A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War - Paperback

by Gilbert M. Joseph (Editor), Greg Grandin (Editor)

Latin America experienced an epochal cycle of revolutionary upheavals and insurgencies during the twentieth century, from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 through the mobilizations and terror in Central America, the Southern Cone, and the Andes during the 1970s and 1980s. In his introduction to A Century of Revolution, Greg Grandin argues that the dynamics of political violence and terror in Latin America are so recognizable in their enforcement of domination, their generation and maintenance of social exclusion, and their propulsion of historical change, that historians have tended to take them for granted, leaving unexamined important questions regarding their form and meaning. The essays in this groundbreaking collection take up these questions, providing a sociologically and historically nuanced view of the ideological hardening and accelerated polarization that marked Latin America's twentieth century. Attentive to the interplay among overlapping local, regional, national, and international fields of power, the contributors focus on the dialectical relations between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes and their unfolding in the context of U.S. hemispheric and global hegemony. Through their fine-grained analyses of events in Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru, they suggest a framework for interpreting the experiential nature of political violence while also analyzing its historical causes and consequences. In so doing, they set a new agenda for the study of revolutionary change and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America.

Contributors. Michelle Chase, Jeffrey L. Gould, Greg Grandin, Lillian Guerra, Forrest Hylton, Gilbert M. Joseph, Friedrich Katz, Thomas Miller Klubock, Neil Larsen, Arno J. Mayer, Carlota McAllister, Jocelyn Olcott, Gerardo Rénique, Corey Robin, Peter Winn

Back Jacket

Showcasing the work of a remarkable group of scholars, this collection provides a sweeping reinterpretation of Latin America's twentieth century and a thought-provoking intervention into our understanding of the history and meaning of political violence.--Laurent Dubois, author of "Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution"

Author Biography

Greg Grandin is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation, also published by Duke University Press.

Gilbert M. Joseph is the Farnam Professor of History and International Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Revolution from Without: Yucatan, Mexico, and the United States, 1880-1924, and a co-editor of In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War and The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics, all also published by Duke University Press.