Population Politics in the Tropics
Title | Population Politics in the Tropics PDF eBook |
Author | Samuël Coghe |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 333 |
Release | 2022-02-03 |
Genre | Medical |
ISBN | 1108944035 |
Population Politics in the Tropics explores fears of population decline and policies in Portuguese Angola from 1890-1945. Utilising a wide range of multilingual archival research and comparative and transimperial perspectives, Samuël Coghe argues that colonial policy was driven by a persistent, but imprecise, idea of demographic crisis.
Dragon in the Tropics
Title | Dragon in the Tropics PDF eBook |
Author | Javier Corrales |
Publisher | Rowman & Littlefield |
Pages | 209 |
Release | 2011-02-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0815705026 |
Since he was first elected in 1999, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías has reshaped a frail but nonetheless pluralistic democracy into a semi-authoritarian regime—an outcome achieved with spectacularly high oil income and widespread electoral support. This eye-opening book illuminates one of the most sweeping and unexpected political transformations in contemporary Latin America. Based on more than fifteen years' experience in researching and writing about Venezuela, Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold have crafted a comprehensive account of how the Chávez regime has revamped the nation, with a particular focus on its political transformation. Throughout, they take issue with conventional explanations. First, they argue persuasively that liberal democracy as an institution was not to blame for the rise of chavismo. Second, they assert that the nation's economic ailments were not caused by neoliberalism. Instead they blame other factors, including a dependence on oil, which caused macroeconomic volatility; political party fragmentation, which triggered infighting; government mismanagement of the banking crisis, which led to more centralization of power; and the Asian crisis of 1997, which devastated Venezuela's economy at the same time that Chávez ran for president. It is perhaps on the role of oil that the authors take greatest issue with prevailing opinion. They do not dispute that dependence on oil can generate political and economic distortions—the "resource curse" or "paradox of plenty" arguments—but they counter that oil alone fails to explain Chávez's rise. Instead they single out a weak framework of checks and balances that allowed the executive branch to extract oil rents and distribute them to the populace. The real culprit behind Chávez's success, they write, was the asymmetry of political power.
Why Forests? Why Now?
Title | Why Forests? Why Now? PDF eBook |
Author | Frances Seymour |
Publisher | Brookings Institution Press |
Pages | 389 |
Release | 2016-12-27 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 1933286865 |
Tropical forests are an undervalued asset in meeting the greatest global challenges of our time—averting climate change and promoting development. Despite their importance, tropical forests and their ecosystems are being destroyed at a high and even increasing rate in most forest-rich countries. The good news is that the science, economics, and politics are aligned to support a major international effort over the next five years to reverse tropical deforestation. Why Forests? Why Now? synthesizes the latest evidence on the importance of tropical forests in a way that is accessible to anyone interested in climate change and development and to readers already familiar with the problem of deforestation. It makes the case to decisionmakers in rich countries that rewarding developing countries for protecting their forests is urgent, affordable, and achievable.
An Eye for the Tropics
Title | An Eye for the Tropics PDF eBook |
Author | Krista A. Thompson |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Pages | 421 |
Release | 2007-03-15 |
Genre | Photography |
ISBN | 0822388561 |
Images of Jamaica and the Bahamas as tropical paradises full of palm trees, white sandy beaches, and inviting warm water seem timeless. Surprisingly, the origins of those images can be traced back to the roots of the islands’ tourism industry in the 1880s. As Krista A. Thompson explains, in the late nineteenth century, tourism promoters, backed by British colonial administrators, began to market Jamaica and the Bahamas as picturesque “tropical” paradises. They hired photographers and artists to create carefully crafted representations, which then circulated internationally via postcards and illustrated guides and lectures. Illustrated with more than one hundred images, including many in color, An Eye for the Tropics is a nuanced evaluation of the aesthetics of the “tropicalizing images” and their effects on Jamaica and the Bahamas. Thompson describes how representations created to project an image to the outside world altered everyday life on the islands. Hoteliers imported tropical plants to make the islands look more like the images. Many prominent tourist-oriented spaces, including hotels and famous beaches, became off-limits to the islands’ black populations, who were encouraged to act like the disciplined, loyal colonial subjects depicted in the pictures. Analyzing the work of specific photographers and artists who created tropical representations of Jamaica and the Bahamas between the 1880s and the 1930s, Thompson shows how their images differ from the English picturesque landscape tradition. Turning to the present, she examines how tropicalizing images are deconstructed in works by contemporary artists—including Christopher Cozier, David Bailey, and Irénée Shaw—at the same time that they remain a staple of postcolonial governments’ vigorous efforts to attract tourists.
Queer in the Tropics
Title | Queer in the Tropics PDF eBook |
Author | Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 104 |
Release | 2019-04-17 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9783030150730 |
This book aims to reflect on how to translate “queer” in the context of Latin America. Queer theory is becoming consolidated on an international scale as an effort to understand dissident bodies and their inventions. But how can we utilize such a rich body of literature and proposals without merely applying in the Global South what has been formulated in the Global North? Through meetings between dissident bodies in the Global South, the book suggests that the theoretical-poetic inventions formulated in this part of the world cannot be forgotten and proposes a discussion on how to approach queer theory from a decolonial point of view. There is still only a scant body of literature that systematizes and approaches these questions from a Latin American point of view; or, to use the term that gives this book its name, the “tropics.” The book points out the necessity of staying aware of the connections between western modernity and colonial practices. The book therefore invites us to pass through borders, to question limits, and to allow ourselves to be affected by Others, a fundamental exercise in the context of social inequality as drastic as that in which the majority of the population live in Latin America and in the Global South in general. Theories, like bodies, travel; in being translated, they transform themselves. The movements and the bending of bodies and theories are disturbing and subversive. Queer in the Tropics arises from these translations, from this bending, and from these subversions.
Shifting Cultivation and Secondary Succession in the Tropics
Title | Shifting Cultivation and Secondary Succession in the Tropics PDF eBook |
Author | Albert O. Aweto |
Publisher | CABI |
Pages | 208 |
Release | 2013-01-01 |
Genre | Technology & Engineering |
ISBN | 1780640439 |
Shifting cultivation is the predominant system of arable farming in the humid and sub-humid tropics, where several hundred million people depend on this system of agriculture for their livelihood. This book documents and systematizes findings in shifting cultivation from over the last six decades, including characterizing secondary succession and relating the changes that fallow vegetation undergoes to the process of soil fertility restoration. This book is essential reading for researchers and students of tropical agriculture and related areas.
Development and Women's Reproductive Health in Ghana, 1920-1982
Title | Development and Women's Reproductive Health in Ghana, 1920-1982 PDF eBook |
Author | Holly Ashford |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Pages | 248 |
Release | 2022-12-09 |
Genre | Medical |
ISBN | 1000801810 |
This book investigates the history of women’s reproductive health in Ghana, arguing that between the 1920s and 1980s, it was largely driven by discourses of development and population control rather than a concern for women’s health or rights. Between the 1920s and 1980s, the choices that Ghanaian women made regarding their reproductive health were defined by development policy and practice. Spanning the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods, this book demonstrates that whilst the substance of development discourse shifted over time, principles of development continued to be used to impact and legitimise reproductive health policy and practices well after independence. The book explores Ghana’s pluralist health system, the introduction of maternal and child welfare, the dominance of the Red Cross in Ghana’s maternal and child health landscape, nationalist pronatalism and global population activism. In order to understand how global iterations of development and health policy impacted ordinary lives in Ghana, the author uses evidence from multiple ‘levels,’ including private papers, national archives and records of international and transnational organisations. Providing balanced archival perspectives, the book includes extensive oral history interviews carried out with both rural Ghanaian women and traditional birth attendants, as well as with midwives, doctors and family planning fieldworkers. This book will have an important impact on a number of historical fields including Ghanaian history, global health history, global histories of population and family planning and histories of development. It will be of interest to researchers and students in the history of public health, development, Africa, Ghana and gender.