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From houses to roads, infrastructure provides a unique lens through which to explore social and political change. Serving as an important conduit between states and individuals, infrastructure provides governments with a powerful tool to mould citizens and control populations. Yet, at the same time, it also provides individuals and collectives with a platform to challenge the state and forge alternative forms of citizenship and politics. Infrastructure therefore often reconfigures social and political relations in unexpected ways and never dutifully follows the scripts of politicians, bureaucrats, and engineers.
Latin America provides fertile terrain to explore these issues. The region has been subject to extensive...
The 2018 presidential election result in Brazil surprised and shocked many. Since then, numerous debates and a growing body of texts have attempted to understand the country’s so-called ‘conservative turn’.
A gripping in-depth account of politics and society in Brazil today, this new volume brings together a myriad of different perspectives to help us better understand the political events that shook the country in recent years. Combining ethnographic insights with political science, history, sociology, and anthropology, the interdisciplinary analyses included offer a panoramic view on social and political change in Brazil, spanning temporal and spatial dimensions. Starting with the 2018 presidential election, the...
From the late fifteenth century to the present day, countless explorers, conquerors, and other agents of empire have laid siege to the New World, plundering and pilfering its most precious artefacts and treasures. Today, these natural and cultural products—which are key to conceptualizing a history of Latin America—are scattered in museums around the world.
With contributions from a renowned set of scholars, New World Objects of Knowledge delves into the hidden histories of forty of the New World’s most iconic artifacts, from the Inca mummy to Darwin’s hummingbirds. This volume is richly illustrated with photos and sketches from the archives and museums hosting these objects. Each artifact is...
The conflict over possession of the Falklands-Malvinas Islands was waged in an area remote both geographically and geo-politically in an era of cold war and also of tensions within and between sovereign states of the supposed western bloc. It has been broadly perceived as an absurd confrontation, the echoes of which, despite the brevity of its duration, and some four decades on, resonate still not least in the lasting wounds that bear testimony yet to its underlying causes.
This book probes the reasons behind the conflict’s tragic occurrence and the processing of its consequences in and beyond the sovereign states that suffered and suffer still from the exacerbating of nationalist identities in the resolution of their...
In recent years, child migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have made the perilous journey to the United States in unprecedented numbers, but their peers in Nicaragua have remained at home. Nicaragua also enjoys lower murder rates and far fewer gang problems when compared with her neighbours.
Why is Nicaragua so different? The present government has promulgated a discourse of Nicaraguan exceptionalism, arguing that Nicaragua is unique thanks to the heritage of the 1979 Sandinista revolution. This volume critically interrogates that claim, asking whether the legacy of the revolution is truly exceptional. An interdisciplinary work, the book brings together historians, anthropologists and...
Latin America’s long history of showing how racism can co-exist with racial mixture and conviviality offers useful ammunition for strengthening anti-racist stances. This volume asks whether cultural production has a particular role to play within discourses and practices of anti-racism in Latin America and the Caribbean. The contributors analyse music, performance, education, language, film and art in diverse national contexts across the region.
The book also places Latin American and Caribbean racial formations within a broader global context. It shows that the region provides valuable opportunities for thinking about anti-racism, not least when recent political events worldwide have shown that, far from a 'post-racial' age, we...
Creative
Spaces: Urban Culture and Marginality is an
interdisciplinary exploration of the different ways in which marginal urban
spaces have become privileged locations for creativity in Latin America. The
essays within the collection reassess dominant theoretical notions of
‘marginality’ in the region and argue that, in contemporary society, it
invariably allows for (if not leads to) the production of the new.
While Latin American cities have, since their foundation, always included marginal spaces (due, for example, to the segregation of indigenous groups), the massive expansion of informal housing constructed on occupied land in the second half of the twentieth century have brought them into the collective...