stanford UP, 2022) is the first book to explore the history of Palestinian immigration to Latin America, the struggles Palestinian migrants faced to secure Palestinian citizenship in the interwar period, and the ways in which these challenges contributed to the formation of a Palestinian diaspora and to the emergence of Palestinian national consciousness. Nadim Bawalsa considers the migrants' strategies for economic success in the diaspora, for preserving their heritage, and for resisting British mandate legislation, including citizenship rejections meted out to thousands of Palestinian migrants. They did this in newspapers, social and cultural clubs and associations, political organizations and committees, and in hundreds

Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the public to answer difficult questions about their identity by looking to the genome. At a time of intensified interest in issues of race and racism, the burgeoning influence of corporations like AncestryDNA and 23andMe has sparked debates about the commodification of identity, the antiracist potential of genetic science, and the promises and pitfalls of using DNA as a source of "objective" knowledge about the past.  Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) engages these debates by looking at the ways genomic ancestry testing has been used in Brazil and the United States to address the histories and legacies of slavery, from personal genealogical projects to collective racial politics. Reckoning with the struggles of science versus capitalism, "race-blind" versus "race-positive" public policies, an

Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. While religious institutions sponsor a number of these initiatives, many are implemented within the secular framework of global health. In Where They Need Me: Local Clinicians and the Workings of Global Health in Haiti (Cornell UP, 2022), Pierre Minn illustrates the divergent criteria that actors involved in global health use to evaluate interventions' efficacy through examining the work of Haitian health professionals in humanitarian aid encounters. Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrative staff are hired to carry out these global health programs, distribute or withhold resources, and produce accounts of interventions' outcomes. In their roles as intermediaries, Haitian clinicians are expected not only to embody the humanitarian projects of foreign funders and care for their impoverished patients but also to act as sources of support for their own kin networks, while negotiating their future prospects in a climate

In terms of its popularity, as well as its production, chocolate was among the first foods to travel from the New World to Spain. Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature (U Toronto Press, 2021) considers chocolate as an object of collective memory used to bridge the transatlantic gap through Spanish literary works of the early modern period, tracing the mention of chocolate from indigenous legends and early chronicles of the conquistadors to the theatre and literature of Spain. The book considers a variety of perspectives and material cultures, such as the pre-Colombian conception of chocolate, the commercial enterprise surrounding chocolate, and the darker side of chocolate's connections to witchcraft and sex. Encapsulating both historical and literary interests, Chocolate will appeal to anyone interested in the global history of chocolate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supporting

As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and affordable alternate energies has become an increasing priority in the twenty-first century. However, one nation has already been producing such a fuel for almost a century: Brazil. Its sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world. Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford UP, 2022) offers the first full historical account of the industry's origins. The Brazilian government mandated a mixture of ethanol in the national fuel supply in the 1930s, and the success of the program led the military dictatorship to expand the industry and create the national program Proálcool in 1975. Private businessmen, politicians, and national and international automobile manufacturers together leveraged national interests to support this progr

In Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity (Duke University Press, 2017), David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate change has yet to be seen as a moral issue. He examines the forces that render the use of fossil fuels ordinary and therefore exempt from ethical evaluation. Hughes centers his analysis on Trinidad and Tobago, which is the world's oldest petro-state, having drilled the first continuously producing oil well in 1866. Marrying historical research with interviews with Trinidadian petroleum scientists, policymakers, technicians, and managers, he draws parallels between Trinidad's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave labor energy economy and its contemporary oil industry. Hughes shows how both forms of energy rely upon a complicity that absolves producers and consumers from acknowledging the immoral nature of each. He passionately argues that like slavery, producing oil is a moral choice and that oil is at its most dangerous when it is accepted as an ordinary part of e

Ken Chitwood’s book The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean (Lynn Rienner Publishers Inc, 2021) is a provocation to its readers to include Latin American and Caribbean Muslim histories and contemporary expressions of piety in our studies of Islam and Muslim societies, particularly those committed to the theorization of global Islam. The book synthesizes histories and scholarship of Latin American and Caribbean Muslim’s narratives, but also draws on ethnographic study conducted across the hemisphere to provide complex textures and layers to how Muslim identities are constructed and negotiated in diverse regions of Brazil, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba and much more. The first half of the book maps historical lineages and conjectures of Muslim histories and claims that inform Latin American and Caribbean Muslim imaginations, such as of potential pre-Columbian contact, and connections with Spain, as well as the enduring legacies of enslaved African Muslims across the Black Atlantic and

In Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity (Routledge, 2021), June Carolyn Erlick explores the relationship between natural disasters and civil society, immigration and diaspora communities and the long-term impact on emotional health. Natural disasters shape history and society and, in turn, their long-range impact is determined by history and society. This is especially true in Latin America and the Caribbean, where climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of these extreme events. Ranging from pre-Columbian flooding in the Andes to the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, this book focuses on long-range recovery and recuperation, rather than short-term disaster relief. Written in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, the author shows how lessons learned about civil society, governance, climate change, inequality and trauma from natural disasters have their echoes in the challenges of today’s uncertain world. June Carolyn Erlick is the Editor-in-Ch

In The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021), Aisha Khan explores how colonial categories of race and religion together created identities and hierarchies that today are vehicles for multicultural nationalism and social critique in the Caribbean and its diasporas. When the British Empire abolished slavery, Caribbean sugar plantation owners faced a labor shortage. To solve the problem, they imported indentured “coolie” laborers, Hindus and a minority Muslim population from the Indian subcontinent. Indentureship continued from 1838 until its official end in 1917. The Deepest Dye begins on post-emancipation plantations in the West Indies—where Europeans, Indians, and Africans intermingled for work and worship—and ranges to present-day England, North America, and Trinidad, where colonial-era legacies endure in identities and hierarchies that still shape the post-independence Caribbean and its contemporary diasporas. Aisha Khan focuses on the contested religious

In Chingona: Owning Your Inner Badass for Healing and Justice (Broadleaf Books, 2022), Mexican American activist, scholar, and podcast host Alma Zaragoza-Petty helps us claim our inner chingona, a Spanish term for badass woman. For all the brown women the world has tried to conquer, badassery can be an asset, especially when we face personal and collective trauma. Working for change while preserving her spirit, a chingona repurposes her pain for the good of the world. She may even learn that she belongs to a long line of chingonas who came before her--unruly women who used their persevering energy to survive and thrive. As a first-generation Mexican American, Zaragoza-Petty narrates in riveting terms her own childhood, split between the rain-soaked beauty of her grandparents' home in Acapulco and a harsh new life as an immigrant family in Los Angeles. She describes the chingona spirit she began to claim within herself and leads us toward the courage required to speak up and speak out against oppressive system

Sarah T. Hines's Water for All Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia (University of California Press, 2021) chronicles how Bolivians democratized water access, focusing on the Cochabamba region, the country's third largest city and most important agricultural valley. Covering the period from 1879 to 2019, Hines examines the conflict over control of the region's water sources, showing how communities of water users increased supply and extended distribution through collective labor and social struggle. Through analysis of a wide variety of sources from agrarian reform case records to oral history interviews, Hines investigates how water dispossession in the late nineteenth century and reclaimed water access in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries prompted, shaped, and strengthened popular and indigenous social movements. The struggle for democratic control over water culminated in the successful Water War uprising in 2000, a decisive turning point for Bolivian politics. This story offers le

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African