The color of modernity

São Paulo and the making of race and nation in Brazil

In "The Color of Modernity," Barbara Weinstein focuses on race, gender, and regionalism in the formation of national identities in Brazil; this focus allows her to explore how uneven patterns of economic development are consolidated and understood. Organized around two principal episodes--the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution ...

The structure of world history

from modes of production to modes of exchange

In this major, paradigm-shifting work, Kojin Karatani systematically rereads Marx's version of world history, shifting the focus of critique from modes of production to modes of exchange. Karatani seeks to understand both Capital-Nation-State, the interlocking system that is the dominant form of modern global ...

Anti-crisis

Crisis is everywhere: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the Congo; in our housing markets, money markets, financial systems, state budgets, and sovereign currencies. In Anti-Crisis, Janet Roitman steps back from the cycle of crisis production to ask not just why we declare so many crises ...

A language of Empire, a quotidian tongue: the uses of Nahuati in New Spain

(Ethnohistory, Volume 59, Nº4, 2012)

This special issue of Ethnohistory highlights new aspects of the use of Nahuatl as a lingua franca during the colonial period. The language of the Aztecs, Nahuatl was also spoken by mestizos, mulatos, and Spaniards. By emphasizing interethnic communication in largely quotidian contexts, this issue ...

The fantasy of feminist history

In The Fantasy of Feminist History, Joan Wallach Scott argues that feminist perspectives on history are enriched by psychoanalytic concepts, particularly fantasy. Tracing the evolution of her thinking about gender over the course of her career, the pioneering historian explains how her search for ways ...

The making of the middle class

toward a transnational history

In this important and timely collection of essays, historians reflect on the middle class: what it is, why its struggles figure so prominently in discussions of the current economic crisis, and how it has shaped, and been shaped by, modernity. They focus on specific middle-class ...

Vertical empire

the general resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes

In 1569 the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo ordered the native people of the central Andes to move to newly founded Spanish-style towns called reducciones. This campaign, known as the General Resettlement of Indians, represented a turning-point in the history of European colonialism: a state ...

People of faith

Slavery and african catholics in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro

In People of Faith, Mariza de Carvalho Soares reconstructs the everyday lives of Mina slaves transported in the eighteenth century to Rio de Janeiro from the western coast of Africa, particularly from modern-day Benin. She describes a Catholic lay brotherhood formed by the enslaved Mina ...

Making a new world

founding capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America

Making a New World is a major rethinking of the role of the Americas in early world trade, the rise of capitalism, and the conflicts that reconfigured global power around 1800. At its centre is the Bajio, a fertile basin extending across the modern-day Mexican ...

Traveling from new Spain to Mexico

mapping practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Antonio Garcia Cubas's Carta general de la Republica Mexicana (1857), a widely acclaimed map of the independent Mexican nation-state, represented the country's geographic coordinates in precise detail. The respected geographer and cartographer made mapping Mexico his life's work. Combining insights from the ...

Harem histories

envisioning places and living spaces

Ed. Marilyn Booth. Harem Histories is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, while also attending to its representational and political uses by visitors to those societies. One theme that ...

Immanuel Wallerstein and the problem of the World

system, scale, culture

Eds. David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, Nirvana Tanoukhi. In this collection of essays, leading cultural theorists consider the meaning and implications of world-scale humanist scholarship by engaging with Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis. The renowned sociologist developed his influential critical framework to explain the historical and ...

A Flock Divided

Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749-1857

Catholicism, as it developed in colonial Mexico, helped to create a broad and remarkably inclusive community of Christian subjects, while it also divided that community into countless smaller flocks. Taking this contradiction as a starting point, Matthew D. O'Hara describes how religious thought and ...

The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages

on the Unwritten History of Theory

Eds. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith. This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should - indeed must - reckon with the medieval. Offering a much needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg who, in his 'Legitimacy of the Modern Age ...

Violent Democracies in Latin America

Eds. Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein. Despite recent political movements to establish democratic rule in Latin American countries, much of the region still suffers from pervasive violence. From vigilantism, to human rights violations, to police corruption, violence persists. It is perpetrated by state-sanctioned ...

Hybrid Constitutions

Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege and Culture in Colonial America

In Hybrid Constitutions, Hsuhe contests the idea that early-modern colonial constitutions were part of a uniform process of modernization, conquest, and assimilation. Through detailed analyses of the founding of several seventeenth-century English proprietary colonies in North America, she reveals how diverse constitutional thought and practice ...

Houses in a landscape

memory and everyday life in Mesoamerica

In "Houses in a Landscape", Julia A. Hendon examines the connections between social identity and social memory using archaeological research on indigenous societies that existed more than one thousand years ago in what is now Honduras. While these societies left behind monumental buildings, the remains ...

Reckoning with Pinochet

the memory question in democratic Chile, 1989-2006

"Reckoning with Pinochet" is the first comprehensive account of how Chile came to terms with General Augusto Pinochet's legacy of human- rights atrocities. An icon of Latin America's 'dirty war' dictators, Pinochet had ruled with extreme violence while building a loyal social base ...

The Russia reader

history, culture, politics

Eds. Adele Barker, Bruce Grant. This title includes an account of the day-to-day scramble to make ends meet after the end of the Soviet Union, letters recording ordinary Russians' reactions to the Revolution as events unfolded in 1917, and excerpts from a sixteenth-century manual instructing ...

Bring on the books for everybody

how literary culture became popular culture

"Bring on the Books for Everybody" is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed ...