Este volumen recoge los trabajos presentados, en el simposio Estado, región y poder local en América Latina, desarrollado en Barcelona el 29 y 30 de noviembre de 2006, por investigadores interesados en analizar y debatir, desde una mirada interdisciplinaria, cuestiones relativas a las características del estado-nación, el surgimiento y la articulación de diversos espacios regionales y la conformación de los poderes locales en la construcción de los estados latinoamericanos. La convocatoria fue organizada por el Taller de Estudios e Investigaciones Andino-Amazónicos (TEIAA), grupo de investigación consolidado de la Universitat de Barcelona (2005SGR 00250) que desde 1991 ha promovido diversas reuniones científicas ya en la Universidad de Barcelona, ya en congresos nacionales e internacionales (AHILA e ICA fundamentalmente), además de haber organizado un seminario permanente con la participación de investigadores de diversas disciplinas humanísticas y de las ciencias sociales, y de estudiantes de postgrado.

In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere - the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglass - both published their first works. Each would become the most famous and enduring texts in what were both prolific careers, and they ensured Sarmiento and Douglass' position as leading figures in the canon of Latin American and U.S. African-American political thought, respectively. But despite the fact that both deal directly with key political and philosophical questions in the Americas, Douglass and Sarmiento, like African-American and Latin American thought more generally, are never read alongside each other. This may be because their ideas about race differed dramatically. Sarmiento advocated the Europeanization of Latin America and espoused a virulent form of anti-indigenous racism, while Douglass opposed slavery and defended the full humanity of black persons. Still, as Juliet Hooker contends, looking at the two together allows one to chart a hemispheric intellectual geography of race that challenges political theory's preoccupation with and assumptions about East / West comparisons, and questions the use of comparison as a tool in the production of theory and philosophy. By juxtaposing four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers - Frederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos - her book will be the first to bring African-American and Latin American political thought into conversation. Hooker stresses that Latin American and U.S. ideas about race were not developed in isolation, but grew out of transnational intellectual exchanges across the Americas. In so doing, she shows that nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American thinkers each looked to political models in the 'other' America to advance racial projects in their own countries. Reading these four intellectuals as hemispheric thinkers, Hooker foregrounds elements of their work that have been dismissed by dominant readings, and provides a crucial platform to bridge the canons of Latin American and African-American political thought.

Celebrities live their lives in constant dialogue with stories about them. But when these stories are shaped by durable racist myths, they wield undue power to ruin lives and obliterate communities. Black Legend is the haunting story of an Afro-Argentine, Raúl Grigera ('el negro Raúl'), who in the early 1900s audaciously fashioned himself into an alluring Black icon of Buenos Aires' bohemian nightlife, only to have defamatory storytellers unmake him. In this gripping history, Paulina Alberto exposes the destructive power of racial storytelling and narrates a new history of Black Argentina and Argentine Blackness across two centuries. With the extraordinary Raúl Grigera at its center, Black Legend opens new windows into lived experiences of Blackness in a 'white' nation, and illuminates how Raúl's experience of celebrity was not far removed from more ordinary experiences of racial stories in the flesh.

The companion volume to Latin American Bureaucracy State and the State Building Process (1780–1860) (2013), this book examines the organization and the consolidation of various groups – including judicial officers and tax agents, administrative clerks and soldiers, and merchants and money lenders – acting to create (or reacting to ruin, in the case of the collective resistance to taxes) newly emergent forms of social and political power. Chapters range across Latin America and the United States, Spain, Modern England, Russia, India and the Far-East, and the longue durée of Eurasian history (12th–19th centuries). They reveal that, beyond the general impact of kinship networks, different processes resulted in the consolidation of a new authority based on specialized knowledge and professionalization. The importance attached to the role played by these new servants by imperial, royal or feudal courts led to new forms of recruitment, new procedures of evaluation and the regularization of daily work. It also led to the establishment of new hierarchies, and to the reinforcement of the identity of these various groups who were aggregating to defend shared interests, develop alliances, create methods of intervention, and define fields of expertise. In this respect, the concept of “State” is revisited here as a diverse and locally varied process grounded on differing historical experiences, but which produced similar public officers, who saw themselves as powerful servants managing a part of the public authority.

In 1932 Bolivia and Paraguay went to war over the Chaco region in South America. The war lasted three years and approximately 52,000 Bolivians and Paraguayans died. Moving beyond the battlefields of the Chaco War, this volume highlights the forgotten narratives of the war. Studying the environmental, ethnic, and social realities of the war in both Bolivia and Paraguay, the contributors examine the conflict that took place between 1932 and 1936 and explore its relationship with and impact on nationalism, activism and modernity. Beginning with an overview of the war, the book goes on to explore many new approaches to the conflict, and the contributors address topics such as the environmental challenges faced by the forces involved, the role of indigenous peoples, the impact of oil nationalism and the conflict's aftermath. This is a volume that will be of interest to anyone working on modern Latin America and the relationship between war and society.

This book reconsiders the relationship between race and nation in Argentina during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and places Argentina firmly in dialog with the literature on race and nation in Latin America, from where it has long been excluded or marginalized for being a white, European exception in a mixed-race region. The contributors, based both in North America and Argentina, hail from the fields of history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. Their essays collectively destabilize widespread certainties about Argentina, showing that whiteness in that country has more in common with practices and ideologies of Mestizaje and 'racial democracy' elsewhere in the region than has typically been acknowledged. The essays also situate Argentina within the well-established literature on race, nation, and whiteness in world regions beyond Latin America (particularly, other European 'settler societies'). The collection thus contributes to rethinking race for other global contexts as well.