New Books in Latin American Studies

As overseas departments of France, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are frequently described as anomalies within the postcolonial Caribbean. Yet in reality, as Yarimar Bonilla argues in her new book Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the majority of Caribbean states are in fact non-sovereign. Moreover, even for those nations that are nominally independent, their sovereignty is nonetheless continually compromised by the foreign influence that comes with globalization. Thus, the Caribbean as a whole is a region where non-sovereignty is the dominant political status, requiring alternative political frameworks that move beyond identifying sovereignty as the inevitable and necessary result of decolonization. Bonilla calls this process of imagining and testing out these new frameworks “non-sovereign politics.” Non-Sovereign Futures examines the emergence of non-sovereign politics through an ethnography of labor activists in Guadeloupe. Whereas union activists had explicitly nationalist agendas in the 1950s and 1960s, by the early 2000s, sovereignty was no longer the terrain on which activists made claims upon the state. Bonilla provides a compelling analysis of the ways that Guadeloupean labor activists disrupted island life through a series of labor and general strikes, engaged and shaped the historical legacies of slavery and emancipation, and transformed their own personal political selves. Though these activists frequently expressed disappointment with the results of these strikes, Bonilla insists that their true accomplishment was in imagining new possibilities for making claims upon the French state that were no longer bound to the unsatisfying question of sovereignty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

It’s easy to conjure images of paradise when thinking of the Caribbean. The region is know for its lovely beaches, temperate weather, and gorgeous landscapes. For the people who live there, however, living in paradise means dealing with tourists, inequality, exploitation, and corruption. While many scholars have published critiques of Caribbean tourism ranging from measured to withering, the voices of Caribbean people, living in the region or abroad, are rarely evident. Angelique V. Nixon‘s Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (U Press of Mississippi, 2015 ) explores the many ways in which Caribbean authors, artists, workers, filmakers, educators and activists have understood, worked with, and challenged the foundations of a tourist economy. For more information about the author’s work, follow her on Facebook (Angelique V. Nixon), Twitter and Instagram @sistellablack, blog, and visit her staff page on the IGDS website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

What are the alternatives to the current neo-liberal cultural settlement prevailing in much of the global north? In To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture: The Cultural Policy of The Cuban Revolution (PM Press, 2015), Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, from The Centre for Cultural Change, argues that this question can be addressed by learning from the cultural policy of the Cuban revolution. The book draws on a wealth of archival material, coupled with the theoretical framework of Marxist Humanism, to give a detailed picture of the revolutionary period on the island and chart the lessons from that era. The book introduces the key policy documents and events, along with examples from a variety of cultural forms, including a detailed engagement with the role of film and cinema in the revolutionary era. The book will be essential reading for cultural studies and cultural policy scholars, alongside anyone seeking an alternative vision of culture’s social role. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Malick Ghachem‘s recent book The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012) takes a long look at Haiti’s colonial history on the legal questions around slavery. In particular, he traces the implementation of the Code Noir, France’s earliest attempt to impose a legal structure on its American colonies’ plantation system. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Code ostensibly regulated how masters and slaves related to one another. Provisions in the Code sought to keep a strong colonial economy going, which meant limiting how much control an owner had over enslaved people. This produced areas of tension between imperial officials wanting to rein in abuse, and planters desire for total control over their laborers. At the same time, it created a legal consciousness for enslaved people who would eventually use the terms of the Code Noir in their insurgency turned revolution. Ghachem’s account adds rich complexity to our understanding of why the Haitian Revolution occurred. Rather than see it as a novel burst of enslaved action, Ghachem shows how the Revolution was part of a much longer tradition, anchored in the laws of slavery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Dr. Edmund Hamann, Dr. Stanton Wortham, Dr. Enrique G. Murillo (Eds.) have provided a fascinating and expansive volume on Latino education in the US that features an array of scholars from around the world, entitled Revisiting Education in the New Latino Diaspora (Information Age Publishing, 2015), part of the Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies series. This volume is actually an in-depth update from a pervious book, Education in the New Latino Diaspora, with new demographics, lenses, and perspectives, on new trends and happenings in this ever-changing space. Dr. Hamann joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Ruben Flores is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. His book Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) is the winner of the 2015 book award of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Flores recast the long U.S. civil rights movement by framing it within the exchange of ideas between Mexican and U.S. pragmatists. In a thoroughly research transnational history he demonstrates how post-revolutionary Mexican reformers adopted John Dewey’s pragmatism and Franz Boas’s cultural relativism in fostering assimilation of diverse native people into a pan-ethnic republic. Mexican educators Moises Saenzand Rafael Ramirez both studied under Dewey at Columbia University and were eager to apply his philosophy at home. In turn, U.S. reformers looked to Mexico’s scientific state as a living laboratory and a model for assimilating native people and Hispanics of the southwest, and blacks in the south into the “beloved community.” American educator George I. Sanchez, the psychologist Loyd Tireman, and the anthropologist Ralph L. Beals applied what they learned from Mexico’s three-tiered rural education program, administrative structure, and the concept of the Mexican “melting pot” to post-world war II school desegregation and civil rights battles in the U.S. As radical liberals, they believed in the power of government and education embodied in Mexico as effective in fostering cross-ethnic cooperation and a common vision. Flores has skillfully demonstrated how “backroads” intellectuals with a mutual desire for national unity and the preservation of local difference, along with a pragmatic belief in the connection between thought and action, crossed borders and fueled civil rights gains in the U.S. 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 Building A Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (UNC Press, 2014), Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis Sonia Song-Ha Lee challenges two common misperceptions surrounding the Civil Rights Movement. The first is the presumption that Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans played marginal roles in the advancement of civil rights and social justice causes, and second, that the aims and methods of Latinos diverged from those of African Americans preventing the two groups from building interracial coalitions and cooperating in their pursuit of racial and socioeconomic justice. Focusing on the social and political context of postwar New York City, Dr. Lee describes the issues, people, and organizations that were central in establishing cross-racial coalitions between Puerto Rican and African American parents, students, and activists. Realizing their shared struggle against racism, poverty, and marginalization, Professor Lee argues that Puerto Ricans and African Americans developed an “overlapping” sense of ethno-racial identity in which notions of blackness and Latinidad were “intertwined and mutually reinforced” through social and political activism. 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 the 1850s, when the majority of the population of Colombia (known then as New Granada) embraced the emancipation of the remaining 17,000 people still enslaved, the lettered elite quickly tied emancipation to emerging ideas of universal citizenship in the Colombian republic. Yet there was no agreement over the rights that emancipatory citizenship would provide. Jason McGraw explores the political struggles over citizenship–and the recognition of that citizenship–in the six decades after emancipation in his book, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (UNC Press, 2014). Combining social, political, and intellectual history, McGraw carefully shows how lettered elites, who mostly succeeded in eliminating illiterate Colombians from formal politics, never managed to silence fully the rich vernacular politics of the working classes. In the process, The Work of Recognition argues for the centrality of Afro-Colombians, the Caribbean region, and the legacy of emancipation to Colombian national political struggles of the nineteenth century and the emergence of robust labor politics in the early twentieth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

After the emancipation of slavery in the late nineteenth century, Afro-Brazilians moved to cities like Rio de Janeiro in search of employment. Because of the lack of opportunity and a shortage of resources, Brazilians set up their own housing arrangements on the hillsides above the city. These neighborhoods are known... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

As slavery came to an end in the Caribbean’s British colonies, officials and local reformers began to worry about how and whether they would convince their newly freed workforce to continue working. More specifically, they worried about underpopulation, and whether the formerly enslaved population was reproducing quickly enough. This was the source of instruments of surveillance such as the census, as well policies and institutions meant to ensure the continuing reproductive health of the populace. This is the point of departure for Juanita De Barros‘ terrific book Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery (UNC Press, 2014) as it explores the dynamics and the multiple actors involved, including poor women, Caribbean reformers, midwives, colonial officials and many others. De Barros offers an innovative way to understand the everyday lives of Caribbean women as she explores the debates and policies centered on sex, health and colonial policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies