Communes and the Venezuelan State (Social Movements in the Americas)
by Anderson Bean
Since 2006, Venezuela has witnessed an explosion of different forms of popular power and participatory democracy. Over 47,000 grassroots neighborhood-based communal councils and 3,000 communes have been constructed. In Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis, Anderson Bean offers a critical analysis of these experiments in popular and workers' power and their potential for societal transformation within and beyond Venezuela. Drawing on exte...
Acts of Repair (Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights)
by Natasha Zaretsky
Decolonial Perspectives on Entangled Inequalities (Anthem Studies in Decoloniality and Migration)
From Homemakers to Breadwinners to Community Leaders
by Norma Fuentes-Mayorga
The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town
by Robert S. Carlsen
This compelling ethnography explores the issue of cultural continuity and change as it has unfolded in the representative Guatemala Mayan town Santiago Atitlán. Drawing on multiple sources, Robert S. Carlsen argues that local Mayan culture survived the Spanish Conquest remarkably intact and continued to play a defining role for much of the following five centuries. He also shows how the twentieth-century consolidation of the Guatemalan state steadily eroded the capacity of the local Mayas to ada...
From the rise of dictator Rafael Trujillo in the early 1930s to the rule of his successor Joaquin Balaguer in the 1970s, women were frequently absent or erased from public political narratives in the Dominican Republic. Filling these silences, The Paradox of Paternalism shows that women were central to local, national, and international politics during this period. Women activists from across the political spectrum engaged with the state by working within both authoritarian regimes and inter-Ame...
This volume examines the experiences of São Paulo's working class during Brazil's Old Republic (1891–1930), showing how individuals and families adapted to forces and events such as urbanization, discrimination, migration, and World War I. In this unique study, Ball combines social and economic methods to present a robust historical analysis of everyday life along racial, ethnic, national, and gender lines.Drawing from both statistical data and primary sources such as letters, newspapers, and in...
Filtered through the lens of the North American and European media, the Caribbean appears to be a series of idyllic landscapes - sanctuaries designed for sailing, diving, and basking in the sun on endless white sandy beaches. Conservation literature paints a similarly enticing portrait, describing the region as a habitat for endangered coral reefs and their denizens, parrots, butterflies, turtles, snails, and a myriad of plant species. In both versions, the image of the exotic landscape overshad...
In Social Movements and Radical Populism in the Andes: Ecuador and Bolivia in Comparative Perspective, Jennifer N. Collins examines why the new left took the form of radical populism in Ecuador and Bolivia and how social movements were impacted by this development. Using a Laclauian approach, Collins argues that anti-neoliberal social movements provided the groundwork for populist identity formation. This book also offers a nuanced and insightful explanation for the decline of Ecuador's indigeno...
Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time (Critical Caribbean Studies)
by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann
This book uses a controversial criminal immigration court procedure along the Mexico-U.S. border called Operation Streamline as a rich setting to understand the identity management strategies employed by lawyers and judges. How do individuals negotiate situations in which their work-role identity is put in competition with their other social identities such as race/ethnicity, citizenship/generational status, and gender? By developing a new and integrative conceptualization of competing identity...
A landmark in Brazilian music scholarship, A Respectable Spell introduces English-speaking readers to the rich history of samba from its nineteenth century origins to its emergence as a distinctive genre in the 1930s. Merging storytelling with theory, Carlos Sandroni profiles performers, composers, and others while analyzing the complex ideologies their music can communicate in their lyrics and rhythms, and how the meaning of songs and musical genres can vary depending on social and historical c...
Contradictory Indianness (Critical Caribbean Studies)
by Atreyee Phukan
In this interdisciplinary work, Stacy J. Lettman explores real and imagined violence as depicted in Caribbean and Jamaican text and music, how that violence repeats itself in both art and in the actions of the state, and what that means for Caribbean cultural identity. Jamaica is known for having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, a fact that Lettman links to remnants of the plantation era-namely the economic dispossession and structural violence that still haunt the island...
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean (Critical Caribbean Studies)
by Linden Lewis, Francio Guadeloupe, Yvon Van Der Pijl, Nikki Mulder, Jordi Halfman, Guiselle Starink-Martha, Rose Mary Allen, and Lisenne Delgado
Yerba Mate (California Studies in Food and Culture, #79)
by Julia J S Sarreal
Bloom Spaces (Teaching Culture: UTP Ethnographies for the Classroom)
by Susan Frohlick
Tourism generates intense atmospheric relations between people and places. Exploring the complex nature of these relations, Bloom Spaces considers the experiences of women who travel to Costa Rica in search of health and wellness, and find that it leads to an unexpected but seemingly natural outcome: pregnancy. The book looks beyond pregnancy as the result of an isolated act between two people, and instead probes the ways that the reproductive experience resonates with powerful tourist imaginari...
Buyers Beware offers a new perspective for critical inquiries about the practices of consumption in (and of) Caribbean popular culture. The book revisits commonly accepted representations of the Caribbean from "less respectable" segments of popular culture such as dancehall culture and 'sistah lit' that proudly jettison any aspirations toward middle-class respectability. Treating these pop cultural texts and phenomena with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of...
In Cuba Was Different, Even Sandvik Underlid explores the views of Cuban authorities, official press, and Party members as they reflect back on the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European socialism. In so doing, he contributes to a better understanding as to why the Cuban system-often associated with Fidel Castro leadership-did not itself collapse. Despite the loss of its most important allies, key ideological referents, and even most of its foreign trade, Cuba did not embrace capitalism. The a...