A Turbulent Decade Remembered

This is an interdisciplinary study of the major cultural and political scenes of a decade marked by dramatic -and sometimes traumatic--change.

The 2013 National Book Award Winner A New York Times Bestseller Throughout his career as a journalist, George Packer has always been attuned to the voices and stories of individuals caught up in the big ideas and events of contemporary history. Interesting Times unites brilliant investigative pieces such as "Betrayed," about Iraqi interpreters, with personal essays and detailed narratives of travels through war zones and failed states. Spanning a decade that includes the September 11, 2001 attacks and the election of Barack Obama, Packer brings insight and passion to his accounts of the war on terror, Iraq, political writers, and the 2008 election. Across these varied subjects a few key themes recur: the temptations and dangers of idealism; the moral complexities of war and politics; the American capacity for self-blinding and self-renewal. Whether exploring American policies in the wake of September 11, tracking a used T-shirt from New York to Uganda, or describing the ambivalent response in Appalachia to Obama, these essays hold a mirror up to our own troubled times and showcase Packer's unmistakable perspective, which is at once both wide-angled and humane.

In the aftermath of 1949, Taiwan’s elites saw themselves as embodying China in exile both politically and culturally. The island—officially known as the Republic of China—was a temporary home to await the reconquest of the mainland. Taiwan, not the People’s Republic, represented China internationally until the early 1970s. Yet in recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state. A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt. After major diplomatic setbacks at the beginning of the 1970s posed a serious challenge to Kuomintang authoritarian rule, a younger generation without firsthand experience of life on the mainland began openly challenging the status quo. Hsiau examines how student activists, writers, and dissident researchers of Taiwanese anticolonial movements, despite accepting Chinese nationalist narratives, began to foreground Taiwan’s political and social past and present. Their activism, creative work, and historical explorations played pivotal roles in bringing to light and reshaping indigenous and national identities. In so doing, Hsiau contends, they laid the basis for Taiwanese nationalism and the eventual democratization of Taiwan. Offering bracing new perspectives on nationalism, democratization, and identity in Taiwan, this book has significant implications spanning sociology, history, political science, and East Asian studies.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara twice traveled across Latin America in the early 1950s. Based on his accounts of those trips (published in English as The Motorcycle Diaries and Back on the Road), as well as other historical sources, Che’s Travels follows Guevara, country by country, from his native Argentina through Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, and then from Argentina through Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico. Each essay is focused on a single country and written by an expert in its history. Taken together, the essays shed new light on Che’s formative years by analyzing the distinctive societies, histories, politics, and cultures he encountered on these two trips, the ways they affected him, and the ways he represented them in his travelogues. In addition to offering new insights into Guevara, the essays provide a fresh perspective on Latin America’s experience of the Cold War and the interplay of nationalism and anti-imperialism in the crucial but relatively understudied 1950s. Assessing Che’s legacies in the countries he visited during the two journeys, the contributors examine how he is remembered or memorialized; how he is invoked for political, cultural, and religious purposes; and how perceptions of him affect ideas about the revolutions and counterrevolutions fought in Latin America from the 1960s through the 1980s. Contributors Malcolm Deas Paulo Drinot Eduardo Elena Judith Ewell Cindy Forster Patience A. Schell Eric Zolov Ann Zulawski

Students played a critical role in the Sandinista struggle in Nicaragua, helping to topple the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979—one of only two successful social revolutions in Cold War Latin America. Debunking misconceptions, Students of Revolution provides new evidence that groups of college and secondary-level students were instrumental in fostering a culture of insurrection—one in which societal groups from elite housewives to rural laborers came to see armed revolution as not only legitimate but necessary. Drawing on student archives, state and university records, and oral histories, Claudia Rueda reveals the tactics by which young activists deployed their age, class, and gender to craft a heroic identity that justified their political participation and to help build cross-class movements that eventually paralyzed the country. Despite living under a dictatorship that sharply curtailed expression, these students gained status as future national leaders, helping to sanctify their right to protest and generating widespread outrage while they endured the regime’s repression. Students of Revolution thus highlights the aggressive young dissenters who became the vanguard of the opposition.

In the months leading up to the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, students took to the streets, calling for greater democratization and decrying crackdowns on political resistance by the ruling PRI party. During a mass meeting held at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco neighborhood, paramilitary forces opened fire on the gathering. The death toll from the massacre remains a contested number, ranging from an official count in the dozens to estimates in the hundreds by journalists and scholars. Rereading the legacy of this tragedy through diverse artistic-political interventions across the decades, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco explores the state’s dual repression—both the massacre’s crushing effects on the movement and the manipulation of cultural discourse and political thought in the aftermath. Examining artifacts ranging from documentary photography and testimony to poetry, essays, chronicles, cinema, literary texts, video, and performance, Samuel Steinberg considers the broad photographic and photopoetic nature of modern witnessing as well as the specific elements of light (gunfire, flares, camera flashes) that ultimately defined the massacre. Steinberg also demonstrates the ways in which the labels of “massacre” and “sacrifice” inform contemporary perceptions of the state’s blatant and violent repression of unrest. With implications for similar processes throughout the rest of Latin America from the 1960s to the present day, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco provides a powerful new model for understanding the intersection of political history and cultural memory.

Bringing Latin American popular art out of the margins and into the center of serious scholarship, this book rethinks the cultural canon and recovers previously undervalued cultural forms as art. Juan Ramos uses "decolonial aesthetics," a theory that frees the idea of art from Eurocentric forms of expression and philosophies of the beautiful, to examine the long decade of the 1960s in Latin America--a time of cultural production that has not been studied extensively from a decolonial perspective. Ramos looks at examples of "antipoetry," unconventional verse that challenges canonical poets and often addresses urgent social concerns. He analyzes the militant popular songs of nueva canción by musicians such as Mercedes Sosa and Violeta Parra. He discusses films that use visually shocking images and melodramatic effects to tell the stories of Latin American nations. He asserts that these different art forms should not be studied in isolation but rather brought together as a network of contributions to decolonial art. These art forms, he argues, appeal to an aesthetic that involves all the senses. Instead of being outdated byproducts of their historical moments, they continue to influence Latin American cultural production today.

An exploration of the concept of utopia in Latin America from the earliest accounts of the New World to current cultural production, the carefully selected essays in this volume represent the latest research on the topic by some of the most important Latin Americanists working in North American academia today.