Visualising Traces of the Past in Latin America*

The articles included in this special issue address the shifting relationship between traces of the past and photography in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present day. Looking at different forms of materiality and trace in Latin America, from pre-Columbian remains to body art and industrial ruins, this issue also understands photographs as material objects that ‘act’ within particular visual economies. In this introduction, we offer some brief reflections on ruins and ruination in Latin America, and on the relationship between photography and the past.     

Transatlantic unity on display: the “white legend” and the “pact of silence” in Madrid’s Museum of the Americas

This article examines the history and recent pro-immigrant installations of the postcolonial Museum of the Americas in Madrid. It critically relates the Hispanist “White Legend” regarding the benevolence of Spanish colonialism to both the “pact of silence” following Spain’s Civil War and the current Spanish orientation towards immigrants from Latin America. Despite significant recent reconceptualization, the museum continues to put forward a narrative in which Spain is represented as a benevolent and civilizing contributor to Latin America. The museum’s more recent inclusionist turn to welcoming and serving Latin American immigrant communities in Spain does not complicate the pro-colonialism stance but rather, through a strategically neutral curatorial style, further serves to insist on a positive framing of the past. The exhibit analysed in this article highlights the innocence of Latin American children in order to frame immigration as positive while simultaneously supporting the “White Legend”. Contemporary Spanish tendencies towards forgetting or silencing the past have a deeper history than is usually recognized, and in this case study, these tendencies work to occlude not just the violence of the colonial period but also the inequities of today’s immigration.     

拉丁美洲与加勒比地区的国际移民——兼论中国移民的生存发展空间

通过对拉美历史上四次国际移民历史和趋向的发展变化、非法移民及其原因、移民侨汇对国民经济的重大影响、移民跨国中小企业的形成与发展等方面的分析,探讨了拉丁美洲与加勒比地区国际移民的历史、现状以及中国移民在这一地区的生存与发展空间。     

Views from the “South”: Intellectual Hegemony and Postmodernism in Latin America

Euroamerican scholars mark Latin America as a site of utopian revolutions, foreign intervention, troubled economies, military repression, and a failed modernist paradigm of development. Four recent books critically assess this construction by addressing its source in the international imaginary. They advocate a subaltern perspective on colonial difference and argue that postmodernity as promulgated by Euroamerican scholars may become yet another intellectual trend ignorant of Latin America's particularities and complexities. Latin American scholars have embraced postmodernity far longer than their Euroamerican counterparts, whose relatively recent applications remain problematic.     

拉丁史籍对“1182年君士坦丁堡大屠杀”的历史书写

1182年,拜占庭首都君士坦丁堡城内爆发了一起拜占庭人针对拉丁人的大屠杀行动。通过幸存者、信使、旅行家、路人、十字军等群体的传播,中世纪拉丁作者对这一历史事件进行了详细的记录。他们从不同角度描述了君士坦丁堡大屠杀的全过程和对拉丁人生命、财产和精神所造成的巨大伤害,认为这场大屠杀具有全民参与的特征。拉丁作者从受害者的角度试图对该事件发生的原因作出解释,认为这是拉丁世界和拜占庭帝国矛盾激化的产物,是拜占庭人长期以来仇视情绪的结果。对照拜占庭文献,我们就会发现,拉丁史籍对"1182年君士坦丁堡大屠杀"的记述既有一致性,也存在着明显的偏差。拉丁史籍所塑造出的安德罗尼库斯与穆斯林相勾结、背叛基督教的形象,与历史事实并不相符。这种带有偏见的记载显然是受到了当时社会环境尤其是拉丁世界长期丑化拜占庭帝国心理因素的影响。     

A Report on Historical Archaeology Publications in Latin America

Historical archaeology is today widely practiced in Latin America. Scholars not living or working in the region often are unaware of the research conducted in the countries south of the United States. This brief report outlines some of the historical archaeology conducted in Latin America and provides a brief bibliography.     

Photography and Latin American Ruins

Ever since the nineteenth century photographers have regularly turned to Latin American ruins to express a diverse range of scientific, colonial, aesthetic and spiritual desires. This article looks at photographs of Latin American ruins from the nineteenth century through several archaeological expeditions in Central and South America over the course of the twentieth century. Focusing in particular on photographs of ruins that include human subjects, I argue that the human-material interactions evident in these images undermine the traditional view of a split between the archaeological subject and the material object, serving as a reminder of the political actuality of ‘classical’ ruins, sites that have sometimes been left out of the West’s contemporary fascination with the dark underbelly of modernity. Acknowledging that such politics is by no means always innocent, sometimes reflecting as it does the embedded power relations of neo-colonial desires, I argue nonetheless that ancient ruins in Latin America continue to be spaces around which social relations can be formed, not least through humour and pleasure.     

Border crossings and the remaking of Latin American Cold War Studies

This essay reviews the burgeoning literature on Latin America’s distinctive variant of the Cold War since about 2000. First, it examines a watershed of recent collaborations between Latin American area specialists and foreign relations scholars, which has dramatically transformed Latin American Cold War Studies. Then, it focuses on two of the more fertile veins in that scholarship: first, the notion that the region’s Cold War should be placed in a broader historical context, which scholars are increasingly referring to as Latin America’s “long Cold War,” and second, the long Cold War’s multivalent cultural dimension. If study of the Latin American Cold War has become something of a growth industry in the last 15 years, its leading edge may well be efforts to tease out the complex, power-laden cultural processes, relationships, exchanges, and institutional forms that antedated and shaped Latin America’s Cold War proper (c. 1947 to the early 1990s), and had consequences beyond the conflict’s denouement.     

‘Suppose They were to Do It in Mexico’: The Spanish Embargo and Its Influence on Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy

The US arms embargo during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) can play a key role in our understanding of the transformation of American strategic thought in the late 1930s. The embargo's most well-documented causes are isolationist sentiment, the influence of the Catholic vote in the New Deal coalition and the forceful diplomatic leadership of Britain's Foreign Office in European affairs. Less well known is the importance of Latin America, which was considered throughout the conflict in the debates about lifting the Spanish embargo. This article examines the Spanish embargo and the reasons behind it. It also analyzes the Latin American dimension of Roosevelt's Spanish policy. By doing so it reveals how the perceived threat of Fascist penetration in Latin America influenced US diplomacy regarding Spain. Since that threat was first perceived, Washington began to fear the consequences of a Francoist military victory. It considered that the success of German and Italian military interventions in Spain could encourage similar initiatives in Latin America. The lessons learned in Spain reinforced Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy in Latin America and, at the same time, also provided a subtle reasoning for abandoning continental isolationism.     

New world complex societies: Recent economic,social, and political studies

Archaeologists working on the complex societies of Latin America have made impressive empirical advances on a number of fronts during the past five years. This article focuses on economic, social, and political issues, using the following topics for organization: intensive agriculture, demography, exchange, households, urbanism, chiefdoms, and state-level polities. For each topic, I review recent archaeological research and summarize pertinent theoretical issues. Unfortunately, the heavy accumulation of new archaeological results is not matched by the conceptual advances that are needed to explore the analytical significance of the data.     

Trump’s populism: lessons from Latin America

This paper compares left-wing Latin American populism with Donald Trump. Despite their different social bases and economic policies, they use a similar logic to construct politics as an antagonistic struggle between two camps. Left-wing and right-wing populists aim to rupture existing political institutions to give power to the people, yet they differ in how they construct this category. Whereas Trump used ethnic criteria to differentiate the people from three out groups – Mexicans, Muslims, and African-American militant organisations – left-wing Latin American populists used political and socio-economic criteria. Despite their democratising promises, Latin American populists like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador undermined democracy from within. Even though stronger institutions might protect American democracy, Trump has disfigured democracy.     

美国对建立拉美无核区问题的立场与对策(1962—1968)

为了避免核武器、核军备竞赛再次在拉美出现,古巴导弹危机之后,一些拉美国家提出了建立拉美无核区的设想。对该提议,美国经过考察发现此举同样有助于满足其国家安全需求,这使得约翰逊政府原则同意支持按照美国标准建立。然而,由于美国政府不同部门之间对建立拉美无核区的细节问题存有分歧,使得美国虽然促成了拉美无核区条约的缔结,但它最终却没有签署该条约。     

Dancing to Different Tunes: Conveying Latin American realities to composite classes

Students are often attracted to courses about Latin America by media images of the region with their aura of danger and unpredictability. Such stereotypes must be addressed in teaching, but the means is far from clear when the participants stem from different disciplinary backgrounds and academic traditions. The method adopted here was to tackle development through discourse construction through an appreciation of positionality. This approach enabled students to draw on their respective backgrounds and experience critically; it also ensured that students appreciated the core concepts embedded in the discipline, while engaging in a challenging way with the issues raised by Latin American development.     

拉丁美洲军人干政国家的军人与民主

拉丁美洲军人干政国家中的军人是影响国家民主和民主化的重要因素之一。短期来看,拉丁美洲军人干政国家中军人对民主化的作用是不确定的：军人有时安邦定国为民主化奠定基础,有时践踏宪政成为民主化的障碍。军人干政不代表堵死民主化之路;军人返回军营也不代表通向民主化坦途。长远来看,军人干政不具备终极合法性,民主巩固的结果将是文人领军和宪政。在民主转型中的拉丁美洲军人干政国家,一方面民主转型是大势所趋,另一方面军人干政并未销声匿迹。民主的推行需要合理利用军人的积极作用,以形成独特的民主模式。     

Promoting a Different Type of North–South Interactions: Québécois Cultural and Religious Paradiplomacy with Latin America

ABSTRACT

The historiography on Canadian–Latin American relations states that economic incentives, along with geopolitical concerns during the Second World War, have always been the chief reason behind Canadian interests in the region. This article argues that social groups from Quebec had other incentives to establish connections with Latin America. Quebec’s civil society became well connected with Latin American groups before the North American Free Trade Agreement facilitated economic and political cooperation, thanks mostly to the intensive Catholic missionary effort in the region, and positive representations of Latino culture in French Canadian sociopolitical circles in the 1940s and 1950s. As a result, Francophones’ interests diverged from Canada’s main objectives in the region; Quebec’s civil society’s engagement was distinctly more cultural and social in nature. Because of the difference of objectives, this article shows that social groups from Quebec attempted to influence Canadian–Latin American relations to suit their interests.     

A Gramscian Conjuncture in Latin America? Reflections on Violence,Hegemony, and Geographical Difference

This article addresses whether the concepts of Antonio Gramsci still “travel” to Latin America. During the 20^th century, Gramsci was one of the most important social theorists invoked to understand forms of social order in Latin America, as well as providing resources to reflect upon subaltern culture, resistance and the construction of alternatives. However, over the past two decades there have been several theoretical and practical challenges to the hegemony of Gramsci. These challenges are multifarious, but can be reduced to several important contentions that are explored in this article. These include the enduring role of violence, the alleged decline of ideology and finally the challenge of state‐centrism in the face of geographical difference. In the current regional conjuncture, marked by the return to power of right‐wing social forces, I therefore examine whether Gramscian concepts are still apposite for understanding the political economy of Latin America in the 21^st century.     

冷战与拉美游击运动的兴衰(1961-1969)

20世纪60年代,古巴革命的成功及共产主义势力在拉美地区的不断增强打破了美国主导的泛美体系的国际格局,拉美游击运动登上了冷战的历史舞台,并成为当时第三世界最强劲的地区势力,但最终在双方冷战战略的调整和竞争地位的转换中以失败谢幕.因此,这一时期拉美游击运动的兴衰是冷战对第三世界地区势力发展影响的典型案例,对它的研究具有一定的学术意义.     

Jazzing Sheiks at the 25 Cent Bram: Panama and Harlem as Caribbean Crossroads,circa 1910–1940

Both Harlem and Panama were, in the early twentieth century, crossroads of the Caribbean. This essays traces the musical echoes of that fact, arguing that British West Indians had a central but often unrecognized role in the exchanges driving Black cultural innovation in the interwar metropoles. Hundreds of thousands of British West Indians came to and through Panama at the start of the twentieth century, creating a Pan-Caribbean space where the rhythms of son, tango, mento, cumbia, and ragtime rang out. From there many would travel onward. The lives of Panama-born, New York-based performers like Vernon Andrade, Luis Russell, Teófilo Alfonso ‘Panama Al’ Brown, and Estelle Bernier show how British West Indians shaped by the Greater Caribbean’s borderlands crossed boundaries within New York as well. Multilingual and multicultural, they moved easily within Harlem’s ‘Latin Quarter’ of Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-speakers, helping to bring rhythms and styles from the Hispanic Caribbean to the Afro-American listening and dancing public. Stories of the working-class dance halls of 1920s Panama and of the Latin connections of British Caribbean performers in New York together point to tropical circuits of music and moves rarely recognized as part of the metropolitan Jazz Age.     

The agrarian history of Byzantium,from the origins to the twelfth century. The sources and problems

The relationship between conquerors and conquered in the Latin Empire of Constantinople has traditionally been understood as a relentlessly hostile one, particularly on the religious level. Whatever its merits, the dominance of this view has sometimes resulted in the gross misinterpretation of important pieces of evidence. This article examines two unusual liturgical texts that were treated by their discoverers as products of a Latin campaign of liturgical proselytism. The texts themselves are bilingual presentations of the Western rite of mass, with Greek and Latin text presented in an interlinear format. Most unusually, the Latin text is written in Greek characters. This article makes the case, due to internal evidence as well as the broader context of ecclesiastical relations in the Latin Empire, that these texts were created by Greek clerics rather than by Latin authorities, and that their purpose was entirely different from that imagined by their discoverers.