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Democracy's checkered past and uncertain future in the developing world still puzzles and fascinates. In Latin America, attempts to construct resilient democracies have been as pervasive as reversals have been cruel. This book is based on a wealth of original historical documents and contemporary interviews with prominent political actors and analyses five centuries of political history in these paradigmatic cases of outstanding democratic success and abysmal failure. It shows that while factors highlighted by standard explanations matter, it is political culture that configures economic development, institutional choices and political pacts in ways that directly affect both democracy's chances and its quality. But it also claims that political culture is a dynamic combination of rational and normative imperatives that define actors' views of the permissible, shape their sense of realism, structure political struggles and legitimate the resulting distribution of power.
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Those who survived the brutal dictatorship of the Somoza family have tended to portray the rise of the women’s movement and feminist activism as part of the overall story of the anti-Somoza resistance. But this depiction of heroic struggle obscures a much more complicated history. As Victoria González-Rivera reveals in this book, some Nicaraguan women expressed early interest in eliminating the tyranny of male domination, and this interest grew into full-fledged campaigns for female suffrage and access to education by the 1880s. By the 1920s a feminist movement had emerged among urban, middle-class women, and it lasted for two more decades until it was eclipsed in the 1950s by a nonfemini...
Most discussions of socialist development within nation-states focus exclusively on the state, leaving civil society out of the picture. By looking into the realm of theater in two socialist countries, the author broadens this view.
An ethnographic account of indigenous artisans in Nicaragua and the complex ways they have understood and constructed their own identity from the period of the Sandanistas to the present.
Masaya, a provincial capital of Nicaragua, cultivates an aggressively traditional identity that contrasts with Managua’s urban modernity. In 2001 the city was officially designated Capital of Nicaraguan Folklore, yet residents have engaged in a vibrant folk revival since at least the 1960s. This book documents the creative innovations of Masaya’s performing artists. The first extended study in English of Nicaraguan festival arts, Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival is an ethnographically and historically grounded inquiry into three festival enactments during the Somoza, Sandinista, and Neoliberal periods: the carnivalesque torovenado masquerades, the transvestit...
At the nexus of politics, sociology, development studies, nationalism studies and Latin American studies, this work takes Nicaragua as a case study to engage and advance upon on Benedict Anderson's ideas on the origins and spread of nationalism.
Political Performances: Theory and Practice emerges from the work of the Political Performances Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research/Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche de Théâtrale. The collection of essays strives to interrogate definitions and expand boundaries of political performance. Members of Political Performances are from around the world and so approach the intersection of politics and performance from very different perspectives. Some focus on socio-political context, others on dramatic content, others on political issues and activism, and still others examine the ways in which communities perform their collective identity and political a...