Latin America Writes Back

Latin America Writes Back
Author: Emil Volek
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780815332565

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Since the mid-twentieth century, Latin America has been swept by a wave of momentous changes that some have called "the second modernization," accelerated by an exploding population, rampant urbanization, and world-wide trends in technology, economy, and culture. These postmodern upheavals have transformed traditional landscapes and created striking new developments, which - despite their magnitude - have yet to be properly understood in the United States and Europe. Now, after years of marginalization in the international debate on global change, Latin American scholars present their own response to the theories and practices of postmodernity in this revelatory collection of essays. Editor Emil Volek has assembled contributions across a range of interdisciplinary perspectives that illuminate contemporary Latin American culture by high-lighting from within many changes scarcely noticed in Europe and the U.S. Issues discussed in light of these recent changes include the notorious Latin American conflicts with modernity, the vexing problems of cultural identity, strategies of resistance to global trends, and the pervasive misconceptions about Latin American culture perpetuated within the United States and Europe. Together the essays clarify that Latin America is neither what it used to be nor what it is expected to be, but rather a new reality long overlooked by the world beyond. Book jacket.

Constructing American Lives

Constructing American Lives
Author: Scott E. Casper
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2018-07-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469649047

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Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape individuals' characters and to help define the nation's identity. In an age predating radio and television, biography was not simply a genre of writing, says Scott Casper; it was the medium that allowed people to learn about public figures and peer into the lives of strangers. In this pioneering study, Casper examines how Americans wrote, published, and read biographies and how their conceptions of the genre changed over the course of a century. Campaign biographies, memoirs of pious women, patriotic narratives of eminent statesmen, "mug books" that collected the lives of ordinary midwestern farmers--all were labeled "biography," however disparate their contents and the contexts of their creation, publication, and dissemination. Analyzing debates over how these diverse biographies should be written and read, Casper reveals larger disputes over the meaning of character, the definition of American history, and the place of American literary practices in a transatlantic world of letters. As much a personal experience as a literary genre, biography helped Americans imagine their own lives as well as the ones about which they wrote and read.

Constructing The Self, Constructing America

Constructing The Self, Constructing America
Author: Philip Cushman
Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
Total Pages: 460
Release: 1995-03-20
Genre: Psychology
ISBN:

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In this groundbreaking "cultural history of psychotherapy", historian and psychologist Philip Cushman shows how the development of modern psychotherapy is inextricably intertwined with that of the United States and how it has fundamentally changed the way Americans view events and themselves. Using an interpretive historical approach, Cushman shows how and why psychotherapy was created, what its functions are, and how it has come to play such an enormous role in American life. Asserting that each era develops a different conception of "what it means to be human", Cushman traces the evolution of the self throughout history to contemporary times, naming its current configuration in our consumerist society the "empty self", one that needs constant filling. In Constructing the Self, Constructing America, he places psychotherapy in its social and historical context, and examines its origins in the nineteenth century to its preeminence in American life today, arguing that its establishment as a social institution may in fact reproduce some of the very ills that it is meant to heal. Finally, in an unusual move, Cushman suggests a way to use interpretive methods in the everyday practice of psychotherapy. By doing so, he hopes to dissuade both patient and therapist from colluding with the empty self or the rampant consumerism of our time.

Science and Society in Latin America

Science and Society in Latin America
Author: PABLO. KREIMER
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2021-06-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9781032093260

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In the form of a sociological pilgrimage, this book approaches some topics essential to understanding the role of science in Latin America, juxtaposing several approaches and exploring three main lines: First, the production and use of knowledge in these countries, viewed from a historical and sociological point of view; second, the reciprocal construction of scientific and public problems, presented through significant cases such as Latin American Chagas Disease; and third, the past and present asymmetries affecting the relationships between centers and peripheries in scientific research. These topics show the paradox of being at the same time "modern" and "peripheral."

Networking Peripheries

Networking Peripheries
Author: Anita Say Chan
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2014-01-31
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 026201971X

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An exploration of the diverse experiments in digital futures as they advance far from the celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital cultures flourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that there are more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. To explore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertaken to “network” the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectual property of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies to open technology activism in rural and urban zones. Drawing on ethnographic accounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, rural educators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions of information classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a new creative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights through information tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source–based technologies advance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributing laptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery do more than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.

The Intellectual Construction of America

The Intellectual Construction of America
Author: Jack P. Greene
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807861774

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Jack Greene explores the changing definitions of America from the time of Europe's first contact with the New World through the establishment of the American republic. Challenging historians who have argued that colonial American societies differed little from those of early modern Europe, he shows that virtually all contemporary observers emphasized the distinctiveness of the new worlds being created in America. Rarely considering the high costs paid by Amerindians and Africans in the construction of those worlds, they cited the British North American colonies as evidence that America was for free people a place of exceptional opportunities for individual betterment and was therefore fundamentally different from the Old World. Greene suggests that this concept of American societies as exceptional was a central component in their emerging identity. The success of the American Revolution helped subordinate Americans' long-standing sense of cultural inferiority to a more positive sense of collective self that sharpened and intensified the concept of American exceptionalism.

Empire at the Periphery

Empire at the Periphery
Author: Christian J. Koot
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2011-07-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814748848

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Throughout history the British Atlantic has often been depicted as a series of well-ordered colonial ports that functioned as nodes of Atlantic shipping, where orderliness reflected the effectiveness of the regulatory apparatus constructed to contain Atlantic commerce. Colonial ports were governable places where British vessels, and only British vessels, were to deliver English goods in exchange for colonial produce. Yet behind these sanitized depictions lay another story, one about the porousness of commercial regulation, the informality and persistent illegality of exchanges in the British Empire, and the endurance of a culture of cross-national cooperation in the Atlantic that had been forged in the first decades of European settlement and still resonated a century later. In Empire at the Periphery, Christian J. Koot examines the networks that connected British settlers in New York and the Caribbean and Dutch traders in the Netherlands and in the Dutch colonies in North America and the Caribbean, demonstrating that these interimperial relationships formed a core part of commercial activity in the early Atlantic World, operating alongside British trade. Koot provides unique consideration of how local circumstances shaped imperial development, reminding us that empires consisted not only of elites dictating imperial growth from world capitals, but also of ordinary settlers in far-flung colonial outposts, who often had more in common with—and a greater reliance on—people from foreign empires who shared their experiences of living at the edge of a fragile, transitional world.

Reinterpreting Exploration

Reinterpreting Exploration
Author: Dane Keith Kennedy
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199755345

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Exploration was a central and perhaps defining aspect of the West's encounters with other peoples and lands. Rather than reproduce celebratory narratives of individual heroism and national glory, this volume focuses on exploration's instrumental role in shaping a European sense of exceptionalism and its iconic importance in defining the terms of cultural engagement with other peoples. In chapters offering broad geographic range, the contributors address many of the key themes of recent research on exploration, including exploration's contribution to European imperial expansion, Western scientific knowledge, Enlightenment ideas and practices, and metropolitan print culture. They reassess indigenous peoples' responses upon first contacts with European explorers, their involvement as intermediaries in the operations of expeditions, and the complications that their prior knowledge posed for European claims of discovery. Underscoring that exploration must be seen as a process of mediation between representation and reality, this book provides a fresh and accessible introduction to the ongoing reinterpretation of exploration's role in the making of the modern world.

Ruling the Savage Periphery

Ruling the Savage Periphery
Author: Benjamin D. Hopkins
Publisher:
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020
Genre: Borderlands
ISBN: 0674980700

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Benjamin Hopkins develops a new theory of colonial administration: frontier governmentality. This system placed indigenous peoples at the borders of imperial territory, where they could be both exploited and kept away. Today's "failed states" are a result. Condemned to the periphery of the global order, they function as colonial design intended.