Colombia S Forgotten Frontier

The first literary geography of the Putumayo, exploring its history and enduring significance through literature of and on this Colombian region by Latin American, US and European writers.

Coming to prominence during the rubber fever of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the Putumayo has long been a site of political turmoil, a place of mass immigration, exile, subjugation, insurgency, and violence, all of which have fostered a long, international literary history. Colombia's Forgotten Frontier maps a literary map of this history for the first time. Lesley Wylie looks at works by writers from Latin America, the United States, and Europe— including works by Roger Casement, José Eustasio Rivera, and Williams Burroughs—in order to examine Colombia's literary legacy of marginality and conflict.

Frontier Road uses the history of one road in southern Colombia—known locally as “the trampoline of death”—to demonstrate how state-building processes and practices have depended on the production and maintenance of frontiers as inclusive-exclusive zones, often through violent means. Considers the topic from multiple perspectives, including ethnography of the state, the dynamics of frontiers, and the nature of postcolonial power, space, and violence Draws attention to the political, environmental, and racial dynamics involved in the history and development of transport infrastructure in the Amazon region Examines the violence that has sustained the state through time and space, as well as the ways in which ordinary people have made sense of and contested that violence in everyday life Incorporates a broad range of engaging sources, such as missionary and government archives, travel writing, and oral histories

The humanitarian movement against Leopold’s violent colonisation of the Congo emerged out of Europe, but it depended at every turn on African input. Individuals and groups from throughout the upper Congo River basin undertook journeys of daring and self-sacrifice to provide evidence of atrocities for the colonial authorities, missionaries, and international investigators. Combining archive research with attention to recent debates on the relation between imperialism and humanitarianism, on trauma, witnessing and postcolonial studies, and on the recovery of colonial archives, this book examines the conditions in which colonised peoples were able to speak about their subjection, and those in which attempts at testimony were thwarted. Robert Burroughs makes a major intervention by identifying African agency and input as a key factor in the Congo atrocities debate. This is an important and unique book in African history, imperial and colonial history, and humanitarian history.

Americans imagine the Early West as a vast expanse of almost empty land populated only by farmers, ranchers, cattle, and horses. Now a leading scholar challenges this stereotype with his concise examination of early city planning and urban development in the region. Extending and elaborating on studies by Carl Bridenbaugh and Richard Wade of the Atlantic Seaboard and the Ohio Valley, John Reps demonstrates that throughout the Trans-Mississippi West cities and towns, not farms and ranches, formed the vanguard of frontier settlement. Urban communities thus stimulated rather than followed the opening of the West to agriculture. These cities did not grow randomly, for their founders established patterns of streets, lots, and public sites to guide expansion as population increased. Reps supports his thesis with 100 illustrations-plans, maps, surveys, and views-showing the original designs of every major Western city and of dozens of smaller places. Based on Reps's massive Cities of the American West (winner of the Beveridge Prize in 1980), this succinct account includes extensive notes and references that will be useful to readers who wish to pursue his penetrating critique.

"Forgotten Peace examines Colombian society's attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere's worst mid-century conflict and how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. In this book, Robert A. Karl reconstructs encounters between government officials, rural peoples, provincial elites, and urban intellectuals during a crucial conjuncture that saw reformist optimism transform into alienation. In addition to offering a sweeping reinterpretation of Colombian history--including the most detailed account of the origins of the FARC insurgency in any language--Karl provides a Colombian vantage on global processes of democratic transition, development, and memory formation in the 1950s and 1960s. Sweeping in scope, Forgotten Peace challenges contemporary theories of violence in Latin America."--Provided by publisher.

Although Villavicencio, the capital of the Department of Meta, is located just 120 miles from Bogot , the mountains of the eastern Andean Cordillera lies between the two cities. As a result, after its founding in 1842, Villavicencio remained an isolated frontier outpost for more than one hundred years--even though "El Portal de la Llanura" ("the Gateway to the Plains") provided the principal access to Colombia's tropical plains (Llanos), a vast grassy region cut by tributaries connecting with the Meta and Guaviare rivers and eventually the Orinoco. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century governments in Bogot regarded the Llanos as the "Eastern Lands of Promise," underestimating the geographic and climatic obstacles to their development. From Frontier Town to Metropolis recounts the history of the town and explains how, by the twenty-first century, it became a thriving metropolis with a population nearing three hundred thousand. During the next sixty years, it became the principal urban center of the Llanos despite the continual presence of militant guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers. This book examines the developments that transformed Villavicencio, drawing on data collected about the Colombian Llanos over a period of forty years. Noted researcher Jane M. Rausch offers a detailed treatment of the development of Villavicencio and the Department of Meta as a microcosm of Colombia's eastern frontier. The book incorporates a wealth of research published in Spanish by Colombian scholars in the last twenty years and is the first history of Villavicencio available to English-speaking scholars. It considers the important topics of when a frontier is no longer a frontier and the role played by frontier images in contemporary nationalism.

A collection of multinational scholarly contributions on various cultural aspects of the Amazon region in the 20th century.