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This chapter discusses South Asian subaltern studies as well as their adaptation by Latin Americanist historian Florencia Mallon and by the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. It is important to keep in mind the differences between the original projects of South Asian Subaltern Studies Group formulated in terms of querying the “historic failure of the nation to come to its own” and of making clear that, “it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India.” Although one can say that it is this problematic that engages Mallon's and the Latin American Group's adaptation, in both cases, there is a lack of attention to the fact that Latin America is not a country—like postpartition India—and that the many countries of Latin America obtained their independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century and not in 1947.

This chapter introduces the subject of Peruvian responses to climate change and ensuing glacier catastrophes from 1941 to the present. In Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range, which towers above the Callejón de Huaylas valley in the Ancash Department, 25,000 people have died from glacier-related disasters (glacial lake outburst floods and avalanches). The chapter places this study within current historiography on climate history, the history of science and technology, environmental history, Peruvian history, Latin American history, disaster studies, and glacier-society relations both globally and in the Andean region. The chapter then demonstrates why glacier retreat in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range is an ideal case study for understanding long-term human adaptation to climate change, as well as analyzing how science evolves in societal context following climate change and natural disasters. Responses to climate change, which brought scientists and engineers to the Cordillera Blanca, unleashed a process called disaster economics: the use of catastrophes or disaster mitigation programs to promote and empower a range of economic development interests in both the public and private sectors. Climate change triggered historical processes and scientific developments far beyond the immediate disasters caused by melting glaciers.

The introduction explains why the term “Latin America” is politically, morally, and culturally troublesome but nonetheless persists unchallenged. It also reviews the many ways in which intellectuals, historians, art-historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists have criticized and yet absorbed the term in the last three decades.

This chapter traces the emergence of postcolonial theory in Latin American studies during the 1990s, a disciplinary shift that sparked a serious and hotly contested debate over the terms and conditions of intellectual exchange between metropolitan institutions of interpretation in Europe and the United States and those in Latin America. Latin American scholars opposed to this disciplinary trend drew attention to the foundational singularity and irreducibility of Latin American history and identity; asserted the categorical impropriety of drawing from European theoretical models—as well as postcolonial intellectual production from former British colonies—to reflect on Latin America; and appealed to Latin America’s own intellectual tradition as a means to counter and resist what are perceived as homogenizing and subordinating globalized narratives. The chapter returns to these debates in order to trace the political implications and cultural effects of this disciplinary deadlock. It introduces the central thesis and lays the theoretical and critical groundwork for establishing the relation between these larger claims and the claims made in subsequent chapters.

This chapter examines world history and historical studies of masculinity through the prism of Latin American Studies. It begins by discussing the materialist and culturalist approaches that drive a wedge between world historians and scholars of gender and sexuality before considering Latin American history in relation to both world history and transnational cultural studies. It then explores how discussions of gender and sexuality provide inspiration for integrating the changing face of the political economy with a critical aspect of gender history: the shifting nature of masculinity. It argues that we need to focus on the trajectories taken by area fields other than Latin American Studies and find field-specific ways of narrating masculinity as a global history.

Chapter 6 constitutes a detailed criticism of current U.S. Latin Americanism in various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. They examine the current challenges faced by U.S. Latin Americanism, namely: its own insignificance; the “kingdom of the comma” and its arguments; and textbook categories summed up in the model “south of Nogales, Arizona everything is Nogales Sonora,” or in the style of “epistemic otherness” theories that nevertheless respect the commands of the old concept: “Latin America.” The term endures as an unchallenged, almost unconscious assumption, a cultural landscape that serves for the projection of new and old utopias and dystopias.

The conclusion develops the implications of hemispheric juxtaposition for comparative political theory, and for African American studies, Latin American studies, and Latino studies. It explains how a hemispheric intellectual genealogy of racial thought in the Americas transforms our understanding of each of these thinkers: Frederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos. It also highlights two key theoretical concepts constitutive of racial thought in the Americas that emerge from the hemispheric analysis in this book: an expanded notion of democratic fugitivity informed by black fugitivity, and the concept of mestizo futurism.

This introduction to the anthology explains the origin of the 2013 conference from which it derives, pointing to the unusual variety and level of expertise involved, at a time when so many want to understand Brazil and so few who try to help can muster the necessary authority. It focuses on the particularly useful way in which the chapters interweave to contextualize and strengthen each other as they all focus on Brazil’s emergence as one of the world’s great powers.

This concluding chapter deduces the recurrence of the idea of the “network” and its diverse effects from the preceding review of foundation programs. Significant globalist consequences of networks include the Kissinger and Salzburg seminars for European elites, and the building of networked academic associations in Asian, African, and Latin American studies—which sometimes prove devastating as well. Some debilitating consequences are prevalent in Nigeria, Indonesia, and Chile, as in each case, the foundation leaders tended to see their societies as real-world laboratories for their technocratic schemes for modernization. Nonetheless, the chapter maintains that these foundation-funded networks have led to the hegemony of a globalist worldview across main political parties and upper state echelons.

The conclusion summarizes the findings of the study and reiterates how this research is in dialogue with previous studies of the Bolivarian Revolution. It stresses the enduring importance of the national – both Bolivarian cultural policy and Venezuela’s absence from international literary circuits – on the form and content of contemporary fiction. This book concludes that self-reflexivity gives these novels agency, allowing their authors to explore and challenge the ideas about literary value found in Bolivarian cultural policy. This research therefore contributes to scholarly discussion about the uses of metafiction and intertextuality in contemporary literature. The conclusion also reiterates that these novels deserve international scholarly attention, a first step towards rectifying the lack of contemporary Venezuelan narrative in Latin American Studies.

This book examines the intellectual and political production of women's history across time and space. Drawing on insights from scholars, it considers women's and gender history within national, imperial, and geographic contexts as well as the accomplishments, shortcomings, and future directions of the field. It shows that the writing of women's histories was chronologically deeper than initially thought and driven by wider intellectual, social, political, and economic developments. Furthermore, it explains how historiography on women and gender lends credence to the argument that all history is politics and how relationships of power intersect with politics. Through the prism of Latin American Studies, the book also discusses two distinct and rarely intersecting historiographies: world history and masculinity.