This pioneering translation of Alfonso Múnera’s seminal work El fracaso de la nación presents a new interpretation and innovative perspective on canonical Colombian history and the failure of the Colombian nation to English-speaking readers. Mainstream historiography depicts Colombian independence as the achievement of European-descendent elites only, downplaying the role and importance of regional subaltern classes. Múnera’s well-researched account challenges theoretical, political, and cultural interventions and shows that these subaltern groups were pivotal to achieving independence from Spain. It was their organizing and pressing for freedom from colonial domination that ultimately brought about independence in Cartagena and later to the whole country. Yet Múnera demonstrates that these differing regional elites meant that a single, coherent unity across New Granada was not possible, a point that would ultimately doom subsequent nation-building efforts. Offering a truly decolonizing perspective, one that has remained hidden from official accounts of Colombian independence, scholars and researchers in political science, history, sociology, and anthropology will welcome the opportunity to read this work for the first time in translation.

An analysis of migration, labor-management collaboration, and the mobility of capital based on case studies in New England and Colombia.

DIVUses 1996 strike by Colombian coca workers as site to study the state and social movements, analyzing how peasants denied full citizenship become political players in a way that defines the Colombian state in the international arena./div

This collection brings together innovative historical work on race and national identity in Latin America and the Caribbean and places this scholarship in the context of interdisciplinary and transnational discussions regarding race and nation in the Americas. Moving beyond debates about whether ideologies of racial democracy have actually served to obscure discrimination, the book shows how notions of race and nationhood have varied over time across Latin America's political landscapes. Framing the themes and questions explored in the volume, the editors' introduction also provides an overview of the current state of the interdisciplinary literature on race and nation-state formation. Essays on the postindependence period in Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Peru consider how popular and elite racial constructs have developed in relation to one another and to processes of nation building. Contributors also examine how ideas regarding racial and national identities have been gendered and ask how racialized constructions of nationhood have shaped and limited the citizenship rights of subordinated groups. The contributors are Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, Lillian Guerra, Anne S. Macpherson, Aims McGuinness, Gerardo Renique, James Sanders, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Barbara Weinstein.

Long a favorite on dance floors in Latin America, the porro, cumbia, and vallenato styles that make up Colombia's música tropical are now enjoying international success. How did this music—which has its roots in a black, marginal region of the country—manage, from the 1940s onward, to become so popular in a nation that had prided itself on its white heritage? Peter Wade explores the history of música tropical, analyzing its rise in the context of the development of the broadcast media, rapid urbanization, and regional struggles for power. Using archival sources and oral histories, Wade shows how big band renditions of cumbia and porro in the 1940s and 1950s suggested both old traditions and new liberties, especially for women, speaking to a deeply rooted image of black music as sensuous. Recently, nostalgic, "whitened" versions of música tropical have gained popularity as part of government-sponsored multiculturalism. Wade's fresh look at the way music transforms and is transformed by ideologies of race, nation, sexuality, tradition, and modernity is the first book-length study of Colombian popular music.

Based on cutting-edge research, these 12 essays examine connections between race and national identity in Latin America and the Caribbean in the post-independence era. They reveal how notions of race and nationhood have varied over time and across the region's political landscapes.

For close to a century, Harlem has been the iconic black neighborhood widely seen as the heart of African American life and culture, both celebrated as the vanguard of black self-determination and lamented as the face of segregation. But with Harlem’s demographic, physical, and commercial landscapes rapidly changing, the neighborhood’s status as a setting and symbol of black political and cultural life looks uncertain. As debate swirls around Harlem’s present and future, Race Capital? revisits a century of the area’s history, culture, and imagery, exploring how and why it achieved its distinctiveness and significance and offering new accounts of Harlem’s evolving symbolic power. In this book, leading scholars consider crucial aspects of Harlem’s social, political, and intellectual history; its artistic, cultural, and economic life; and its representation across an array of media and genres. Together they reveal a community at once local and transnational, coalescing and conflicted; one that articulated new visions of a cosmopolitan black modernity while clashing over distinctions of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality. Topics explored include Harlem as a literary phenomenon; recent critiques of Harlem exceptionalism; gambling and black business history; the neighborhood’s transnational character; its importance in the black freedom struggle; black queer spaces; and public policy and neighborhood change in historical context. Spanning a century, from the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance to present-day controversies over gentrification, Race Capital? models new Harlem scholarship that interrogates exceptionalism while taking seriously the importance of place and locality, offering vistas onto new directions for African American and diasporic studies.