Anubhav Sinha directs this big-budget Bollywood sci-fi superhero action film starring Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Arjun Rampal. Geeky video game designer Shekhar (Khan) has a secret alter-ego: leather-clad, musclebound superhero-with-a-heart G.One, on hand to protect the world from the villainous forces that threaten it.

Although largely sharing a common past and language, the countries in Latin America remain distinct entities with their own identities. Latin America since 1780 provides a continental-based historical narrative which stresses the common themes between countries like Mexico in North America to Argentina in the Southern Cone, while at the same time highlighting their specific national contexts. This book focuses on key events such as the Mexican-American War, the Cuban Revolution, and the overthrow of Salvador Allende's government, as well as providing short inserts on the main political protagonists such as Simon Bolívar, Getulio Vargas and the Subcomandante Marcos. This new edition has been fully updated to include recent events and trends including Hugo Chávez's 'Bolivarian Revolution' in Venezuela, Evo Morales' electoral victory in Bolivia, and the so-called Pink Tide that has resulted in the emergence of a variety of socialist-leaning governments in the region. At the same time, the book discusses Latin America's cultural diversity, paying particular attention to the response of writers and film makers to the historical contexts covered in the book. A range of pedagogical devices and a lively prose style makes this book the ideal introduction to Latin American history. Written in an accessible style and assuming no prior knowledge, the books in this series address the specific needs of students on language courses, as well as anyone with an interest in modern history. Approaching the study of history via contemporary politics and society, each book offers a clear historical narrative and sets the country or region concerned in the context of the wider world.

The process of construction of national states had a decisive moment during the period of revolutions that spanned from the end of the eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century. Even if it was a generalized process throughout the Western world, the majority of social scientists that have analyzed it have based their theoretical models on the European and North American experiences. This volume pays particular attention to the historical experience of Latin America and accounts for its distinctive regional and national characteristics through the analysis of cases. It also evokes the existence of certain features of the process that historiography has not sufficiently taken into consideration until now. This book provides the first detailed perspective of the formation of the State’s bureaucracies in Latin America, a long and complex process shaped by the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions of different countries in the continent. These bureaucracies absorbed and institutionalized the pre-existing configurations of power while simultaneously transforming them. The essays included in this book offer an innovative vantage point for the analysis of issues that continue to be crucial in present-day Latin America, such as those that involve the relations between the State and society.

In Smoldering Ashes Charles F. Walker interprets the end of Spanish domination in Peru and that country’s shaky transition to an autonomous republican state. Placing the indigenous population at the center of his analysis, Walker shows how the Indian peasants played a crucial and previously unacknowledged role in the battle against colonialism and in the political clashes of the early republican period. With its focus on Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca Empire, Smoldering Ashes highlights the promises and frustrations of a critical period whose long shadow remains cast on modern Peru. Peru’s Indian majority and non-Indian elite were both opposed to Spanish rule, and both groups participated in uprisings during the late colonial period. But, at the same time, seething tensions between the two groups were evident, and non-Indians feared a mass uprising. As Walker shows, this internal conflict shaped the many struggles to come, including the Tupac Amaru uprising and other Indian-based rebellions, the long War of Independence, the caudillo civil wars, and the Peru-Bolivian Confederation. Smoldering Ashes not only reinterprets these conflicts but also examines the debates that took place—in the courts, in the press, in taverns, and even during public festivities—over the place of Indians in the republic. In clear and elegant prose, Walker explores why the fate of the indigenous population, despite its participation in decades of anticolonial battles, was little improved by republican rule, as Indians were denied citizenship in the new nation—an unhappy legacy with which Peru still grapples. Informed by the notion of political culture and grounded in Walker’s archival research and knowledge of Peruvian and Latin American history, Smoldering Ashes will be essential reading for experts in Andean history, as well as scholars and students in the fields of nationalism, peasant and Native American studies, colonialism and postcolonialism, and state formation.

This collection brings together recent scholarship that examines how understandings of honor changed in Latin America between political independence in the early nineteenth century and the rise of nationalist challenges to liberalism in the 1930s. These rich historical case studies reveal the uneven processes through which ideas of honor and status came to depend more on achievements such as education and employment and less on the birthright privileges that were the mainstays of honor during the colonial period. Whether considering court battles over lost virginity or police conflicts with prostitutes, vagrants, and the poor over public decorum, the contributors illuminate shifting ideas about public and private spheres, changing conceptions of race, the growing intervention of the state in defining and arbitrating individual reputations, and the enduring role of patriarchy in apportioning both honor and legal rights. Each essay examines honor in the context of specific historical processes, including early republican nation-building in Peru; the transformation in Mexican villages of the cargo system, by which men rose in rank through service to the community; the abolition of slavery in Rio de Janeiro; the growth of local commerce and shifts in women’s status in highland Bolivia; the formation of a multiethnic society on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast; and the development of nationalist cultural responses to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. By connecting liberal projects that aimed to modernize law and society with popular understandings of honor and status, this volume sheds new light on broad changes and continuities in Latin America over the course of the long nineteenth century. Contributors. José Amador de Jesus, Rossana Barragán, Sueann Caulfield, Sidney Chalhoub, Sarah C. Chambers, Eileen J. Findley, Brodwyn Fischer, Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Laura Gotkowitz, Keila Grinberg, Peter Guardino, Cristiana Schettini Pereira, Lara Elizabeth Putnam

DIVEssays in collection argue that Latin American legal institutions were both mechanisms of social control and unique arenas for ordinary people to contest government policies and resist exploitation./div

This Oxford Handbook comprehensively examines the field of Latin American history.