Catherine LeGrand

Close encounters of empire : writing the cultural history of U.S.-Latin American relations

New concerns with the intersections of culture and power, historical agency, and the complexity of social and political life are producing new questions about the United States’ involvement with Latin America. Turning away from political-economic models that see only domination and resistance, exploiters and victims, the contributors to this pathbreaking collection suggest alternate ways of understanding the role that U.S. actors and agencies have played in the region during the postcolonial period. Exploring a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century encounters in Latin America, these theoretically engaged essays by distinguished U.S. and Latin American historians and anthropologists illuminate a wide range of subjects. From the Rockefeller Foundation’s public health initiatives in Central America to the visual regimes of film, art, and advertisements; these essays grapple with new ways of conceptualizing public and private spheres of empire. As such, Close Encounters of Empire initiates a dialogue between postcolonial studies and the long-standing scholarship on colonialism and imperialism in the Americas as it rethinks the cultural dimensions of nationalism and development.

The Colombian Crisis in Historical Perspective

Abstract This article explores the nineteenth- and twentieth-century roots of the present violence in Colombia and the main actors involved therein. Focusing on the civilian government, the Colombian military, the FARC and ELN guerrillas, and the paramilitaries, it emphasizes the chronic weakness of the state, the privatization and regionalization of conflict, the impact of the cocaine export economy, and the difficulties of coming to a peace agreement. This article also explains connections and differences between the Colombian violence of the 1950s and the current conflict, and it provides a guide to the literature authored by Colombian social scientists on the subject.

Labor Acquisition and Social Conflict on the Colombian Frontier, 1850–1936

Exporters of raw materials under Iberian rule, the nations of Latin America continued to perform a similar role in the world economy after Independence. In the nineteenth century, however, a significant shift occurred in the kind of materials exported. Whereas in colonial times the great wealth of Latin America lay in her mineral resources, particularly silver and gold, aster 1850 agricultural production for foreign markets took on larger importance. The export of foodstuffs was not a new phenomenon, but in the nineteenth century the growth in consumer demand in the industrializing nations and the developing revolution in. transport much enhanced the incentives for Latin Americans who would produce coffee, wheat, cattle, or bananas for overseas markets.

Colombian transformations: Peasants and wage‐labourers in the Santa Marta Banana Zone

This paper examines the various forms of rural protest directed against the United Fruit Company in Colombia between 1900 and 1964. It explores the three factors that explain the tensions between the rural population and the Company: structural tensions between the peasant economy and the export sector; the relationship between peasants and wage‐labourers; and the effects of international market cycles on local conditions. In concluding, it questions the usefulness of typologies that, by positing a structural distinction between peasants and proletarians, neglect the historical dynamics of class formation.

Colonization and Violence in Colombia: Perspectives and Debates

AbstractFrontier zones are among the most violent areas in Colombia today. There guerrilla groups have established their rural bases; there military repression is most intense, and there in recent years the cocaine traffickers have entrenched themselves in various ways. This review of the relevant literature explores how students of Colombia have interpreted the significance of the frontier historically and how they are trying to make sense of the relation between colonization and violence today. It shows how the interpretations are influenced by conceptualizations of the the role of the state in colonization areas and it highlights the ways in which the study of frontier processes can shed light on broader issues related to the nature of the political regime and the popular struggles.

Legal narratives of citizenship, the social question, and public order in Colombia, 1915–1930 and after

This article focuses on what happened to citizenship rights in Colombia in the 1920s when urbanization and industrialization brought the ‘social question’ to the fore. In exploring the categories relating to citizenship and narratives about them in laws and congressional debates, it reads the fields of political, social, and civil rights in relation to one another and signals the particular anxieties that centred and still today centre on civil rights or, viewed obversely, on concerns about state security and public order.

Land, justice, and memory: challenges for peace in Colombia

ABSTRACT In this introduction, the editors present the seven articles that constitute this special issue on Colombia. They explain the context of the war that has wracked the country for more than 50 years and highlight the central themes that connect the articles. This essay also analyzes how the 2016 accord between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) aims to address the causes of the conflict so as to establish a durable peace with justice. The essay then looks at the challenges ahead for the implementation of the agreement. Issues of rural inequality, displacement, impunity, the illegal drug economy, the military, private armed groups, new social demands, innovative memory projects, and the changing role of the state are discussed. The bibliography provides a guide to some of the best Colombian literature on the armed conflict, its impact, and possible outcomes of the peace process.