New Books in Latin American Studies

What can collaborative research with Colombian campesino leaders teach us about building peace? In this episode, I talk with Angie Lederach, author of Feel the Grass Grow: Ecologies of Slow Peace in Colombia (Stanford UP, 2023). Angie describes how a background in international peacebuilding led her to work with grassroots Colombian peacebuilders and how they co-constructed a research design drawing on the principles of Participatory Action Research. She explains how engaging in PAR affected her theoretical findings, as the concept of “slow peace” came out of social leaders’ frustrating engagements with a hurried state. Finally, she describes how both her ethnography and grassroots peacebuilding changed with the signing of a 2016 peace agreement, before sharing the ethnographic parable of the dying donkey.Alex Diamond is Assistant Professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Progress and development have long been important issues in anthropology and social sciences. Based on extensive archives and ethnographic fieldwork, Progress in the Balance: Mythologies of Development in Santos, Brazil (Cornell UP, 2023) addresses and assesses an anthropological theory of progress. Daniel Reichman documents and explains the contested meanings of progress, and reveals how this concept is deeply embedded in Brazil’s histories and socio-cultural contexts. Further, he investigates how any society can separate “progress” from plain old change and, if changes are constantly happening all around us, how and why certain events get lifted out of a normal timeframe and into a mythic narrative of progress.Each chapter in the book outlines a particular episode in Santos, a city undergoing an unprecedented period of economic and political turmoil, as it is represented in public culture, mainly through museums, monuments, art, sports, and public events. Drawing on narrative stories and the anthropology of myth, Reichman proposes a model that he refers to as a “clash of timescapes.” Progress in the Balance shows how the concept of “progress” requires a different temporal structure that separates sacralized social change from mundane historical events, offering analysts a new framework of understanding progress and development.Daniel R. Reichman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. His research focuses on cultural responses to economic change, especially the anthropology of trade and globalization in Latin America. He is the author of The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras, which was awarded 3rd prize in the 2012 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.Yadong Li is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the supernatural, hope studies, and post-structural philosophy (hauntology). More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Anyone interested in his research can contact him at yli88@tulane.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

A cultural imaginary is a structuring space through which collective understandings of cultural and society phenomena are formed, reproduced, and accepted as the norm. Reading the Walls of Bogota: Graffiti, Street Art, and the Urban Imaginary of Violence (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) uses graffiti and street art to explore the urban imaginaries of violence in Bogotá, Colombia. These artistic forms are produced and received in different ways in different areas of the city and offer an insight into citizens’ everyday experiences and perceptions of violence from the political, to the personal, to that of structural inequality. Through graffiti, in which critiques of memory, space, politics, and aesthetics are embedded, artists and their viewers form vernacular theories through which they interpret the world and the spaces they inhabit. By focusing on creative expression, Alba Griffin shows how Bogotá’s residents respond to imaginaries of violence, how they critique the norms, how they appropriate space to challenge or negotiate violence, and how they push back against inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Triumphant capitalism has in our time engendered a new global class that lives and works in a borderless world, beyond the reach of national politics or sovereign power. Or has it? In Rooted Globalism: Arab-Latin American Business Elites and the Politics of Global Imaginaries (Indiana University Press, 2022), Kevin Funk challenges the commonsensical view that today members of a global capitalist class have little or no need of national loyalty. Teasing the global apart from the transnational and de-national, Funk delineates a global capitalist ideal type, which he adopts as a heuristic for study of Arab-Latin American business elites. Through relational interviews he shows that global capitalism’s ostensible new class might be more rooted in place than either those who champion its achievements or who reluctantly take its existence for granted would have us believe. Evidence of a global capitalist class consciousness, he explains on this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, is hard to find.This is happy news, for two reasons. First, if business elites are subject to national politics after all then they can be taxed and regulated. Second, if global capitalism is less hegemonic and more fragmented than both its cheerleaders and critics say it is then it is vulnerable — not only to nativism and anti-globalism, but more optimistically to a different type of globalism from the one currently represented in airport terminals and business magazines. And if global capitalism is vulnerable then another globalism is possible.Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University where he co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network; and, a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Moisés Kopper's Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil's Public Housing (U Michigan Press, 2022) examines how communal idealism, electoral politics, and low-income consumer markets made first-time homeownership a reality for millions of low-income Brazilians over the last ten years.Drawing on a five-year-long ethnography among city planners, architects, street-level bureaucrats, politicians, market and bank representatives, community leaders, and past, present, and future beneficiaries, Moisés Kopper tells the story of how a group of grassroots housing activists rose from oblivion to build a model community. He explores the strategies set forth by housing activists as they waited and hoped for—and eventually secured—homeownership through Minha Casa Minha Vida’s public-private infrastructure. By showing how these efforts coalesced in Porto Alegre—Brazil’s once progressive hotspot—he interrogates the value systems and novel arrangements of power and market that underlie the country’s post-neoliberal project of modern and inclusive development.By chronicling the making and remaking of material hope in the aftermath of Minha Casa Minha Vida, Architectures of Hope reopens the future as a powerful venue for ethnographic inquiry and urban development.Moisés Kopper is Research Professor at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp.Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban life, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Negotiating Relief and Freedom: Responses to Disaster in the British Caribbean, 1812-1907 (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Oscar Webber is an investigation of short- and long-term responses to disaster in the British Caribbean colonies during the 'long' nineteenth century. Dr. Webber explores how colonial environmental degradation made their inhabitants both more vulnerable to and expanded the impact of natural phenomena such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. He shows that British approaches to disaster 'relief' prioritised colonial control and 'fiscal prudence' ahead of the relief of the relief of suffering.In turn, that this pattern played out continuously in the long nineteenth century is a reminder that in the Caribbean the transition from slavery to waged labour was not a clean one. Times of crisis brought racial and social tensions to the fore and freedoms once granted, were often quickly curtailed.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Today’s guest is Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s new book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Emergency takes nine words—“birds,” “wealth,” “caves,” “television,” “demons,” “migrations,” “love,” “the sun,” and “Mormons”—and weaves a rich transhistorical narrative about the Popul Vuh sacred narrative. In these pages, Garcia explores how this text emerged in conditions of historical violence and persisted through over three hundred years, becoming a touchstone for Mesoamerican religious studies, decolonial activism, and literary adaptation.Edgar Garcia is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His previous books are Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019). He has also served as the guest editor of Fence, a literary magazine. Written during the COVID pandemic, Emergency was published in 2022.John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Debbie Sharnak's new book, Of Light and Struggle: Social Justice, Human Rights, and Accountability in Uruguay (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) is an important and vibrant history of international and local activism in response to dictatorship from 1973 to 1985. Uruguayans suffered numerous human rights abuses under the repressive military government during this period. Activists, transnational social movements, and international policymakers both worked together and clashed as they pushed against the dictatorship and navigated the country back to a democratic government. Sharnak writes about these convergences and conflicts to provide a complex history of Uruguay and of human rights. Her book shows how the history of this small country can shed new light on the larger history of Latin America and international human rights. In this episode of the podcast, Sharnak, a professor at Rowen University, discusses her book and the research that went into it. She discusses the language of human rights and how it could unite disparate groups in common cause. Yet, narrow, unifying understandings of the term often left some experiences, such those of some Afro-Uruguaians, out of larger narrative. She discusses how such unity was difficult to maintain as the dictatorship ended and democracy returned to the country. Christine Lamberson, PhD, is a historian. Her research focuses on 20th century U.S. legal, political, and cultural history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Today I talked to Kathleen Osberger about her book I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile's Dictatorship, 1975 (Oribis Books, 2023).In 1975, Kathleen Osberger, who’d just graduated from Notre Dame University, flew to Chile to teach in a Catholic school in Santiago. She was assigned to live with several religious women, and when she arrived, was told that they would sometimes shelter dissidents who were wanted by the secret police. This was after the CIA assisted coup that overthrew democratically elected president, Salvador Allende in 1973. Augusto Pinochet then ruled Chile as a dictator, clamping down on unrest, journalists, and critics. Those who tried tried to protect some of these dissidents from detention, torture, disappearance, and death were considered traitors and received the same punishment. Kathy Osberger learned all this, but she still wasn’t prepared when the secret police came with a warrant for her arrest, forced her into a car, and handed her a blindfold. They soon let her go, but everyone knew they’d come back, and she had to disappear.Kathleen Osberger earned her B.A. at the University of Notre Dame, an M.A. from Maryknoll School of Theology, and an A.M. from the University of Chicago–School of Social Work Administration. Her life was shaped by volunteer experiences when she lived in San Miguelito, Panamá; Santiago, Chile; Chimbote, Perú and the South Bronx. In 1987 she began a seventeen-year relationship with the Maryknoll Lay Missioners as an instructor in their orientation to mission program and in 1993 she joined the University of Chicago Hospitals—Department of Psychiatry. Her work as a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist has centered on the issues of trauma and torture.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies