New Books in Latin American Studies
Episodes
Adrian Masters, "We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
03 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Adrian Masters challeng...
Elizabeth Reddy, "¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground" (MIT Press, 2023)
02 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the...
Rebeca L. Hey-Colón, "Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds" (U Texas Press, 2023)
30 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Water is often tasked with upholding division through the imposition of geopolitical borders. We see this in the construction of the Rio Grande/Río B...
Learning for Liberation: The Life and Legacy of Paulo Freire
29 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Paulo Freire offers activists and academics everywhere a lesson in what it means to be a radical intellectual. He is known as the founder of critical ...
Samantha Nogueira Joyce, "Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities" (Lexington Books, 2022)
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities (Lexington Books, 2022), Samantha Nogueira Joyce examines representatio...
Ailton Krenak, "Life Is Not Useful" (Polity Press, 2023)
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Indigenous thinker and leader, Ailton Krenak, exposes the destructive tendencies of our ‘civilization’ in Life is not Useful (Polity, 2023), w...
Aarie Glas, "Practicing Peace: Conflict Management in Southeast Asia and South America" (Oxford UP, 2022)
15 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Southeast Asia and South America are regions made up of largely illiberal states lacking stabilizing great powers or collective identities. But despit...
Daniel Ruiz-Serna, "When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories" (Duke UP, 2023)
13 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories (Duke University Press, 2023) Daniel Ruiz-Serna follo...
Maria L. Quintana, "Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
12 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) explores the origins of twentieth-century U.S. guestwo...
Brian Palmer-Rubin, "Evading the Patronage Trap: Interest Representation in Mexico" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
04 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Marquette University Political Scientist Brian Palmer-Rubin has a new book that examines the connections and disconnections between economics and poli...
Mauro Porto, "Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023), Mauro P. Porto examines...
Katherine Gillen et al., "The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en la Frontera" (ACMRS, 2023)
30 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
First performed in the Milagro Theater of Portland, Oregon in 2014, Olga Sanchez Saltveit’s ¡O Romeo! imagines William Shakespeare, late in his l...
Nicole von Germeten, "Death in Old Mexico: The 1789 Dongo Murders and How They Shaped the History of a Nation" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
30 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In a Mexico City mansion on October 23, 1789, Don Joaquín Dongo and ten of his employees were brutally murdered by three killers armed with machetes....
Pablo Bradbury, "Liberationist Christianity in Argentina (1930-1983): Faith and Revolution" (Tamesis Books, 2023)
29 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How did liberationist Christianity develop in Argentina between the 1930s and early 1970s? And how did it respond to state terrorism during the Dirty ...
Timothy R. Pauketat, "Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America" (Oxford UP,
27 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Timothy R. Pauketat’s Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America (Oxford UP, 2023) is a sweeping ...
Francy Carranza-Franco, "Demobilisation and Reintegration in Colombia: Building State and Citizenship" (Routledge, 2020)
24 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Francy Carranza-Franco's Demobilisation and Reintegration in Colombia: Building State and Citizenship (Routledge, 2020) investigates disarmament, de...
Joel E. Correia, "Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco" (U California Press, 2023)
20 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Paraguayan Chaco is a settler frontier where cattle ranching and agrarian extractivism drive some of the world's fastest deforestation and most ex...
Lorgia García Peña, "Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective" (Duke UP, 2022)
19 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Writing Latinos, from Public Books, is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing co...
A. J. Faas, "In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
18 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador (Rutgers University Press, 2023) relates the stories of the people of Penipe, Ecua...
Karen E. Eccles and Debbie McCollin, "World War II and the Caribbean" (U West Indies Press, 2017)
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Karen E. Eccles and Debbie McCollin edited volume World War II and the Caribbean (U West Indies Press, 2017) focuses on one of the most exciting per...
Erin McFee and Angelika Rettberg Beil, "Ex-Combatants and Peace Agreement with the FARC-EP in Colombia" (Ediciones Uniandes, 2019)
15 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This book carries out a multidisciplinary analysis of different aspects of the peace process between the Colombian Government and the Revolutionary Ar...
Cinegogía: An Open Access Resource for Teaching and Studying Latin American Cinema
14 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Cinegogía is an open-access website devoted to the teaching and study of Latin American cinemas. Bridget Franco, an associate professor of Spanish a...
Gwen Burnyeat, "The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy Amid Disinformation in Colombia" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
09 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas sought to end fifty years of war and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize...
Javier Puente, "The Rural State: Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru's Central Sierra" (U Texas Press, 2022)
05 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On the eve of the twentieth century, Peru seemed poised for prosperity and development. Both foreign capitalists and local elites imagined that the h...
Rebecca Herman, "Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America" (Oxford UP, 2022)
29 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
During the Second World War, the United States built over two hundred defense installations on sovereign soil in Latin America in the name of cooperat...
Margaret Chowning, "Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750–1940" (Princeton UP, 2023)
24 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Historians have long looked to networks of elite liberal and anti-clerical men as the driving forces in Mexican history over the course of the long ni...
Claudia Brittenham, "Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica" (U Texas Press, 2023)
24 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica (U Texas Press, 2023), Claudia Brittenham unravels one of the most puzzling phenomen...
Chris Alden and Alvaro Mendez, "China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
19 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
China's role as an economic powerhouse in Latin America is reshaping a region on the cusp of development and change. Since the turn of the century, bi...
Hernán Flom, "The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
16 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Political Scientist Hernán Flom has written a fascinating and nuanced analysis of how the criminal drug markets operate in Argentina and Brazil. Inst...
Alberto García, "Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico" (U California Press, 2023)
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico (U California Press, 2023) offers an essential new history of the Bracero ...
Gonzalo Soltero, "Conspiracy Narratives South of the Border: Bad Hombres Do the Twist" (Routledge, 2022)
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Gonzalo Soltero's book Conspiracy Narratives South of the Border: Bad Hombres Do the Twist (Routledge, 2022) examines four conspiracy narratives fro...
Hilbourne A. Watson, "Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period" (U The West Indies Press, 2019)
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the 1920s, Barbadians and other British West Indians began organizing politically in an international environment that was marked by a se...
Radio Broadcasting Along Mexico's Northern Border, 1930-1950
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sonia Robles, an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware, talks about her book, Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting Along Mexico’...
Joan Flores-Villalobos, "The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West India...
Lisa M. Johnson and Rosemary A. Joyce, "Materializing Ritual Practices" (U Colorado Press, 2022)
05 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Materializing Ritual Practices (U Colorado Press, 2022) explores the deep history of ritual practice in Mexico and Central America and the ways inter...
Hilbourne A. Watson, "Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Independence Period, 1966-1976" (U West Indies Press, 2020)
04 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hilbourne A. Watson's Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Independence Period, 1966-1976 (U West Indies Press, 2020)...
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, "Decolonizing American Spanish: Eurocentrism and the Limits of Foreignness in the Imperial Ecosystem" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022)
04 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jeffrey joins the podcast to discuss the prevalence of English in the academic ecosystem and in research publishing. Jeffrey critiques the lackadaisic...
Elle Hardy, "Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World" (Hurst, 2022)
28 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How has a Christian movement, founded at the turn of the twentieth century by the son of freed slaves, become the fastest-growing religion on Earth? T...
Caroline Dodds Pennock, "On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe" (Knopf, 2023)
26 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe (Knopf, 2023) by Dr. Caroline Dodds Pennock presents a landmark work of narrative histor...
Adrian Fraser, "The 1935 Riots in St Vincent: From Riots to Adult Suffrage" (U West Indies Press, 2016)
25 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
St Vincent was among the earliest of the British Caribbean colonies to have experienced labour disturbances in the 1930s. While disturbances in the ot...
Chris Bongie, trans. and ed., "The Colonial System Unveiled by Baron de Vastey" (Liverpool UP, 2014)
21 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event...
Freddy Prestol Castillo, "You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot" (Duke UP, 2019)
17 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1937 tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by Dominican troops wielding machetes and knives. Dominican wr...
Helen Yaffe, "We Are Cuba!: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World" (Yale UP, 2020)
17 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing de...
Sarah Foss, "On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala" (UNC Press, 2022)
16 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, economics, and society grew in scope and complexity, with diplomatic legacies evide...
Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, "When Rains Became Floods: A Child Soldier’s Story" (Duke UP, 2015)
16 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When Rains Became Floods: A Child Soldier’s Story (Duke UP, 2015) is the gripping autobiography of Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, who as a child soldier...
Suzanne Francis-Brown, "World War II Camps in Jamaica: Refugees, Internees, Prisoners of War" (U West Indies Press, 2022)
12 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1939 and 1947, the Caribbean island of Jamaica--then a British colony--was haven or detention centre for thousands of displaced Europeans; an...
Andreas E. Feldmann et al., "The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration" (Routledge, 2022)
09 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration (Routledge, 2022) offers a systematic account of population movements to and from the region...
Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman, "Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
05 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to ha...
Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh, "Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume tit...
Nicole von Germeten, "The Enlightened Patrolman: Early Law Enforcement in Mexico City" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When late eighteenth-century New Spanish viceregal administrators installed public lamps in the streets of central Mexico City, they illuminated the b...
Mark A. Schneegurt, "Anthology of Religious Poetry from the Mexican Inquisition Trials of 16th-Century CryptoJews" (2020)
30 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A century after being expelled from Portugal, cryptoJews in Mexico, false converts to Christianity, could not speak of their beliefs for fear of becom...
A Left Turn? The Politics of Latin America Today
30 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This week, RBI director John Torpey interviews Prof. Enrique Desmond Arias, a professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate Center...
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, "Beautiful, Gruesome, and True: Artists at Work in the Face of War" (Columbia Global Reports, 2022)
29 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Art has a long history of engaging with conflict and violence. From the antiquities, through Goya, to Guernica, our museums are filled with depictions...
The History of Electricity in Mexico
27 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In her detailed cultural history of technological change, Electrifying Mexico, Diana Montaño argues that ordinary Mexicans became electrifying age...
Frank Wolff, "Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund" (Haymarket Books, 2021)
25 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Frank Wolff's ground-breaking Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund (Haymarket Books, 2021) in...
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos, "Undocumented Motherhood: Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing" (U Texas Press, 2022)
24 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the ter...
Sharon Milagro Marshall, "Tell My Mother I Gone to Cuba: Stories of Early Twentieth-century Migration from Barbados" (U West Indies Press, 2016)
22 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Barbadians were among the thousands of British West Indians who migrated to Cuba in the early twentieth century in search of work. They were drawn the...
Helen Anne Curry, "Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction" (U California Press, 2022)
21 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction (U California Press, 2022), historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more th...
Paulina Laura Alberto et al., "Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
17 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) offers English translations of more than one hun...
Carwil Bjork-James, "The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia" (U Arizona Press, 2020)
15 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politic...
Tanya Katerí Hernández, "Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality" (Beacon Press, 2022)
14 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press, 2022) will challenge what you thought about racism an...
Miguel Valerio, "Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
14 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sovereign Joy Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores the performance of festive black kings and queens ...
Kaiama L. Glover, "A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being" (Duke UP, 2021)
13 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP, 2021), Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists wh...
Clemente Penna, "Urban Economies, Capital, Credit, and Slavery in Rio de Janeiro, 1820-1860" (UFRJ, 2019)
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode, Martín Garrido Lepe y Beatriz Rodriguez-Satizabal talk with Clemente Penna winner of the Tamás Szmrecsányi Prize for thesis in eco...
Christopher Loperena, "The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras" (Stanford UP, 2022)
09 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous pe...
Philippe-Richard Marius, "The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)
08 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Ri...
Carlos Alberto Sánchez, "A Sense of Brutality. Philosophy after Narco-Culture" (Amherst College Press, 2020)
06 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmm...
Dannelle Gutarra Cordero, "She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
03 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how d...
Pedro Lebrón Ortiz, "The Philosophy of Marronage" (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021)
25 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Pedro Lebrón Ortis's book The Philosophy of Marronage (Filosofía del cimarronaje) theorizes the broader context behind the notion of "cimarronaje...
The Future of Global Trade: A Discussion with Shannon K. O'Neil
22 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy ...
Ariana Huberman. "Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Cultural Production" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)
20 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Ariana Huberman's Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Cultural Production (Academic Studies Press, 2022) delves into crea...
Sarah Zukerman Daly, "Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections" (Princeton UP, 2022)
18 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
One of the great puzzles of electoral politics is how parties that commit mass atrocities in war often win the support of victimized populations to es...
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism" (Princeton UP, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolutio...
Cynthia Radding, "Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain" (U Arizona Press, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Common understandings drawn from biblical references, literature, and art portray deserts as barren places that are far from God and spiritual sustena...
Philip Nanton, "Riff: The Shake Keane Story" (Papillote Press, 2022)
14 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Philip Nanton's new book Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press, 2022) follows the life and work of Shake Keane, the peripatetic and creative...
On Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
13 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1967, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez published his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Because of that book, he won the Nobel Pr...
Stuart Earle Strange, "Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
10 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname (U Toronto Press, 2021) explores how ideas of self-knowledge and ide...
Iván Sandoval-Cervantes, "Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration" (U Texas Press, 2022)
10 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnat...
Nadim Bawalsa, "Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return Before 1948" (Stanford UP, 2022)
04 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Tens of thousands of Palestinians migrated to the Americas in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. By 1936,...
Ruti G. Teitel, "Transitional Justice" (Oxford UP, 2000)
04 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Societies that are throwing off the yoke of authoritarian rule and beginning to build democracies face a daunting question: should they punish the rep...
Sarah Abel, "Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome" (UNC Press, 2021)
29 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the ...
Pierre Minn, "Where They Need Me: Local Clinicians and the Workings of Global Health in Haiti" (Cornell UP, 2022)
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. While religious institutions sponsor a number of these initia...
Erin Alice Cowling, "Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
21 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In terms of its popularity, as well as its production, chocolate was among the first foods to travel from the New World to Spain. Chocolate: How a Ne...
Jennifer Eaglin, "Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol" (Oxford UP, 2022)
18 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and afforda...
David McDermott Hughes, "Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity" (Duke UP, 2017)
16 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity (Duke University Press, 2017), David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate c...
Ken Chitwood, "The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean" (Lynn Rienner, 2021)
11 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Ken Chitwood’s book The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean (Lynn Rienner Publishers Inc, 2021) is a provocation to its readers to include ...
Aisha Khan, "The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2021)
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021), Aisha Khan explores how colonial categories of ...
June Carolyn Erlick, "Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity" (Routledge, 2021)
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity (Routledge, 2021), June Carolyn Erlick explores the relationship bet...
Sarah T. Hines, "Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia" (U California Press, 2021)
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah T. Hines's Water for All Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia (University of California Press, 2021) chronicles how Bolivian...
Alma Zaragoza-Petty, "Chingona: Owning Your Inner Badass for Healing and Justice" (Broadleaf Books, 2022)
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Chingona: Owning Your Inner Badass for Healing and Justice (Broadleaf Books, 2022), Mexican American activist, scholar, and podcast host Alma Zar...
Sarah Quesada, "The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Lati...
Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz and Barbara Frey, "Mexico's Human Rights Crisis" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Lawless elements are ascendant in Mexico, as evidenced by the operations of criminal cartels engaged in human and drug trafficking, often with the act...
On Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis' "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas"
24 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is such a complex and clever allegory of Brazilian society that many readers didn’t initially understand just ...
4.4 “A short, sharp punch to the face”: José Revueltas’ The Hole (El Apando) with Alia Trabucco Zerán and Sophie Hughes.
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Alia Trabucco Zerán, award-winning author of The Remainder (La Resta), and Women Who Kill (Las Homicidas), and Sophie Hughes, Alia’s translato...
Suzana Sawyer, "The Small Matter of Suing Chevron" (Duke UP, 2022)
12 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years...
Technocracy Now! Part 2: Exploring Technocracy through Cybernetics
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On part #2 of Technocracy Now, we tell stories of cybernetic technocracies. First, we hear the story of Charles A. McClelland, a liberal political sci...
Margarita Fajardo, "The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era" (Harvard UP, 2021)
07 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era (Harvard University Press, 202...
René Provost, "Rebel Courts: The Administration of Justice by Armed Insurgents" (Oxford UP, 2021)
06 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Warzones are sometimes described as lawless, but this is rarely the case. Armed insurgents often replace the state as the provider of law and justice ...
Ricardo López-Pedreros, "The Middle Classes in Latin America: Subjectivities, Practices, and Genealogies" (Routledge, 2022)
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As a collective effort, The Middle Classes in Latin America: Subjectivities, Practices, and Genealogies (Routledge, 2022) locates the formation of ...
Aviva Ben-Ur, "Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
30 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) explores the political and social history ...