A Cultural History of Underdevelopment explores the changing place of Latin America in U.S. culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent U.S.-Cuba détente. In doing so, it uncovers the complex ways in which Americans have imagined the global geography of poverty and progress, as the hemispheric imperialism of the nineteenth century yielded to the Cold War discourse of "underdevelopment." John Patrick Leary examines representations of uneven development in Latin America across a variety of genres and media, from canonical fiction and poetry to cinema, photography, journalism, popular song, travel narratives, and development theory. For the United States, Latin America has figured variously as good neighbor and insurgent threat, as its possible future and a remnant of its past. By illuminating the conventional ways in which Americans have imagined their place in the hemisphere, the author shows how the popular image of the United States as a modern, exceptional nation has been produced by a century of encounters that travelers, writers, radicals, filmmakers, and others have had with Latin America. Drawing on authors such as James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, Leary argues that Latin America has figured in U.S. culture not just as an exotic "other" but as the familiar reflection of the United States’ own regional, racial, class, and political inequalities.

The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

Includes the complete English continuity script of the film, Memorias del subdesarollo (Memories of underdevelopment) directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and the complete English translation (entitled 'Inconsolable memories') of Edmundo Desnoes' novel of the same name on which it was based.

Analyzes Muslim countries' contemporary problems, particularly violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, comparing their historical levels of development with Western Europe.

Essays that suggest new ways of understanding the role that US actors and agencies have played in Latin America." - publisher.

Prominent scholars and journalists ponder the question of why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world is more divided than ever between the rich and the poor, between those living in freedom and those under oppression.