Postcolonial Latin America Research Articles

Resistance and the regimen: The microthanatopolitics of Venezuelan antiretroviral scarcity and HIV drug adherence failures

The Venezuelan State does not provide adequate antiretroviral therapy (ART) for the population living with HIV, resulting in pharmaceutical scarcity, involuntary treatment pauses, and adherence failures. Such a situation may result in the development of resistance to certain ART drugs, meaning that Venezuelans with HIV may have their treatment options reduced for the remainder of their lives. It can take a number of years for a person to acquire late-stage HIV/AIDS and for death to occur, and so I focus on the microbiological death of CD4 cells over time – a concept I call ‘microthanatopolitics’.In this paper I argue that the microthanatopolitics of ART scarcity deprives those living with HIV of future treatment options, encourages resistance to ART drugs, and ultimately may contribute towards ill health long after treatment availability changes in Venezuela. To explore this in depth, the paper draws upon 6 interviews with Venezuelan HIV activists in Venezuela (2024), supported by 40 testimonies from Venezuelan migrants living with HIV in Colombia (2021–2024), with and without known ART resistance.It will be concluded that not only is this an issue for those currently living in Venezuela, but also for migrants and the global HIV response who will suffer from the promotion and circulation of ART-resistant viral strains in the long run. This microthanatopolitics is influenced by both the current Venezuela political system as well as humanitarian aid from the Global North; an important consideration of coloniality in post-colonial Latin America.

Race and Transnationalism in the Americas

Questions of ethnicity and race have always been a central issue of research on colonial and postcolonial Latin America. The contributors to the book Race and Transnationalism in the Americas seek to broaden the debate by focusing on the transnational and transcultural dimension of ethnic or racial inclusion and exclusion throughout Latin America and beyond. The authors explore diverse topics of migration, state policies, and citizenship, as well as sports, music, and film production, from the late nineteenth century to the present.Despite the fact that Latin America was the first world region to have been systematically colonized and ruled by European powers during the early modern period, the region has only recently entered the historiography of global and transnational history, especially with regard to scholars born in the region. Apart from the strong tradition of national history and limited access to academic resources (research centers, libraries, or funds) in some Latin American countries, there has always been skepticism in Latin America and in the global South in general toward what sometimes is deemed a new imperial history. Despite this, recent years have shown a renewed interest in an inter-American perspective among historians of Latin America, and the present collection of essays is just another expression of this trend. As Marc Hertzman rightly points out in his introduction to the volume, transnational history offers new perspectives on the political, social, and cultural history of Latin America when it succeeds in addressing the transnational entanglements of local phenomena in a combined look on connections and disconnections. Hertzman highlights the book's focus on “how . . . race and the categorization of race functioned as mechanisms or organizing frameworks for cultural, political, and social inclusion in the Americas” (p. 3). By contrast, the volume's editors, Benjamin Bryce and David M. K. Sheinin, point in their epilogue to the spread of racial narratives and politics of racial discrimination in the wake of recent transnational migration throughout the Americas.Alexander Dawson and Stephen Lewis analyze the inter-American indigenista movement of the first half of the twentieth century in Mexico and the United States; both scholars focus on misreadings of and tensions between different views of Indigenous culture and mestizaje. While Elaine Carey's essay highlights the transnational dimension of US and Mexican debates on drug consumption and trafficking, health care, and racism from the 1920s to the 1950s, David M. K. Sheinin focuses on the construction of the “criollo baseball player” in Venezuela via different US role models and national narratives of whiteness and Blackness from the 1940s onward. Somewhat misplaced given the book's transnational perspective is Waskar Ari-Chachaki's interesting case study on the construction of an Indigenous nation by Gregorio Titiriku's Indigenous movement in the Bolivian Altiplano, which contested assimilationist state policies during the 1920s and 1930s.Several contributions to the book address transnational migration and its political, social, and cultural dimensions. While Benjamin Bryce points out the racial hierarchies within immigration debates and policies in Argentina toward different Asian countries from 1890 to 1920, Lara Putnam discusses political debates over citizenship and legal rights for Black migrants from the British Caribbean in the wider Caribbean, the United States, and Britain from 1918 to 1962. Sonja Stephenson Watson focuses on the emergence of reggae en español in Panama following the immigration of railroad and canal workers from the Caribbean and transcultural networks in the region and to the United States from the 1960s onward. Finally, Raanan Rein analyzes the construction of a mosque in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo in 2000 in the context of historical immigration from the Middle East, the subsequent growth of an Argentine Muslim community, and integration policies toward ethnic minorities from Juan Perón to Carlos Menem.Marc Hertzman presents an interesting example of cultural appropriation by the male African Brazilian carnival association Filhos de Gandhy formed in Salvador, Bahia, in 1949, whose syncretic symbolism and performance combined cultural elements of anticolonialism, communism, and candomblé with essentializing notions of Orientalism and masculinity. Kevin Coleman and Julia Irion Martins analyze the 2015 documentary film Damiana Kryygi from Argentine filmmaker Alejandro Fernández Mouján, which shows the alliance of local settlers and European anthropologists against Indigenous people in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Paraguay alongside contemporary Ache Indigenous community activism.Overall, Race and Transnationalism in the Americas is a fine collection that offers insights into various issues, disciplines, and methodologies that go beyond traditional approaches focused on the nation-state.

Circulating Political Information in Colombia: Written and Oral Communication Practices in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

AbstractThis article examines how people gathered and transmitted political information in Colombia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Existing scholarship has predominantly focused on the study of the press in Colombia and Latin America. However, few historians have explored other forms of information, such as telegrams, rumours and letters, or how Colombians combined these. By focusing on how various forms of information circulated through political, familial and commercial networks, this study offers a new dimension to our understanding of communications in Colombia. It argues that this was a period of increasing circulation of information due to social, political and economic change, as well as new links between oral and written practices. Thus, this article illuminates how Colombians circulated political information in a society of restricted literacy in post-colonial Latin America, offering new insights into politics, communications and the interplay between written and oral culture.

Technology and Tradition in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion: Archeological Perspectives ed. by Rani T. Alexander

Reviewed by: Technology and Tradition in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion: Archeological Perspectives ed. by Rani T. Alexander Edward (Ted) Beatty (bio) Technology and Tradition in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion: Archeological Perspectives Edited by Rani T. Alexander. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Pp. 304. How should we understand and interpret the history of technology in post-conquest, colonial, and postcolonial Latin America? How did individuals and communities draw on both indigenous practices and European introductions as they pursued production and consumption through the long colonial and into the modern era? How did these practices vary across locality and region, and across time, in non-linear fashion? This fascinating edited volume offers a set of nine superbly focused studies by a talented group of archeologists examining the history of technology in Mesoamerica. They do not simply present conventional histories of the conquest of indigenous technology through European artefacts, techniques, and practices, nor straightforward stories of diffusion and progressive movement toward a saturation of European-influenced technique. Themes of transfer, hybridization, and transculturation are pervasive. They vividly illustrate the varied landscape of surviving indigenous practices, of local agency in the partial adoption of new practices, and how available technologies were embraced, adopted, and adapted, repurposed, and sometimes simply ignored in local settings. The authors probe “invisible transitions and apparent continuities” (p. 91) and are as equally interested in obsolescence as in innovation. These were rarely binary choices or patterns but varied in degree, by household, community or region, and shifted over time depending on the changing nature of external linkages and local conditions. This attention to local agency and context for explaining patterns observed in the archeological records runs through nearly all the chapters, ranging from the late fifteenth to the nineteenth century, situated in central and southern Mexico, Belize, and El Salvador. Several examples illustrate these themes. Iron imported from Spain or made locally by Spanish blacksmiths did not quickly replace stone tools. Chapter two examines survival and change in the obsidian tool manufactures of central Mexico in the century after the conquest, driven by the relative price of metal and the expertise to fashion tools. In ceramics and building materials (chapters four, five, and eleven), production techniques and styles drew from European (not just Spanish) and indigenous traditions. Patterns of material and technique choices can be traced over space and time, but also varied by household, “spotty and idiosyncratic” (p. 190) within the broader trends. Even the industrialization of cacao, indigo, sugar, and henequen production in response to rising Atlantic demand in the nineteenth century illustrates borrowing, adaptation, and hybridity when seen through the archeological record of specific sites (chapters eight, nine and ten). As demand for henequen (sisal) fiber grew dramatically [End Page 967] in the mid-nineteenth century, initial efforts to automate de-fibering methods by U.S.-based inventors failed. It was Mexican mechanics who designed and over three decades refined the first viable decorticizing machines. Technological change looked very different in the nearby cacao and indigo districts: Spanish commercial agents could easily assert control over processing and distribution networks, seen here in the excavated remains of those physical sites. European conquest eventually produced a radically transformed technological landscape in Mesoamerica, but more provocative and diverse than expected in these chapters. Historians of technology will find the introductory and concluding chapters (by Rani T. Alexander and Anthony P. Andrews, respectively) extremely useful syntheses of this book’s central issues and arguments. The entire volume benefits from effective leadership and editing by Alexander and her colleagues: intellectually wide-ranging but also tightly focused, coherent, and consistent in its presentation across chapters. The volumes’ contributors, all archeologists, drawn from universities in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, do an admirable job of writing for nonspecialist audiences. Most are familiar with the theoretical literature in the history of technology and cite it as relevant; the work of archeologist Michael Schiffer provides an important touchstone throughout. The authors are consistently attuned to questions of behavior, society, and culture, but are firmly rooted in the material and historical record of their subjects. This is a superb volume and should be a valuable reference for historians of technology. Edward...

A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies ed. by Clare Anderson

Reviewed by: A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies ed. by Clare Anderson Katherine Roscoe A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies Edited by Clare Anderson. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. This edited collection lives up to the promise, delivering a truly global history of convicts and penal colonies. It is, as Clare Anderson states in her introduction, “the first global overview of convict transportation and penal colonies” covering a “range of contexts” over “more than five centuries” (3). The volume’s title indicates its twofold focus: on convicts, as individuals forcibly mobilised across the globe, and on penal colonies, as spatial assemblages where convicts were marginalised, punished and co-opted by the state and trading companies. Through a globally comparative framework, Anderson et al. persuasively demonstrate that convicts played a key role in the expansion of empires, modernisation of infrastructure and development of punishment systems in the twentieth century. Each chapter offers an overview of the convict system in a separate geographical region, ideal for assigning to students. It begins with the Portuguese Empire (Timothy Coates), who were the first to transport convicts to build a fort at Ceuta in North Africa in 1415. It is followed by other European empires: the Spanish (Christian De Vito), Scandinavian (Johan Heinsen), French (Jean-Lucien Sanchez), Dutch (Matthias van Rossum) and British Empires (Hamish-Maxwell Stewart and Clare Anderson). Collectively, these essays flip traditional conceptualisation of convict transportation on its head. Anderson’s introduction states that many convicts were transported between colonies, rather than from Europe to overseas colonies (5). This approach challenges the presumptive whiteness that dominates understandings of convict transportation, drawing attention instead to the “scale of transportation of Asians, Africans and other non-Europeans” (Anderson, 4). The multi-directionality of these convict flows is expertly visualised in maps by Laura Vann. The second half of the volume examines the use of internal exile, either overland or to offshore islands, by nation states. It covers postcolonial Latin America (Ryan Edwards), Russia and the USSR (Sarah Badcock and Judith Pallot), Japan (Minako Sakata) and Modern Europe (Mary Gibson and Ilaria Poerio). By exploring historic continuities between penal transportation and deportation in modern Europe and the USSR’s gulags, the collection underlines that penal ideologies, as well as people, circulated from the colonies back to Europe. Far from travelling “unidirectionally” from metropole to colonies, the innovations of the modern penal system—notably the probation system—were modelled on the colonies (Gibson and Poerio, 364). As Ryan Edwards notes, convict transportation enabled “burgeoning nations” to “develop the[ir] frontiers” (250). In her epilogue, Ann Laura Stoler reflects that today’s prison industrial complex replicates these historic patterns, punishing and displacing “disposable” populations along class and race lines, and then commodifying their labour for profit. In her wide-ranging introduction Anderson lays out a conceptual framework to compare convict transportation with other global migrations. Though absolute numbers of convicts transported within European empires was relatively small (c. 1,490,000), she argues that penal transportation was “significant” in longevity and scope (7). Anderson notes that transportation “preceded and outlived enslavement” (16) and operated, in the Atlantic world, as an “ideological precursor” to plantation slavery (Maxwell-Stewart, 191). Convicts sometimes competed with, but other times preceded the arrival of indentured, enslaved, military and free workers. There was slippage too between these categories, as rebellious enslaved people were transported in the Caribbean and convicts’ sentences of transportation commuted for military service in the Spanish Empire. Rather than positioning convicts on a “continuum of unfreedom,” Anderson suggests their place on a “continuum of mobility, particularly of coerced workers” is more meaningful (8). Nevertheless, the reliance of European powers on multiple, overlapping forms of unfree labour is strongly foregrounded throughout the collection. It is through this focus on the modalities of punishment, which Stoler dubs “carceral motion,” that the volume ties together these distinct contexts over a vast time period. The essays all recognise the spatial interplay between convict mobility and carceral immobility at different stages of a convict’s journey. Rather than narrowing down on the legal definition of “convict transportation,” which varies by context, it focusses on the “serial displacements” (Heinsen, 13) that convicts experienced along...

Sentencing Canudos: subalternity in the backlands of Brazil

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony s residents, primarily disenfranchised former slaves, mestizos, landless farmers, and uprooted Indians, followed a man known as Antonio Conselheiro ( The Counselor ), who promoted a communal existence, free of taxes and oppression. To the fledgling republic of Brazil, the settlement represented a threat to their system of government, which had only recently been freed from monarchy. Estimates of the death toll at Canudos range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand.Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this monumental event in Brazilian history. In her study, Adriana Michele Campos Johnson offers a close examination of nation building and the silencing of other voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha s Os Sertoes, which has become the defining and nearly exclusive account of the conflict, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been sentenced to history by this work. Johnson investigates other accounts of Canudos such as local oral histories, letters, newspaper articles, and the writings of Cunha s contemporaries, Afonso Arinos and Manoel Benicio, in order to strip away political agendas. She also seeks to place the inhabitants and events of Canudos within the realm of everydayness by recalling aspects of daily life that have been left out of official histories.Johnson analyzes the role of intellectuals in the process of culture and state formation and the ensuing sublimation of subaltern histories and populations. She echoes recent scholarship that posits subalternity as the product of discourse that must be disputed in order to recover cultural identities and offers a view of Canudos and postcolonial Latin America as a place to think from, not about.

Latin American independence: education and the invention of new polities

Latin American independence from Spain and Portugal in the first decades of the nineteenth century was a process of global relevance. A considerable number of new polities emerged that had to deal with radically new political situations. Particularly in the case of the former Spanish colonies, a general rejection of the colonial past determined decisions favouring republican forms of government and the creation of modern citizenry. In this sense, education was credited with the power of revolutionising political life and modernising local and “backward” populations. Education was considered crucial in addressing the three major challenges of postcolonial Latin America: the consolidation of the new polities, the invention of new republican orders, and the reshaping of old inherited identities, particularly those of the subaltern. The articles included in this special issue primarily address these three dimensions.

Latin American and World Histories: Old and New Approaches to the Pluribus and the Unum

Latin American and World Histories: Old and New Approaches to the Pluribus and the Unum

Murder and Masculinity, Violent Fictions of Twentieth-Century Latin America

Rebecca Biron breaks new ground in this study of masculinity, violence, and the strategic construction of collective political identities in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. By engaging current sociological, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, Murder and Masculinity analyzes the cliche of proving virility through violence against women. Biron develops her argument through close readings of five works: Jorge Luis Borges's La intrusa, Armonia Somer's El despojo, Clarice Lispector's A Maca no Escuro, Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair, and Reinaldo Arenas's El Asalto. Although men murdering women is often interpreted as nothing more than machista misogyny, Biron argues that the five narratives addressed in this book show that healed masculinities are essential to the achievement of cultural identity and political autonomy in Latin America. The introduction to this study deftly situates Biron's work in relation to previous theoretical arguments on the social and political dimensions of Latin American writing. The five subsequent chapters offer superb analyses of the individual texts. Like their male protagonists who experiment with the psychological and legal extremes of gender division, these narratives risk nonconformity to the laws of genre in their quest for liberation from violent social and literary conventions. In combining elements of detective stories, crime narratives, psychological case studies, and magical or grotesque realism, they offer metafictional commentary on a network of discourses that confuses images of masculinity, national identity, and political autonomy in postcolonial Latin America.

The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America.

The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America.

The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America

The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America

The Allure of the foreign: imported goods in postcolonial Latin America

The Allure of the foreign: imported goods in postcolonial Latin America

The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective

Thomas M. Callaghy has written a truly admirable study of formation in Africa that is at once bold and provocative. Focusing specifically on Zaire, the study boldly and convincingly situates the formation process in contemporary Africa within a comparative and historical framework that is astutely informed by the current theoretical debates on the and by a judicious blend of analytic categories derived from Weberian sociology, Marxist analysis, organization theory, modernization and development approaches, and world-system and dependency-underdevelopment perspectives. This ambitious framework is operationalized with the help of an impressive array of extant theoretical and empirical studies, enriched by primary data collected in Zaire. It is also a provocative study, for Callaghy proceeds from what, at first blush, seems to be a preposterous assumption that the formation process in contemporary Africa is similar to and comparable with the formation process in Latin America and especially seventeenth-century France. The central thesis of the study is that the formation process in contemporary Africa is no different than in Europe and postcolonial Latin America, or, for that matter, anywhere else. Methodologically, therefore, the state formation experience of other areas and periods is indeed germane to the study of formation process in Africa and ... the use of comparative perspective helps to highlight key aspects of African politics today that have been neglected or inadequately conceptualized (pp. xixii). Everywhere, the process of formation entails a struggle between a group of centralizing elites and a diverse set of powerful and autonomous internal and external groups over the location and distribution of political power and economic resources. Essentially, this is a struggle for sovereignty, for domination over internal societal groups and autonomy vis-a-vis external actors and forces. Everywhere the struggle proceeds slowly, unevenly and incrementally, involving a varying mix of conflicting and complementary interests, confrontational and cooperative strategies, and coercive and cooptive techniques. Nowhere is the eventual outcome of this struggle predetermined or unambiguous. This central thesis is methodically elaborated in two crisply written and tightly argued parts of the book, comprised of eight chapters which are liberally footnoted, often with long explanatory notes. Part I elucidates the comparative and analytic perspectives which inform the study. Part II focuses directly on the statesociety struggle in Zaire. Chapter I employs the current theoretical debates on the to categorize Mobutu's Zaire as the contemporary African variant of an early modern absolutist authoritarian with a strong organic-statist orientation and associated but weak corporatist structures linking and society. Comparison with Latin America serves to emphasize the quintessentially uninstitutionalized character of this in which structures, societal configurations (especially class and ethnicity), and state-society relations are all in flux and in the process of formation. Zaire in this respect conforms not to the bureaucratic-authoritarian model of contemporary Latin America or Bonapartist France, in which