Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this issue. Robert H. Wilson, Peter M. Ward, Peter K. Spink, and Victoria E. Rodríguez, eds., Governance in the Americas: Decentralization, Democracy, and Subnational Government in Brazil, Mexico, and the USA. Eduardo Rojas, Juan R. Cuadrado‐Roura, and José Miguel Fernández Güell, eds., Governing the Metropolis: Principles and Cases. Translated by Sarah Schineller. Nita Rudra, Globalization and the Race to the Bottom in Developing Countries: Who Really Gets Hurt? Merike Blofield, The Politics of Moral Sin: Abortion and Divorce in Spain, Chile, and Argentina. Yanna P. Yannakakis, The Art of Being In‐between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Campbell, Bruce B., and Arthur D. Brenner, eds. Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability. Pollack, Marcelo. The New Right in Chile, 1973–97. Siavelis, Peter M. The President and Congress in Postauthoritarian Chile: Institutional Constraints to Democratic Consolidation. Díaz‐Briquets, Sergio, and Jorge Pérez‐López, Conquering Nature: The Environmental Legacy of Socialism in Cuba. Schwab, Peter. Cuba: Confronting the U.S. Embargo. Jiménez Polanco, Jacqueline. Los partidos políticos en la República Dominicana: actividad electoral y desarrollo organizativo. Cornelius, Wayne A., Todd A. Eisenstadt, and Jane Hindley, eds. Subnational Politics and Democratization in Mexico. Harvey, Neil. The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. Ward, Peter M., and Victoria E. Rodríguez, with Enrique Cabrero Mendoza. New Federalism and State Government in Mexico: Bringing the States Back In.     

Culturing identities,the state,and national consciousness in late nineteenth‐century western Guatemala1⋆

This paper examines the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late nineteenth‐century western Guatemala. Rooted in face‐to‐face encounters between departmental jefes políticos (departmental governors) and local Maya communities, this procedural culture emerged from routines of governance such as annual municipal inspections, ethnic struggles for municipal control, and local efforts to title community lands that led Maya and state officials to develop contrasting understandings of each other and their relations. Far from precipitating a national identity of mutual belonging, state formation here intensified the racism and political violence that would rend Guatemala during the century to come.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Castro, Max. J., ed. Free Markets, Open Societies, Closed Borders? Trends in International Migration and Immigration Policy in the Americas. Craske, Nikki. Women and Politics in Latin America. Jaquette, Jane S., and Sharon L. Wolchik, eds. Women and Democracy: Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. Hira, Anil. Ideas and Economic Policy in Latin America: Regional, National, and Organizational Case Studies. Mace, Gordon, and Louis Bélanger, eds. The Americas in Transition: The Contours of Regionalism. Rodríguez Mendoza, Miguel, Patrick Low, and Barbara Kotschwar, eds. Trade Rules in the Making: Challenges in Regional and Multilateral Negotiations. Welch, Cliff. The Seed Was Planted: The São Paulo Roots of Brazil's Rural Labor Movement, 1924–1964. Hanchard, Michael, ed. Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil. Lesser, Jeffrey. Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. McCaughan, Edward J. Reinventing Revolution: The Renovation of Left Discourse in Cuba and Mexico. Snyder, Richard, ed. Institutional Adaptation and Innovation in Rural Mexico. Dietz, Henry. Urban Poverty, Political Participation, and the State: Lima, 1970–1990.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Leóns, Madeline Barbara, and Harry Sanabria, eds. Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality. Griffith, Ivelaw Lloyd. Drugs and Security in the Caribbean: Sovereignty Under Siege. McClintock, Cynthia. Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador's FMLN and Peru's Shining Path. Chesnut, R. Andrew. Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty. Kirk, John M., and Peter McKenna. Canada-Cuba Relations: The Other Good Neighbor Policy. Gainesville: Randall, Stephen J., and Graeme S. Mount, with David Bright. The Caribbean Basin: An International History. Pebley, Anne R., and Luis Rosero-Bixby, eds. Demographic Diversity and Change in the Central American Isthmus. Santa Monica Taylor, Lucy. Citizenship, Participation, and Democracy: Changing Dynamics in Chile and Argentina. Leitinger, Ilse Abshagen, ed. and trans. The Costa Rican Women's Movement: A Reader. Kaplowitz, Donna Rich. Anatomy of a Failed Embargo: U.S. Sanctions Against Cuba. Pelupessy, Wim. The Limits of Economic Reform in El Salvador. Stotzky, Irwin P. Silencing The Guns in Haiti: The Promise of Deliberative Democracy. Rodríguez O., Jaime E., and Kathryn Vincent, eds. Myths, Misdeeds, and Misunderstandings: The Roots of Conflict in U.S.-Mexican Relations. Serrano, Mónica, ed. Governing Mexico: Political Parties and Elections.     

Book reviews

Thorp, Rosemary (1998), Progress, Proverty and Exclusion: An Economic History of Latin America in the 20th Century, Inter‐American Development Bank (Washington). Katz, Friedrich (1998), The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. Jones, Grant D. (1998), The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom. Bell, Stephen (1998), Campanha Gaúcha. A Brazilian Ranching System, 1850‐1920. Adelman, Jeremy (ed) (1999), Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History. Bulmer‐Thomas, Victor and Dunkerley, James (eds.) (1999), The United States and Latin America: The New Agenda. Leogrande, W.M. (1998), Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America 1977‐1992. Arnson, Cynthia (ed.) (1999), Comparative Peace Processes in Latin America. Biekart, Kees (1999), The Politics of Civil Society Building. European Private Aid Agencies and Democratic Transitions in Central America. Belnap, Jeffrey and Fernandez, Raúl (eds.) (1998) José Martí's “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies. Chomsky, Aviva and Lauria‐Santiago, Aldo (eds.) (1998), Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation‐State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean. Míguez, Daniel (1998), Spiritual Bonfire in Argentina: Confronting Current Theories with an Ethnographic Account of Pentecostal Growth in a Buenos Aires Suburb. Kamsteeg, Frans H (1998), Prophetic Pentecostalism in Chile: A Case Study on Religion and Development Policy. Rodríguez, Victoria (ed.) (1998), Women’Participation in Mexican Political Life. Arias, Patricia and Fiona Wilson (1997), La Aguja y el Surco: Cambio Regional, Consumey Relaciones de Génera en la Industria de la Ropa en México. Laguerre, E.S. (1998), Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America. Johnson, H. and Watson, K. (ed) (1998), The White Minority in the Caribbean. Bueno, Eva P. and Terry Caesar (eds.) (1998), Imagination Beyond Nation: Latin American Popular Culture. Parker, Richard (1999), Beneath the Equator: Cultures of Desire, Male Homosexuality and Emerging Gay Communities in Brazil. Kulick, Don (1998), Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Davies, Matt (1999), International Political Economy and Mass Communication in Chile: National Intellectuals and Transnational Hegemony. Roberts, Kenneth (1999), Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru. Petras, James (1999), The Left Strikes Back, Class Conflict in Latin America in the Age of Neoliberalism.     

Indigenismo and the Avant‐garde: Jorge Sanjinés' Early Films and the National Project

Jorge Sanjinés' 1960s films Revolución and Ukamau challenge the class and ethnic hierarchies of Bolivian society by casting the proletarian and indigenous masses as revolutionary liberators. The new national imaginary they evoke is tightly bound to the experimental cinematic techniques they employ, since their rejection of rationalist, realist aesthetics signals a partial undermining of the linear time of the modern nation. Ukamau both recalls and resists previous Bolivian indigenismo, which sought to co‐opt the Indian into a national mestizo consciousness. Its exoticist portrayal of the Indian ultimately limits its political effectiveness, but textual and contextual analyses show subversive Indian agency leaking through.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this issue. Steve Ellner, ed., Latin America's Radical Left: Challenges and Complexities of Political Power in the Twenty‐First Century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Bibliography, index, 306 pp.; hardcover $94, paperback $33, ebook $31.99. Kenneth M. Roberts, Changing Course in Latin America: Party Systems in the Neoliberal Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Illustrations, tables, appendix, bibliography, index, 330 pp.; hardcover $95, paperback $34.99, ebook $28. Kurt Weyland, Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America Since the Revolutions of 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Tables, figures, bibliography, index, 326 pp.; hardcover $85, paperback $29.99, ebook $24. Rebecca Weitz‐Shapiro, Curbing Clientelism in Argentina: Politics, Poverty, and Social Policy. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2014. Figures, tables, bibliography, index, 206 pp.; hardcover $90, ebook $72. Miriam Shakow, Along the Bolivian Highway: Social Mobility and Political Culture in a New Middle Class. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Figures, table, appendix, glossary, bibliography, index, 272 pp.; hardcover $65, ebook $65. Paul Almeida, Mobilizing Democracy: Globalization and Citizen Protest. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Illustrations, maps, figures, tables, bibliography, index, 216 pp.; hardcover $59.95, paperback $29.95, ebook $29.95. Ricardo Hausmann and Francisco R. Rodríguez, eds., Venezuela Before Chávez: Anatomy of an Economic Collapse. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Figures, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index, 488 pp.; hardcover $119, paperback $35.95. Carew Boulding, NGOs, Political Protest, and Civil Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Maps, figures, tables, bibliography, index, 232 pp.; hardcover $90, ebook $72. Melani Cammett and Lauren M. Maclean, eds., The Politics of Non‐state Social Welfare. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. Illustrations, tables, figures, bibliography, index, 328 pp.; hardcover $79.95, paperback $29.95.     

The Role of State Advertising in Latin American Newspapers: Was the Demise of Nicaragua’s Barricada Newspaper Political Sabotage?

Barricada, a daily newspaper in Nicaragua, closed in 1998. The editor said his newspaper was a victim of a government policy to remove state advertising from Barricada, which was the official newspaper of the opposition Sandinista political party. This study examines the role of state advertising as a means of governmental control of the news media. The study finds evidence to support the claim that Barricada was the victim of a partisan campaign to withhold advertising. But it also finds that the Sandinistas had done the same thing when they were in power in the 1980s.     

The Death of the Author through False Translation in Mario Bellatin's Orientalised Japan

This article argues that Mario Bellatin's exploration of the potential relationship between writing, translation and physical deformity leads, perhaps unconsciously, to the continuation of exoticising stereotypes about ‘Oriental’ cultures. In El jardín de la señora Murakami, Shiki Nagaoka: una nariz de ficción, and Biografía ilustrada de Mishima, Bellatin resorts to Japanese characters to distance himself from his own writings, as if it were the culture that is the most alien to his own. His lucubrations about reading and writing are sometimes accompanied of exocitising and orientalist overtones, which he mocks at times.     

Adrià Gual as illustrator,stage and costume designer

Catalan playwright, director and teacher Adrià Gual was a key figure in the development of modernista theatre. With his emphasis on theatre as artistic synthesis, Gual's multi-faceted work mirrors that of other European innovators and lays the path towards theatrical renovation in Catalonia and in Spain more generally. The visual element is a key component of his approach, and is reflected in his costume designs and illustrations to printed play texts. This article considers his work in two areas: Oscar Wilde's Salomé – perhaps the archetypical Symbolist play – and the commedia dell'arte spectacles he devised for performance in 1912 and 1927. The article also considers Salvador Dalí's set design for the latter, and allows us to highlight connections with the theatre design work of other avant-garde artists.     

Cultural Policy,Literature and Readership in Revolutionary Cuba: The View from the 21st Century

This article presents a fresh perspective on cultural policy in revolutionary Cuba, focusing specifically on the centrality of dialogue with the general readership to the production, reception and regulation of literature. It first summarises the positions regarding revolutionary literature that have been asserted and essayed at various points along the sometimes chaotic trajectory of revolution in Cuba. It then examines reading-related policies and recent attempts within Cuba to re-orient reading practices in the aftermath of the Período Especial [Special Period], and ends by presenting current Cuban debates on the need to mitigate dialogic breakdown between literary text and readership.     

Salafi pluralism in national contexts: the secular state,nation and militant Islamism in Kosovo,Albania, and Macedonia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the question of how Albanian Salafi Muslims have engaged with and provided religious interpretations to issues peculiar to Albanians’ historical and sociopolitical context, as well as considering the ethnic group’s recent engagement in Middle Eastern conflicts. Utilizing Salafism’s doctrinal concepts of takfir (excommunication of another Muslim) and al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ (loyalty and disavowal) as guiding analytical tools, the article investigates Albanian Salafi Muslims’ position and discourse on the following three Albanian-specific issues: (i) engagement with the secular state by voting for their representatives (leaders); (ii) the question of nation and nationalism; and (iii) the question of militant Islamism related more recently to the Syrian conflict. Though there are different nuances among Albanian Salafi Muslims, the article shows the sharper distinctions and divergences that exist between the mainstream and rejectionist Salafis when considering the ways they have engaged with the three issues under analysis. Also, despite the general agreement in literature about Salafism’s globalized acculturalization impact on localized Islam(s), the analysis deduces Salafism’s ‘re-culturalized’ and ‘re-nationalized’ face in the Albanian-specific context, something prevalent among the mainstream Salafi Muslims of this ethnic group in the Balkans.     

The struggle for Korea's national rights

This article assesses the role played by Indonesian capitalists in the country's new democratic political system. It takes as its starting point the analysis presented by Richard Robison in his influential 1986 book, Indonesia: The Rise of Capital . Robison saw the authoritarian state as central to capitalist class formation, viewing it as midwife and protector of an emergent business class. Though democratisation was not his primary concern, this analysis made him pessimistic about the prospects of democratic change. Over the intervening years, Indonesia has not only undergone democratisation; its capitalist class has also changed significantly. The article notes elements of continuity in the nature of Indonesian capital (including the continuing weight of politically vulnerable ethnic Chinese business interests) as well as change (including the taking of political office by businesspeople and the strengthening of provincial business). Overall, there is now much greater independence of private capital vis-à-vis the state, even if business-state relations are still characterised by patterns that developed during authoritarian rule, including the clientelist and predatory behaviours that have been the subject of much analysis in post-Suharto Indonesia. A focus on the capitalist class and its enmeshment in state power, in the style pioneered by Robison, thus helps explain continuity between Indonesia's authoritarian past and its new democratic order, especially the continuing ubiquity of corruption and patronage. However, such a focus is less useful in accounting for political change, especially democratisation itself. To explain democratisation we need to broaden our class analytical optic to bring into focus the actions and interests of lower and middle class forces.     

Asserting State Authority through Environmental Monitoring: Venezuela in the Post‐Gómez Era, 1935–1945

In Venezuela, the task of consolidating the central state fell to Presidents Eleazar López Contreras (1936–1941) and Isaías Medina Angarita (1941–1945). This meant asserting fiscal control over the oil companies operating in the state of Zulia as well as appeasing restive working and middle classes. The government sought to exert power over both by moving towards a system of environmental monitoring of the petroleum industry. López Contreras was reluctant to apply real political pressure to the companies and accordingly environmental monitoring tended to be lax. Medina Angarita personally visited zulianos and made fiery speeches designed to assuage Venezuelan pride. What is more, he allowed the press to denounce the companies for their environmental abuse. Through his environmental monitoring efforts, Medina demonstrated to the companies that the state was a force to be reckoned with.     

Festival and revolution in the highlands of Vietnam: A Vietnamese artist shows how the revolution came to a mountain people in Central Vietnam

Abstract

Spring Festival on the High Plateaus (figure 1) is the name given by Vietnamese artist Tran Huu Chat to an engraved, painted, and lacquered wooden panel executed in 1962 and acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi. As so often in Vietnamese art of recent decades, this large (120 × 96 cm), elaborate, and richly populated composition is socially and politically charged, but it is also of exceptional ethnographic significance. The theme of solidarity in revolutionary struggle between ethnic minorities and the Vietnamese majority is that of much Vietnamese art of the U.S. war period, especially poster art. Moreover, this homage to Vietnamese “primitives” is in the spirit of President Ho Chi Minh's own repudiation of racism; his 1945 Declaration of Independence avoids any equivalent of the term “merciless Indian savages” contained in its model, the U.S. Declaration of Independence.     

‘This is not a Favela’: Rio de Janeiro's Urban Quilombo Sacopã and the Limits of Multiculturalism

Under Brazil's 1988 Constitution, quilombo communities have the right to the titles of the lands they occupy. This paper assesses quilombo titles' transformative potential through the experiences of Rio de Janeiro's urban quilombo Sacopã, an ethnic Afro‐descendant community once perceived as a favela. Unlike its neighbours, the community managed to resist the widespread favela removals of the 1970s. Based on an ethnographic approach during fieldwork conducted between December 2013 and January 2014, the article asks: how did Sacopã manage to remain, whilst its surrounding favelas were forcefully removed? Who counts as ethnic? What does this imply for Brazil's afro‐descendant majority?     

The ambivalent Apostle of 1953: a liminal reading of the centenary of José Martí

This article has common Cuban motifs at its core: the prevalent obsession with the notion of collective identity, the ideological and psychological importance of national anniversaries, and the omnipresence of the archetypal patriot José Martí. It approaches all from a particular theoretical perspective, however, and thus presents a new reading of the so-called ideario martiano and of the Cuban “national narrative” at a critical moment of the island’s historical trajectory: 1953, the centenary of Martí’s birth. Taking its lead from cultural anthropology (and particularly from the work of Victor Turner), this article presents the half-century since independence in 1902 as a post-colonial “rite of passage” punctuated by a series of turning points, or “limens,” within which the sense of national identity was exposed to sustained scrutiny by public intellectuals and activists. The article provides evidence of such intense collective introspection in 1953 when commemorations of Martí’s centenary stimulated a re-examination of the Republic in the light of his luminous example. Importantly, this turning point is also exposed as a battleground on which antagonistic interpretations of martiano heroism, Republican history, and national identity faced each other in exegetical strife.     

Race,Nature and History in Ensayo sobre las revoluciones políticas and El Español de Ambos Mundos

This article revisits the Ensayo sobre las revoluciones políticas published in Paris by Colombian intellectual José María Samper in 1861. It does so by positioning it in the context of the newspaper in which it was initially published in instalments: El Español de Ambos Mundos. Hitherto both this newspaper and its close conceptual connection to the Ensayo have been overlooked. The simultaneous reading of EAM and the Ensayo also serves to signal similarities and differences in racial thinking on both sides of the Atlantic, while contributing to the increasing interest among scholars in studying how miscegenation was endowed with different meanings according to the context in which it was considered.