New Books in Latin American Studies

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

“There are Mexicans in Alaska?” This was the response Sara Komarnisky heard repeatedly when describing her research on three generations of transnational migrants who divide their time between Anchorage, Alaska and Acuitzio del Canje, Michoacán, Mexico. In her multi-sited ethnography, Mexicans in Alaska: An Ethnography of Mobility, Place, and Transnational Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), Komarnisky explores these migrants’ experiences of mobility—across space and time—and the processes by which they get used to this transnational way of life. This engaging book offers a persuasive case for reimagining how we think about immigration, identity, and national boundaries. Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment(Cornell 2011). Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S., and she is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To suggest a recent title or to contact her, please send an email to clane@fullerton.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 searching and richly textured history of the affinities and common origins of Latin American and North American liberation theologies, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press 2018) dives into the work of thinkers who understood that theology must must have something to offer to people suffering under oppressive systems. By offering sharp readings of the ideas of Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, Rosemary Ruether and many others, Lilian Calles Barger traces the parallels between the liberation theologies of Latin America, black thinkers, and feminists in the 1960s and 70s in response to extreme poverty, entrenched white supremacy, and the constrictions of patriarchal power. Theology from the perspective of elite white men reinforced ideas of freedom “defined by the individualism of capitalist economics,” and upheld the rifts in post-Enlightenment theology: “a sacred/secular split, a universal humanity, a private religious self, and ideological autonomy.” In response, Liberationists across traditions turned to a theological poetics that would express a “theology from below.” Trained and educated in traditional western theology, but drawing on theological resources outside the seminaries, liberation theologians worked to address the real conditions of subordinated peoples. Turning to social science, they found a discipline still working to think society along the grooves carved by theological thought, absorbing questions authority and community formation though scrubbed them of their religious aspects. Returning the church to concern over social and political life, liberationists recovered the resources of sociology and put them to theological use, in the process continuing to smash the wall between what we perceive as a secular thought, and what we understand as a theological thought, reconfiguring the theo-political ground and making “a singular American contribution” to our understanding of where politics and theology meet. Rather than taking a biographical or institutional lens to view the history of these theologies, Barger emphasizes “a web of interconnected and circulating ideas.” Lines of descent from “antecedent thinkers, social networks,” and snippets of “personal biography” all appear over the course of the book, but World Come of Age advances a cultural history that places religious ideas within the “overall frame of social thought,” where “one can see a persistent religious liberatory sensibility and examine how this sensibility converged with numerous intellectual and social movements.” The result is a study wide in scope and full of surprising connections, stark realities, and a compelling statement about “the import and ubiquity of religious ideas in modernity.” This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. A researcher and writer, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed podcasts Lore and Unobscured. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him with a taste for the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States. 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 new book reveals an incredible slice of Cuban-American history that’s been all but forgotten until now. Lisandro Perez‘s Sugar, Cigars and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York (NYU Press, 2018) tells the story of a vibrant Cuban émigré community in 19th-century New York that ranged from wealthy sugar plantation owners investing their fortunes in New York real estate, to working-class Cubans rolling cigars in Lower Manhattan decades before the industry took hold in Tampa. Cubans in New York had their own businesses, newspapers, and clubs, and many were involved in the struggle to liberate Cuba from colonial Spain. Among those New York-based political activists was the great hero and poet Jose Marti, who lived most of his adult life here. In fact, says Perez, a professor at John Jay College of the City University of New York in the department of Latin American and Latino/Latina studies, New York was the most important city in the U.S. for Cubans until 1960, when of course Miami became the destination for Cubans fleeing communism. This interview is part of an occasional series on the history of New York City sponsored by the Gotham Center at CUNY. Beth Harpaz is the editor for the CUNY website SUM, which showcases books and research from the CUNY community.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Jorge Coronado, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, examines photography to further the argument that intellectuals grafted their own notions of indigeneity onto their subjects. He looks specifically at the Cuzco School of Photography (active in the southern Andes) to argue that photography, in its capacity as a visual and technological practice, can be a powerful tool for understanding and shaping what modernity meant in the region. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American 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

Today we are joined by Antonio Sotomayor, Assistant Professor and Librarian of Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Sotomayor is the author of The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), which asks the question of how a colonial possession became a “sovereign international athletic presence.” In The Sovereign Colony, Sotomayor traces the history of Puerto Rican sports from its beginnings during Spanish rule, through the beginnings of American occupation and the promotion of American-style games, and into the solidification of the islands’ national identity through their athletic experiences in regional and international Olympic Games.  He illuminates the ways in which the colonial Olympism of Puerto Rico raised questions about nationalism, sovereignty, and colonialism.  For example, Sotomayor investigates a series of incidents centered on whether Puerto Rican athletes should compete under the Puerto Rican flag, the American flag, or something else entirely? In addition, Sotomayor does not limit his history to issues of colonial oppression and resistance; he shows a more complicated picture that includes actors from Puerto Rico, the United States, and around the world.  For example, he show how all three major political factions on the island – supporters of independence, autonomy, and statehood – manipulated island sports in order to promote their domestic political projects.  His examination features a wide range of fascinating sportsmen including Julio Enrique Monagas who supported Puerto Rican athletics as a piece of the island’s modernization effort.  The expansion of Puerto Rican sports also relied on wider geopolitical movements.  Olympic organizers admitted Puerto Rico, even permitting the island to have a politically linked Olympic Committee, because it meant the expansion of Olympism into the Caribbean.  Similarly, many American sportsmen supported Puerto Rican nationalism in sport as a way of promoting the global west during the Cold War. The Sovereign Colony will have resonance to scholars interested in nationalism, political sovereignty, the international Olympic movement, and the global Cold War.  (Many readers will also be interested in his depiction of Avery Brundage, who sympathized with Puerto Rican athletes and helped to promote the Puerto Rican Olympic Committee.)   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

The North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “the single worst trade deal” that the United States has ever approved. Trump’s assessment, like so many of his statements, isn’t quite the fact he’d like it to be. In study after study, economists have found that NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy ranges from relatively insignificant to mildly beneficial. So as the media follows the negotiations and the talking-heads talk, we once again find ourselves in the welter of not knowing what to believe. What we need—what it seems we always need of late—is someone we can trust to clarify the situation, someone who basis their analysis on facts, on research, on evidence, someone who cares not only about the truth of the matter, but who also has a moral compass we can admire. Today I interview Alyshia Gálvez, author of the new book Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico (University of California Press, 2018). She is this person. She approaches NAFTA with a wide and precise lens, examining not only the economics of the agreement, but also its impact on public health, social welfare, agricultural practices, migration patterns, government policy and so many other considerations that get overlooked when the focus gets narrowed to economics. She looks across the border and at the border itself, so we can understand how the lives of the Mexican people have changed in the twenty years since NAFTA began. Gálvez shows us that NAFTA is indeed a terrible deal, but in all of the ways that Trump doesn’t and seemingly can’t. She offers us an analysis guided by rigor, insight, thoroughness, and, above all, compassion for the lives of very people that NAFTA has destroyed. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017), David García reminds us that how culture is understood and interpreted not only reflects the political and social discourses of the day, but also shapes those discussions. Drawing on figures as diverse as academics like Melville Herskovitz, performers such as Duke Ellington, and those like dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham who filled multiple roles, García lays bare the ways that people in the Americas from the 1930s until the 1950s understood the African origins of black music and dance. He is particularly interested in how the discourse about African retentions in black diasporic culture intensified cultural, political, and social dichotomies: primal vs. civilized, science vs. magic, black vs. white, and most importantly, modernity vs. primitivity. García argues these concepts were defined in terms of each other through the discourse he analyzes, with the politically dominant groups reinforcing positive connotations with the ideas they identified with themselves. Proceeding in broadly chronological order, García begins with a critique of the intellectual foundations of the discipline that we now call ethnomusicology and explores how the approaches taken to African retentions in black music and dance by some of the field’s prominent figures were fundamentally influenced by scientific principles and Freudian psychology. Moving from academia to performance, García expands his argument by considering the rhetoric around black music and dance in the United States, the Caribbean, and Mexico as well as analyzing individual works and performances by Katherine Dunham, Asadata Dafora, Modupe Paris, Duke Ellington, and others. The book ends with a close reading of the cultural and political implications of the mambo, which was a transnational dance phenomenon in the early 1950s. Listening for Africa provides a dense, theoretically rigorous accounting of how the forces that shaped the production and analysis of black music and dance in the mid twentieth century also reinforced political and cultural oppression. David F. García is an Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research on black and Latin music in the United States has been published in MUSICultures, Journal of the Society for American Music and other journals. His first monograph, Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music received a Certificate of Merit from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 2014 and is also a Visiting Scholar at the Cristobal Díaz Ayala Collection of Cuban and Latin American Popular Music by the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Cuba’s grassroots revolution prevailed on America’s doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island’s achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation’s Cold War struggle with Washington. By forging ties with organizations such as the Venceremos Brigade, the Black Panther Party, and the Cuban American students of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and by providing political asylum to activists such as Assata Shakur, Cuba became a durable global influence on the U.S. Left. Drawing from extensive archival and oral history research and declassified FBI and CIA documents, this is the first multi-decade examination of the encounter between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. Left after 1959. By analyzing Cuba’s multifaceted impact on American radicalism, Latner contributes to a growing body of scholarship that has globalized the study of U.S. social justice movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Histories of banking and finance aren’t particularly well-known for being riveting, adventurous reads: they tend to be technical at the expense of being strongly narrative-driven. Peter James Hudson’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017) defies this stereotype. An examination of private lending in the Caribbean by North American bankers between the 1890s and the 1930s, Hudson tells a colorful, albeit at-times disturbing tale of a few American bankers who were able to operate virtually without restriction or regulation. Acting almost as freebooters, they dreamt up new practices to try out on Latin American governments, usually not to their benefit, while reinforcing many North American attitudes and stereotypes about Latin Americans, most of all racially. The result of this imperial lending was traumatic for Caribbean and Latin American governments. For much of this period, bankers enjoyed the official backing of the U.S. government, allowing them to operate with immunity and total security. Through President Taft’s policy of “Dollar Diplomacy,” they were able to operate as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. By making funds available to repressive governments, they helped to cement their place in power at the expense of their subjects, while the amount owed by these governments soon left them under the de facto control of banks and by extension the U.S. government. Ultimately, much of this system came crashing down with the Great Depression, which helped to expose these lending practices as dangerous and ill-regulated. Nevertheless, the effect on the region outlived these practices. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies