Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History

At an unsettled moment in the academy, when there are seemingly few inspirational paradigms for connecting scholarship to action, Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History offers a heady mixture of reflexive theoretical essays and interpretative case studies that embrace the challenge of writing a social and cultural history of Latin America that is not divorced from politics and broader arenas of power. Responding both to an exaggerated positivism that marginalises culture and postmodernist approaches that defang the political to fetishise "experience," "mentality," and "identity," the contributors integrate material and cultural approaches in a new political and cultural history of Latin America. True to the intellectual vision of Brazilian historian Emilia Viotti da Costa, one of Latin America's most distinguished scholars (to whom the volume is dedicated), the contributors seek to move the field beyond the parallel pitfalls of material and cultural reductionism in search of a dialectics that will advance both a new historiography and new political strategies. The volume takes careful stock of the state of historical writing on Latin America. It delineates current historiographical frontiers and suggests a series of new approaches, focusing 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 Viotta da Costa powerfully marks the contributors' engagement with Latin America's past. Featuring a keynote essay by Viotti da Costa herself, the volume embodies a lively North-South encounter that points up incipient trends of hemispheric intellectual convergence. Contributors: Jeffrey L. Gould, Greg Grandin, Daniel James, Gilbert M. Joseph, Thomas Miller Klubock, Mary Ann Mahoney, Florencia E. Mallon, Diana Paton, Steve J. Stern, Heidi Tinsman, Emilia Viotti da Costa, and Barbara Weinstein.