Description:
Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History is a collection that embraces a new social and cultural history of Latin America that is not divorced from politics and other arenas of power. True to the intellectual vision of Brazilian historian Emilia Viotti da Costa, one of Latin America’s most distinguished scholars, the contributors actively revisit the political - as both a theme of historical analysis and a stance for historical practice - to investigate the ways in which power, agency, and Latin American identity have been transformed over the past few decades.

Taking careful stock of the state of historical writing on Latin America, the volume delineates current historiographical frontiers and suggests a series of new approaches that focus on several pivotal themes: the construction of historical narratives and memory; the articulation of class, race, gender, sexuality, and generation; and the historian’s involvement in the making of history. Although the book represents a view of the Latin American political that comes primarily from the North, the influence of Viotti da Costa powerfully marks the contributors’ engagement with Latin America’s past. Featuring a keynote essay by Viotti da Costa herself, the volume’s lively North-South encounter embodies incipient trends of hemispheric intellectual convergence.


CONTENTS:

Acknowledgments......vii

I. The Politics of Writing Latin American History

Gilbert M. Joseph: Reclaiming ‘the Political’ at the Turn of the Millenniu......3

Emilia Viotti da Costa: New Publics, New Politics, New Histories: From Economic Reductionism to Cultural Reductionism – in Search of Dialectics......17

Steve J. Stern: Between Tragedy and Promise: The Politics of Writing Latin American History in the Late Twentieth Century......32

II. The Contestation of Historical Narratives and Memory

Barbara Weinstein: The Decline of the Progressive Planter and the Rise of Subaltern Agency: Shifting Narratives of Slave Emancipatin in Brazil......81

Mary Ann Mahony: A Past to Do Justice to the Present: Collective Memory, Historical Representation, and Rule in Bahia’s Cacao Area......102

Jeffrey L. Gould: Revolutionary Nationalism and Local Memories in El Salvador......138

III. Articulating the Political: The Intersection of Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality and Generation

Diana Paton: The Flight from the Fields Reconsidered: Gender Ideologies and Women’s Labor After Slavery in Jamaica......175

Greg Grandin: A More Onerous Citizenship: Illness, Race, and Nation in Republican Guatemala......205

Thomas Miller Klubock: Nationalism, Race, and the Politics of Imperialism: Workers and North American Capital in the Chilean Copper Industry......231

Heidi Tinsman: Good Wives, Bad Girls, and Unfaithful Men: Sexual Negotiation and Labor Struggle in Chile’s Agrarian Reform, 1964-1973......268

IV. Historians ann the Making of History

Florencia E Mallon: Bearing Witness in Hard Times: Ethnography and Testimonio in a Postrevolutionary Age......311

Daniel James: Afterword: A Final Reflextion on the Political......355

Contributors......365
Index......367