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The Fernando Coronil Reader
The Struggle for Life Is the Matter
Fernando Coronil
Duke University Press, 2019
In The Fernando Coronil Reader Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil challenges us to rethink our approaches to key contemporary epistemological, political, and ethical questions. Consisting of work written between 1991 and 2011, this posthumously published collection includes Coronil's landmark essays “Beyond Occidentalism” and “The Future in Question” as well as two chapters from his unfinished book manuscript, "Crude Matters." Taken together, the essays highlight his deep concern with the Global South, Latin American state formation, theories of nature, empire, and postcolonialism, and anthrohistory as an intellectual and ethical approach. Presenting a cross section of Coronil's oeuvre, this volume cements his legacy as one of the most innovative critical social thinkers of his generation.
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For the Record
On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India
Anjali Arondekar
Duke University Press, 2009
Anjali Arondekar considers the relationship between sexuality and the colonial archive by posing the following questions: Why does sexuality (still) seek its truth in the historical archive? What are the spatial and temporal logics that compel such a return? And conversely, what kind of “archive” does such a recuperative hermeneutics produce? Rather than render sexuality’s relationship to the colonial archive through the preferred lens of historical invisibility (which would presume that there is something about sexuality that is lost or silent and needs to “come out”), Arondekar engages sexuality’s recursive traces within the colonial archive against and through our very desire for access.

The logic and the interpretive resources of For the Record arise out of two entangled and minoritized historiographies: one in South Asian studies and the other in queer/sexuality studies. Focusing on late colonial India, Arondekar examines the spectacularization of sexuality in anthropology, law, literature, and pornography from 1843 until 1920. By turning to materials and/or locations that are familiar to most scholars of queer and subaltern studies, Arondekar considers sexuality at the center of the colonial archive rather than at its margins. Each chapter addresses a form of archival loss, troped either in a language of disappearance or paucity, simulacrum or detritus: from Richard Burton’s missing report on male brothels in Karáchi (1845) to a failed sodomy prosecution in Northern India, Queen Empress v. Khairati (1884), and from the ubiquitous India-rubber dildos found in colonial pornography of the mid-to-late nineteenth century to the archival detritus of Kipling’s stories about the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

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France and Algeria
A History of Decolonization and Transformation
Phillip Naylor
University of Texas Press, 2024

An examination of the complicated history between France and Algeria since the latter’s independence.

While most related studies concentrate on the colonial era and Algeria's War of Independence, France and Algeria details the nations' postcolonial relationship. Phillip Naylor provides a philosophical approach, contending that France reformulated, rather than repudiated, “essential” strategic values during decolonization. It thus continued to pursue grandeur and independence, especially with regard to the Third World and Algeria, an essentialism that expedited France’s postcolonial transformation. But as a new nation, Algeria needed to pursue the “existential” project of self-definition. It became involved in state-building while also promulgating socialism, and it recognized how French oil concessions in the Sahara impeded its independence, leading to the industry's postcolonial decolonization. Finally, the postcolonial relationship has featured a human dimension involving immigrants, pieds-noirs (colonial settlers), and harkis (Algerian soldiers loyal to France), all of them central to bilateral relations.

In this revised and updated edition of his seminal work, first published over twenty years ago, Naylor expands his coverage of the decolonization era, drawing on new information while continuing to study the ever-evolving relationship between the two countries. These new additions expose the continually shifting relations of power, perception, and identity between the two states.

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Freak Performances
Dissidence in Latin American Theater
Analola Santana
University of Michigan Press, 2018
The figure of the freak as perceived by the Western gaze has always been a part of the Latin American imaginary, from the letters that Columbus wrote about his encounters with dog-faced people to Shakespeare's Caliban. The freak acquires greater significance in a globalized, neoliberal world that defines the "abnormal" as one who does not conform mentally, physically, or emotionally and is unable or unwilling to follow the economic and cultural norms of the institutions in power. Freak Performances examines the continuing effects of colonialism on modern Latin American identities, with a particular focus on the way it has constructed the body of the other through performance. Theater questions the representations of these bodies, as it enables the empowerment of the silenced other; the freak as a spectacle of otherness finds in performance an opportunity for re-appropriation by artists resisting the dominant authority. Through an analysis of experimental theater, dance theater, performance art, and gallery-based installation art across eight countries, Analola Santana explores the theoretical issues shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different bodies in the current Latin American landscape.
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From Frontiers to Football
An Alternative History of Latin America since 1800
Matthew Brown
Reaktion Books, 2014
With Brazil hosting the FIFA World Cup this summer and the Olympic Games in 2016, all eyes are on Latin America. But what vision of these countries will we be given? Will our airwaves be full of cultural stereotypes about Latin Americans and inaccurate interpretations of the region’s position in the world? In From Frontiers to Football, Matthew Brown provides a much-needed historical analysis to rebut misconceptions about Latin America’s past while giving readers the tools with which to understand the region’s complex present.
           
Telling the story of Latin America’s engagement with global empires from 1800 to today, From Frontiers to Football is as much a narrative of repeated cycles, continued dependency, and thwarted dreams as it is a tale of imperial designs overthrown, colonial armies defeated, and other successes that have inspired colonized peoples across the globe. Brown restores a cultural history to the continent, giving as much attention to pop singer Shakira and retired footballer Pelé as he does to coffee producers, copper miners, government policies, and covert imperialism. Latin America, Brown shows, is no longer a frontier or periphery, but rather is at the forefront of innovation and a global center for social, cultural, and economic activities. Clear and readable, From Frontiers to Football presents a compelling introduction to the history of Latin America’s interactions with the world over the last two centuries.
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From the Margins
Historical Anthropology and Its Futures
Brian Keith Axel, ed.
Duke University Press, 2002
Historical anthropology: critical exchange between two decidedly distinct disciplines or innovative mode of knowledge production? As this volume’s title suggests, the essays Brian Keith Axel has gathered in From the Margins seek to challenge the limits of discrete disciplinary epistemologies and conventions, gesturing instead toward a transdisciplinary understanding of the emerging relations between archive and field.
In original articles encompassing a wide range of geographic and temporal locations, eminent scholars contest some of the primary preconceptions of their fields. The contributors tackle such topics as the paradoxical nature of American Civil War monuments, the figure of the “New Christian” in early seventeenth-century Peru, the implications of statistics for ethnography, and contemporary South Africa's “occult economies.” That anthropology and history have their provenance in—and have been complicit with—colonial formations is perhaps commonplace knowledge. But what is rarely examined is the specific manner in which colonial processes imbue and threaten the celebratory ideals of postcolonial reason or the enlightenment of today’s liberal practices in the social sciences and humanities.
By elaborating this critique, From the Margins offers diverse and powerful models that explore the intersections of historically specific local practices with processes of a world historical order. As such, the collection will not only prove valuable reading for anthropologists and historians, but also for scholars in colonial, postcolonial, and globalization studies.

Contributors.
Talal Asad, Brian Keith Axel, Bernard S. Cohn, Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Nicholas B. Dirks, Irene Silverblatt, Paul A. Silverstein, Teri Silvio, Ann Laura Stoler, Michel-Rolph Trouillot
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