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A World Torn Apart
This collection of essays derives from a conference on Violence, Culture and Identity held in St Andrews in June 2003. It is a contribution to the understanding of representations of violence in Latin American narrative. The collected essays are dedicated to the study of the problematic history of violence as a means of 'civilizing' the region: violence used by dictatorial regimes to eradicate the collective memory of their actions; violence as a result of the history of marginalizing segments of the population; sexual violence as an attempt at complete control of the victim. The essays establish a clear link between historical, political and literary constructs spanning the past five hundred years of Latin American history. Close readings of political texts, historical documents, prose, poetry and films employ identity theories, postcolonial discourse, and the principles of mimetic and sacrificial violence. The volume adds to the ongoing critical investigation of the relationship between Latin American history and narrative, and to the key role of representations of violence within that narrative tradition.
The Spatial Turn
This book analyses approaches to space, identifying commonalities, and explores how and why differences appear. It includes thirteen essays by authors from America, Canada, Europe and Latin America and will appeal to everyone conducting conceptual and theoretical research on space in geography and other related fields.
Territories of Conflict
This interdisciplinary volume investigates the cultural and political landscapes of Colombia through citizenship, displacement, local and global cultures, grass-root movements, political activism, human rights, environmentalism, and media productions.
Nature Fantasies
In this original study, Gabriel Horowitz examines the work of select nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American writers through the lens of contemporary theoretical debates about nature, postcoloniality, and national identity. In the work of José Martí, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos, Cesar Aira, and others, he traces historical constructions of nature in regional intellectual traditions and texts as they inform political culture on the broader global stage. By investigating national literary discourses from Cuba, Argentina, and Paraguay, he identifies a common narrative thread that imagines the utopian wilderness of the New World as a symbolic site of independence from Spain. In these texts, Horowitz argues, an expressed desire to return to the nation’s foundational nature contributed to a movement away from political and social engagement and toward a “biopolitical state,” in which nature, traditionally seen as pre-political, conversely becomes its center.
Good Victims
In Good Victims, Roxani Krystalli investigates the politics of victimhood as a feminist question. Based on in-depth engagement in Colombia over the course of a decade, Krystalli shows how victimhood becomes a pillar of reimagining the state in the wake of war, and of bringing a vision of that state into being through bureaucratic encounters. The book also sheds light on the ethical and methodological dilemmas that arise when contemplating the legacies of transitional justice mechanisms.
Underground Politics
How Colombian mining communities navigate state power in a context of criminalization and political neglect In the Chocó rainforests of Colombia, local and settler miners turn to gold as a means to get by and get ahead on the margins of capitalism. They eke out livelihoods while worrying about the declining richness of subsoils, their heightened persecution by state troops, the stigmatizing language of politicians, and the extortion of paramilitaries and guerrillas. Underground Politics follows the everyday sociopolitical life of this supposedly lawless gold frontier, revealing how gold-mining communities in Chocó navigate state power in a context of criminalization and political neglect. ...
State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Volume 1
The growth of institutional capacity in the developing world has become a central theme in twenty-first-century social science. Many studies have shown that public institutions are an important determinant of long-run rates of economic growth. This book argues that to understand the difficulties and pitfalls of state building in the contemporary world, it is necessary to analyze previous efforts to create institutional capacity in conflictive contexts. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the process of state and nation building in Latin America and Spain from independence to the 1930s. The book examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to build modern and efficient state institutions for more than a century - without much success. The Spanish and Latin American experience of the nineteenth century was arguably the first regional stage on which the organizational and political dilemmas that still haunt states were faced. This book provides an unprecedented perspective on the development and contemporary outcome of those state and nation-building projects.
Marijuana Boom
Before Colombia became one of the world’s largest producers of cocaine in the 1980s, traffickers from the Caribbean coast partnered with American buyers in the 1970s to make the South American country the main supplier of marijuana for a booming US drug market, fueled by the US hippie counterculture. How did Colombia become central to the creation of an international drug trafficking circuit? Marijuana Boom is the story of this forgotten history. Combining deep archival research with unprecedented oral history, Lina Britto deciphers a puzzle: Why did the Colombian coffee republic, a model of Latin American representative democracy and economic modernization, transform into a drug paradise, and at what cost?
Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement
Every year millions of people are displaced from their homes, livelihoods and communities due to land-based development projects. There is no limit to what can be called a ‘development project’. They can range from small-scale infrastructure or mining projects to mega hydropower plants; can be public or private, well-planned or rushed into. Knowledge of development-induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR) remains limited even after decades of experience and research. Many questions are yet unanswered: What is "success" in resettlement? Is development without displacement possible or can resettlement be developmental? Is there a global safeguard policy or do we need an international r...
Religion, Materialism and Ecology
This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what ‘materialism’ means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways. The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the Divine within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture...
