Warriors and Scribes: Essays on the History and Politics of Latin America

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Verso, 2000 - 211 pages
Warriors and Scribes opens and closes using the prism of biography to question the framing of Latin American political life from both a northern, Cold War perspective and from the trivializations of postmodernism. An investigation of Jorge Castaneda’s Utopia Disarmed reveals that Latin American politics are eminently transformable beyond the failed nostrums of multilateral organizations and collapsed dictatorships of the 1980s.

In surveying regional relations with the USA since 1800, and taking a wry look at Hollywood’s treatment of Central America under Reagan, Dunkerley points out that Anglo-America has possessed neither a uniform imperialist vocation, nor the consistent capacity to impose it. Two pieces written in the late 1990s – a reappraisal of Latin American Studies since the Cuban Revolution and a survey of the contemporary politics of Bolivia – reflect the author’s concerns with a place that was ‘American’ for half a millennium before the ‘Americanization through globalization’ became a watchword.

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Contents

The State of the Left in Latin America
20
The 1997 Bolivian Election in Historical Perspective
39
Hollywood and Central America
75
The Study of Latin American History and Politics in the United
83
The United States and Latin America in the Long
117
Francisco Burdett OConnor and
145
Notes
168
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Page 202 - Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.

About the author (2000)

James Dunkerley is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, and Director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas. His books include Rebellion in the Veins, Power in the Isthmus and The Long War, all published by Verso. John King is Professor of Latin American Cultural History at the University of Warwick.

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