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Interview with Scholars of Latin America about their New Books
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New Books in Latin American Studies Marshall Poe

    • Society & Culture
    • 4.8 • 31 Ratings

Interview with Scholars of Latin America about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

    Vince Brown, Caribbean Vectors (EF, JP)

    Vince Brown, Caribbean Vectors (EF, JP)

    The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year’s War, though it isn’t usually thought of that way. In the first few days of the quarantine and our current geopolitical and epidemiological shitshow, John and Elizabeth spoke with Vincent Brown, who recently published Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Harvard UP, 2019), centered on a group of enslaved West Africans, known under the term “Coromantees” who were the chief protagonists in this war.
    Tracing the vectors of this war within the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, and West Africa, Vince shows us how these particular enslaved Africans, who are caught in the gears of one of human history’s most dehumanizing institutions, constrained by repressive institutions, social-inscribed categories of differences and brutal force, operate tactically within and across space in complex and cosmopolitan ways.
    Vince locates his interest in warfare (as an object of study) in emergence of new world order and disorder through the Gulf Wars. His attention to routes and mobilities he credits to an epidemiological turn of mind–perhaps inherited from his father Willie Brown, a medical microbiologist now retired from UCSD.
    The idea of the vector shaped his first book as well. Vince’s “cartographic narrative” “A Slave Revolt in Jamaica: 1760-1761” and the film he produced with director Llewellyn Smith, Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (which traces African studies and anthropology’s understanding of cultural movements from between Africa and the Americas) also explore these burning questions.
    Along the way, Vince discusses C.L.R. James’ notion of conflict, war and global connectedness in The Black Jacobins and the ways that categories of social difference both are constituted by global capital (reminding us of our conversation on caste, class and whiteness with Ajantha Subramanian) and those bumper stickers from the early 1980s in which the Taliban were the good guys.
    Mentioned in this episode:


    Rambo III (1988)


    The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself (1789)

    Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)

    Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (2002)

    C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)

    John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World-1400-1800 (1992)


    Derrick ‘Black X’ Robinson on his advocacy to make Tacky a national hero in Jamaica

    Black X walks barefoot across Jamaica to make Tacky a national hero

    
    Recallable Books:

    Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (2009)

    John Tutino, Making a New World (2011)

    Angel Palerm, The First Economic World-System (1980)


    Listen and Read Here: 34 The Caribbean and Vectors of Warfare: Vincent Brown
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    • 45 min
    Vanessa Walker, "Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy" (Cornell UP, 2020)

    Vanessa Walker, "Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy" (Cornell UP, 2020)

    Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U. S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2020) explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, Walker shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power. This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Washington, DC. Principles in Power tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, Walker explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.
    Jo Butterfield is the Advisor for the Human Rights Certificate offered by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights and is an Adjunct Asst. Professor with the UI Department of History.
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    • 1 hr 4 min
    Benjamin Bryce and David M. K. Sheinin, "Race and Transnationalism in the Americas" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

    Benjamin Bryce and David M. K. Sheinin, "Race and Transnationalism in the Americas" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

    Edited by Benjamin Bryce and David Sheinin, Race and Transnationalism in the Americas (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), highlights the importance of transnational forces in shaping the concept of race and understanding of national belonging across the Americas, from the late nineteenth century to the present times. The book also examines how race and its categories have functioned as mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion across cultural, political, and social dimensions. The authors across the different chapters examine phenomena such as immigration policies, indigenous decolonization efforts, and governmental colonization endeavors to discuss the intersections between race and both transnational and national elements. New ways to think about what it means to be a citizen, to belong, and to be of a particular race are offered, which prove useful and refreshing in our day and age, marked by considerable migration across borders in the Americas and the politization of racial identities.
    Benjamin Bryce is a Professor of History at the University of British Columbia.
    David Sheinin is a Professor of History at Trent University.
    Ariadna Obregon is a PhD student at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. On Twitter/X: @AriadnaObregn1
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    • 39 min
    Adriana Chira, "Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

    Adriana Chira, "Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

    In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba's radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Drawing on understudied archives, this pathbreaking work, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022) unearths a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism, and offers a new framework for thinking about nineteenth-century Black freedom. Santiago de Cuba's Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, they negotiated their freedom and land piecemeal, through colonial legal frameworks that allowed for local custom and manumission. While gradually wearing down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase, they reimagined colonial racial systems before Cuba's intellectuals had their say. Long before residents of Cuba protested for national independence and island-wide emancipation in 1868, it was Santiago's Afro-descendant peasants who, gradually and invisibly, laid the groundwork for emancipation.
    Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.
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    • 40 min
    Maria Cristina Garcia, "State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change" (UNC Press, 2022)

    Maria Cristina Garcia, "State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change" (UNC Press, 2022)

    Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change (UNC Press, 2022), there is actually no such thing as a "climate refugee" under current U.S. law. Most initiatives intended to assist those who must migrate are flawed and ineffective from inception because they are derived from outmoded policies. In a world of climate change, U.S. refugee policy simply does not work.
    Garcia focuses on Central America and the Caribbean, where natural disasters have repeatedly worsened poverty, inequality, and domestic and international political tensions. She explains that the creation of better U.S. policy for those escaping disasters is severely limited by the 1980 Refugee Act, which continues to be applied almost exclusively for reasons of persecution directly related to politics, race, religion, and identity. Garcia contends that the United States must transform its outdated migration policies to address today's realities. Climate change and natural disasters are here to stay, and much of the human devastation left in their wake is essentially a policy choice.
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    • 50 min
    Jaime M. Pensado, "Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico" (U California Press, 2023)

    Jaime M. Pensado, "Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico" (U California Press, 2023)

    The 21st century has witnessed a revolution in how historians approach the study of Roman Catholicism. Long trapped in an unbridgeable chasm between confessional scholars taking revealed truth as a point of departure & secular scholars ignoring the intellectual and experiential richness of religion, Catholicism has increasingly benefited from vibrant dialogues that are working to break down this divide, as scholars look beyond their local and national sites of research to think globally about this world-spanning religion. 
    University of Notre Dame scholar Jaime Pensado is at the forefront of the work of recasting Catholicism as a truly global object of inquiry, as evidenced by his most recent work Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico (University of California Press, 2023). In my conversation with Pensado, we explored some of the greatest intellectual boons of the global turn for the study of what he has called “the Catholic Sixties,” as well as persistent blind spots and crucial considerations for future research.
    Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs.
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    • 1 hr 2 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
31 Ratings

31 Ratings

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