Duke University Press Log

World Cup for Whom? by Bryan McCann

We're excited to kick off our series of World Cup guest posts with this by Bryan McCann, author of Hard Times in the Marvelous City and Hello, Hello Brazil. McCann is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. 

I have long been skeptical of FIFA and critical of the notion of using international mega-events to stoke local economies. In the final pages of my recent book, Hard Times in the Marvelous City, I argue that preparations for the World Cup and the 2016 Olympics threaten to undermine improvements in security and popular housing underway in Rio de Janeiro over the last decade. As a result, I have not been surprised by growing resentment of the World Cup within Brazil. Even I, however, have been surprised by how bad things have gotten—World Cup planning has been inept, heavy-handed and anti-popular.

Neither FIFA, nor local organizers, nor municipal government in host cities has made any serious attempt to incorporate local populations in World Cup planning or festivities. It has been clear from the start that the games are being put on for international tourists and the executive class. Ordinary local residents are welcome to watch on TV, or at best in front of large screens in open-air plazas, but will be cordoned off from any personal interaction with the games or the players. Locals are subject to jacked-up prices of food and services, waylaid by security guards and construction barriers and, if they happen to live in the path of a Cup-related infrastructural project, to eviction. Cup organizers seem to expect them to smile and dance anyway.  A rhetorical question on banners often seen at recent protests asks Copa Para Quem? (World Cup For Whom?) The answer is clear: not for ordinary Brazilians.

There have been several problems with World Cup preparations. First, obligatory photos of favela children playing soccer notwithstanding, Brazilians don’t love soccer the way they used to. As the country has grown more culturally pluralistic, other pastimes have risen to challenge the preeminence of futebol. In terms of international success, Brazilian volleyball has far outperformed soccer over the past twenty years. Soccer is now something Brazilians love to complain about more than they love to celebrate it.

Second, Brazil won its bid to host the World Cup during a period of economic growth and rising employment, but growth has stagnated while the cost of living has continued to rise. Cup-inflated real-estate prices in host cities only exacerbate that. Brazilians are angry about the billions being spent on the World Cup while other public needs go unmet. This makes them sympathetic towards those who are truly threatened by the Cup, like favela residents subject to eviction or harrassed by police (a phenomenon exponentially intensified in Rio by Olympic preparations).

Third, Brazilians love to party but hate being told what to do, and hate even more being played for fools. As one of my friends from the Pelourinho, the vibrant neighborhood at the heart of Salvador da Bahia memorably put it to me, “no Pelourinho, ninguêm é otário,”—in the Pelourinho, no one is a sucker. It is clear that FIFA has been playing Brazilians for suckers, expecting them to foot the bill for a party they are not invited to attend.

 

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Porto Alegre offers an example. The Beira Rio stadium, host to several Cup games, has been beautifully refurbished, but ticket prices are beyond the reach of most residents. The other effects of Cup preparations have been negative. The enlarged stadium juts into an adjacent roadway, cutting off the sidewalk in a small but clear example of the privileging of elite convenience over public interest. Weeks before the first game, the area surrounding the stadium is a barren, muddy wasteland, as municipal government and private investors feud over who is responsible for aborted landscaping. In the meantime, residents of a nearby vila (as favelas are known in Porto Alegre) were evicted to make way for a construction staging area. Promised transportation improvements have been delayed or, worse, left half-finished, choking traffic rather than facilitating movement.

And Porto Alegre is a relatively small city with a history of participatory government, a deep love for soccer, and clear transportation corridors between the airport, the city center and the stadium that would be easy to upgrade. If Cup preparations have been a flop here, imagine Manaus, a large city of oppressive heat, negligible soccer tradition and great environmental vulnerability.

Cup organizers took it for granted that citizens in this festive, hospitable country would inevitably catch the fever and celebrate colorfully. That may still happen—if the Brazilian team goes deep into the tournament and plays with joy and passion, Brazilians will fall for them—as will I—regardless of how we denounce FIFA now. But the joy and passion will have to be real and tangible to overcome the current skepticism. In the new Brazil, ninguêm é otário.

Celebrate the World Cup with Guest Blog Posts

Olé, Olé, Olé! It's almost time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil! To celebrate, we've asked some of our authors who specialize in Brazil to write guest posts for our blog.

We start off the series tomorrow with Bryan McCann's critique of the idea that the World Cup will bring economic prosperity to Brazil. The following week, on June 18, Jeffrey Lesser writes about multiculturalism and football in Brazil. On June 25 we present an excerpt from Seth Garfield's book Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil, in which he remembers watching the 1994 World Cup with a group of Xavante Indians.  On July 2, John Gledhill writes about how preparations for the World Cup have affected the poor. And finally, on July 9, Marc Hertzman writes about gender and the World Cup. We hope you'll check in each week to read these posts and get a deeper understanding of how the World CUp is affecting Brazil.

Latin American Studies Association, Chicago, May 2014

We had a great time selling books and meeting authors at the 2014 annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association. 

We were excited to congratulate Marc Hertzman for winning an Honorable Mention from the Bryce Wood book award committee for his book Making Samba. The award is for an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English.

 

 Andrew Canessa, author of Intimate Indigeneities poses with Jessaca Leinaweaver, author of The Circulation of Children and Adoptive Migration.

Peter Wade, co-editor of the new collection Mestizo Genomics.

 

Joanne Rappaport is the co-author of the award-winning Beyond the Lettered City and author of the new book The Disappearing Mestizo. 

  

 Gabriela Ramos is co-editor of Indigenous Intellectuals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Co-Editors Lauren (Robin) Derby and Eric Roorda stopped by at different times to pose with the latest in the popular Latin America Readers series, The Dominican Republic Reader.

 

Claudia de Lima Costa and Sonia E. Alvarez, two of the co-editors of the new collection Translocalities/Translocalidades.

Editor Cynthia Milton with two contributors from Art from a Fractured Past.

Marcia Ochoa with her new book Queen for a Day.

Myrian Jimeno, author of Juan Gregorio Palechor.

Heidi Tinsman, author of Buying into the Regime.

See even more photos on our Facebook page. And if you couldn't make it to LASA, don't worry, you can still buy all the great books we featured there at 30% off. Check out the program ad, and use coupon code LASA14 when you order on our website.

Q & A with Kirsten Weld

Kirsten Weld is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. In 2005, human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of Guatemala's National Police. In her new book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, Weld tells the story of the astonishing discovery and rescue of 75 million pages of evidence of state-sponsored crimes, and analyzes the repercussions for both the people and the state of Guatemala.

This book centers on the discovery and rescue of a massive police archive produced during Guatemala’s thirty-six years of civil war, from 1960-1996. Tell us how this discovery came about.  How did you come to be involved?

The discovery of the archives was, quite literally, explosive. Nobody knew that these files still existed, because the administration that signed the Peace Accords took deliberate steps to keep them secret. But one night in June 2005, a four-hour-long series of blasts rocked Guatemala City: a cache of munitions left over from the civil war, stored in frightful conditions on an urban army base, accidentally ignited, showering shrapnel and spewing toxic smoke into the surrounding neighborhoods. Urban legend had it that there was a similar weapons storage problem at a nearby police base, so local residents demanded preventative action. But when investigators from the human rights ombudsman’s office showed up at the police base, they found something even more incendiary than bombs and guns: rooms upon rooms heaped with old papers. They realized that they had found the lost archives of the infamous National Police.

Initially, though, the archives posed more questions than they answered. Who would take custody of this enormous, 75-million-page body of records documenting over a century’s worth of tense, bloody history? Who would do the work to rescue the archives from the rot and abandon to which they’d been consigned, and who would pay for it? What would be the repercussions of reopening a conversation about postwar justice and memory in a country where those who dared to speak of the past were still routinely threatened or killed? What secrets would emerge from the archives?

Slowly, and against all the odds, the outlines of an ad-hoc project to clean, organize, and analyze the files came into being. About eight months into what was then still a shaky, fledgling initiative, I contacted its leaders and floated the possibility of writing a book chronicling their efforts. Believing, I think, that it might provide some extra measure of security to have a foreign observer on-site making a case for the importance of the work they were doing, they agreed to let me join the project as a volunteer, making me the only foreigner to work as a rank-and-file member of the archival recovery team.

No doubt reactions to this discovery were varied and complex.  How have the people and government in Guatemala responded? 

The competing reactions reflected the deep polarization of postwar Guatemalan society. Human rights organizations, advocates of postwar justice, and what remained of the old Left were thrilled, hopeful that this enormous cache of files could be used as evidence in war crimes trials and could help clarify the fates of some of the country’s many desaparecidos, or disappeared people. Conservative sectors studiously ignored the discovery—publicly, at least— but the efforts to rescue the archives faced attacks on multiple fronts, ranging from intimidation to arson attempts. Unknown assailants hurled Molotov cocktails into the archives site on numerous occasions. Workers at the archives project were, in some cases, spied on and harassed. Immense amounts of political pressure were deployed in an attempt to block any revelations that might implicate former police or military officials in crimes against humanity. But because the archival rescue project has managed to achieve major visibility both nationally and internationally, it has thus far survived.

What happened to the people documented in the archive?  Did any of them survive? Since its discovery, have any of the victims documented come forward? 

Many did survive. These files are, after all, the administrative archives of the police, so they contain traffic tickets, noise citations, personnel registries, and other bureaucratic ephemera documenting the regular churn of urban life. That said, however, many other individuals whose names appear in the files were indeed killed by state security forces, even though the records themselves tend to be circumspect on this front—a police report will state that someone was killed by “unknown individuals” or in a “traffic accident,” even when the forensic and eyewitness evidence strongly indicates otherwise. So analysts need to triangulate the information contained in the files with data from other sources, including newspaper reports, oral testimonies, and US government documents. One of the most important tasks underway right now, in collaboration with forensic anthropologists, is to try and match the new documentary evidence about people who were buried anonymously in the country’s many common graves with the DNA evidence currently being exhumed from those graves. The idea is to return the physical remains of the dead and disappeared to their surviving family members.

Survivors have flocked to the archives in search of information about their lost loved ones, but others, we have to assume, stay away, because they fear reprisals or for other reasons. Importantly, many of the people staffing the archival rescue project have personal connections to the people in the files, whether because of their own past political involvement or just because of how pervasively the civil war impacted daily life. So it’s common for those staff to stumble across references to friends, acquaintances, and family members during the course of a day’s work at the archives. As you can imagine, and as the book discusses in detail, that’s a very powerful and complex emotional experience.

 

Celebrating Valerie Millholland at the American Historical Association

We had a wonderful time this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association selling books, mingling with historians, and celebrating retiring Senior Editor Valerie Millholland.

Millholland received the Distinguished Service Award from the Conference on Latin American History. This award is usually given to a senior scholar; it's very unusual for it to go a publisher and we feel so proud that CLAH has chosen to honor Millholland's contributions to the field in this way. She was introduced at the awards luncheon by Barbara Weinstein, who said, "Rarely, if ever, has this award gone to someone whose impact on the field has been as broad and wide-ranging as Valerie's." Millholland gave a wonderful talk about her years as an editor. It will be published later this year in the journal The Americas. She received two standing ovations for the talk and award.

We also toasted Valerie Millholland at a wine and cheese reception in our booth. Many of our authors gathered to celebrate Millholland's achievements and to pose with her for a photo.

 

Heidi Tinsman shows off her new book Buying Into the Regime with Millholland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editing one of our popular Latin America Readers is a true labor of love. Collecting selections and permissions can take years. Co-editor Elizabeth Hutchison celebrates the publication of The Chile Reader with Millholland.

 

Gilbert H. Joseph has published nine books with Duke, including his most recent (with Jurgen Buchenau), Mexico's Once and Future Revolution.

 

 

 

 

 

The party failed to show up due to a catering error, but we still toasted our journal Hispanic American Historical Review. Editors Jocelyn Olcott, John French, and Pete Sigal joined managing editor Sean Mannion in a drink.

 

 

Many of our other authors came by to pose with their books. Here are a few; check out the rest of the photos from this terrific conference on our Facebook page. You can also see some video ributes to Valerie Millholland in this YouTube video.

Christina Hanhardt with her book Safe Space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Sartorius was thrilled to see his new book Ever Faithful for the first time at the conference.

 

 

 

 

 

William Marotti stopped by to pose with his book Money, Trains, and Guillotines.

 

 

 

Seth Garfield and his new book In Search of the Amazon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bryan McCann's Hard Times in the Marvelous City was also new at the conference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks so much to all the authors and staff who made the celebrations at this conference so special. And best wishes to Valerie Millholland on her retirement.

Final Day of the University Press Week Blog Tour

Today is the final day of the University Press Week blog tour. Today's theme is the global reach of university presses. To see the global reach of our own Latin America and World Readers, check out our Influence Map! Many more countries to come, too.

Begin the blog tour at Columbia University Press. Then head to Georgetown University Press for a discussion of how they give their readers the tools they need to have a global reach themselves through foreign language learning materials, international career guides, and international affairs titles. Next Indiana University Press discusses their Mellon-funded Framing the Global project, which supports scholarly research and publication that will develop and disseminate new knowledge, approaches, and methods in the field of global research. From book translations to international marketing and the growth of Project MUSE into many different nations, the Johns Hopkins University Press can't help but thing beyond the borders of the United States. Next is New York University Press, where Chip Rossetti, managing editor of the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL), will discuss the new LAL series, an ambitious international project which comes out of a partnership between NYU Press and NYU Abu Dhabi. At Princeton University Press, Director Peter Dougherty writes about the importance of foreign language translations to the future of university press economic health and fulfillment of their missions. University of Wisconsin Press offers a post by director Sheila Leary profiling the publishing career of Jan Vansina, one of the founders of the field of African history (rather than colonial history). And finally, to end this great tour, Yale University Press's Ivan Lett writes on recent transatlantic collaboration of US-UK marketing initiatives for globally published titles, series, and digital products. We hope you enjoyed these great posts. The complete schedule is available here. To finish up University Press Week, why not head to your local bookstore and pick up a few great university press titles?!

Lynn Stephen's We Are the Face of Oaxaca: A Multi-Platform Book

Lynn Stephen's We Are the Face of Oaxaca will be launched on Monday, November 12, at the University of Oregon. Stephen will not only be launching a book, but also a companion website which is completely integrated with the print content.

For the first time, Duke University Press has developed an ebook project that thoroughly engages the reader both within and beyond. Lynn Stephen’s well-thought out and well-executed web project presented us with an opportunity to explore ways of bringing a physical object—a printed book—into conversation with an online, digital object. With We Are the Face of Oaxaca, we’ve been able to move beyond “For more, visit this website” and really exploit new standards, such as digital object identifiers (DOIs), to bring the reader of either the print book or the ebook directly and reliably to the relevant media available online. The companion website provides readers with direct access to the testimonies, ideas, and photographs found within the pages of the book to encourage deeper research and multilayered learning. The digital content is particularly relevant since We Are the Face of Oaxaca focuses on the use of oral testimony in contemporary social movements. Seeing the video testimonies firsthand allows readers to engage with primary materials from which Stephen based her analysis.

While we have partnered with local design and typesetting firm BW&A Books on a number of projects, including the development of a CSS template for Duke EPUBs, for Lynn Stephen's book We Are the Face of Oaxaca, the author, the Press, and BW&A Books worked together to integrate digital content from her companion website, designed by the University of Oregon, that includes 26 video testimonios, timelines, and additional information that expands on sections of the text into the ebook. Julie Allred of BW&A Books created a cohesive design both for the print book and the EPUB, and this design is mirrored in the companion website. A few weeks after the book's publication date, Julie visited the Press to give us a look under the hood of the ebook creation process. Julie demonstrated the HTML code behind the links to the video content, as well as showing how she created a functional ebook index, with links that take the reader to the paragraph in the text where the index term appears. Julie also described the extensive quality assurance checks that were done by BW&A staff to make sure that the links were accurate and worked smoothly on a number of e-reading devices. On devices that support the technology, the experience of moving back and forth between the text and the digital content is a seamless experience for the reader. The Press and BW&A Books worked to make the book as functional as possible for each reader of this important book.

We Are the Face of Oaxaca is an exciting project for us, and we think readers, students, and teachers are going to love it too. We hope you'll check it out. 

Celebrate Mexican Independence Day with Great Reads

¡Viva México! Today is Mexican Independence Day. Check out Duke University Press’s books on the history of the revolution:

Just out this fall, Mexico's Once and Future Revolution is a concise, teachable exploration of the revolution's causes, dynamics, consequences, and legacies. Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau do so from varied perspectives, including those of campesinos and workers; politicians, artists, intellectuals, and students; women and men; the well-heeled, the dispossessed, and the multitude in the middle. For a vivid introduction to muchos Méxicos—the many Mexicos, or the many varied histories and cultures that comprise contemporary Mexico—pick up The Mexico Reader, also by Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson. Written for the traveler, student, and expert alike, the collection looks at what underlies the chronic instability, violence, and economic turmoil that have characterized periods of Mexico’s history while it also celebrates the country’s rich cultural heritage.

Duke offers more collections that continue expanding our understanding of the revolution. Sex in Revolution, by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano, is a collection of histories showing how women participated in Mexican revolutionary and postrevolutionary state formation. These essays demonstrate how women seized opportunities created by modernization efforts and revolutionary upheaval to contest conventions of sexuality, work, family life, religious practices, and civil rights. In Elisa Servin, Leticia Reina, and John Tutino’s, Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change, leading Mexicanists examine the cycles of crisis and reform that have defined Mexican history since the late eighteenth century. This important collection of essays explores how Mexico’s tumultuous past informs its uncertain present and future.

Other works explore popular participation in the revolution. Another collection, Everyday Forms of State Formation, by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between popular cultures and state formation in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. While most accounts have emphasized either the role of peasants and peasant rebellions or that of state formation in Mexico’s past, these original essays reveal the state’s day-to-day engagement with grassroots society by examining popular cultures and forms of the state simultaneously and in relation to one another. In Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico, Jennie Purnell reconsiders peasant partisanship in the cristiada of 1926–29, one episode in the broader Mexican Revolution and the last major popular rebellion in Mexican history. Rather than viewing the cristeros (supporters of the Church) as victims of false consciousness or as religious fanatics, as others have done, Purnell shows that their motivations—as well as the motivations of the agraristas (supporters of the revolutionary state)—stem from local political conflicts that began decades, and sometimes centuries, before the Revolution.

In The Worm in the Wheat, Timothy J. Henderson recounts the story of Rosalie Evans, a woman who lost her life defending her Mexican hacienda in defiance of confiscation decrees. This dramatic narrative is a compelling tale of political intrigue, violence, shifting allegiances, extreme poverty, and the recalcitrance of one woman.

We hope you enjoy celebrating El Grito Duke Press-style, with some fascinating reading!

Remembering the Chilean Coup Forty Years Later

Before 9/11 (2001), September 11 was remembered most often as the day of the Chilean coup of 1973. Today marks the fortieth anniversary of that day. On September 11, 1973, Chile’s three armies launched an attack on the government of President Salvador Allende, the first democratically-elected socialist president of Chile. Supported by years of CIA financing, training, and anti-Allende propaganda-spreading, the armies attacked the La Moneda, the presidential palace. Inside, Allende refused to resign his office. Shortly after Chilean Air Force aircraft bombed the palace, Allende committed suicide. The U.S.-supported coup, intended to staunch the growth of Communism during the Cold War, ironically launched the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The months following the coup saw some of the most infamous human rights violations cases and more killings than any other year of Pinchoet’s dictatorship.

Duke University Press has published a range of titles that consider Chile's history in the wake of those fateful events. Steve J. Stern’s The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile trilogy provides a comprehensive and sensitive account of how Chileans have come to terms with the legacy of Pinochet’s rule. Remembering Pinochet's Chile, Battling for Hearts and Minds, and Reckoning with Pinochet  offer individual and collective accounts of battles over memory in the wake of human right atrocities. Other Duke Press works place Chile’s unrest within the context of global memory. Leigh A. Payne’s Unsettling Accounts considers what happens when perpetrators of acts of authoritarian state violence publicly admit or discuss their actions. Also edited by Payne and Ksenija Bilbija, Accounting for Violence explores the politics of memory in Latin America, discussing the “memory markets” in Chile and other Latin American countries that emerged from authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s.

Lessie Jo Frazier, in Salt in the Sand , takes a broad historical perspective on Chile’s political culture. She challenges the conventional periodization of modern Chilean history, particularly the idea that the 1973 military coup marked a radical break with the past. Other Duke books consider the economic ramifications of the September 11 coup. In Victims of the Chilean Miracle, Peter Winn examines how Pinochet’s neoliberal model began, finally, to promote economic growth in the mid-1980s. Yet these essays suggest that the Chilean miracle may not be as miraculous as it seems: real wages stagnated, the expected restoration of labor rights faltered, and gaps in income distribution continued to widen. They not only show how neoliberalism has affected Chile’s labor force in general but also how it has damaged the environment and imposed special burdens on women.

Duke published the first bilingual edition of Chilean poet and Duke University Professor Ariel Dorfman’s work, In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land. These poems bear witness to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of personal and social damage in the aftermath of terror. Always an eloquent voice against the ravages of inhumanity, Dorfman’s poems, like his acclaimed novels, continue to be a searing testimony of hope in the midst of despair. Check out Dorfman’s recent New York Times op-ed piece here.

Finally, for a diverse account of Chile’s history, we will release The Chile Reader edited by Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, Thomas Miller Klubock, Nara B. Milanich, and Peter Winn, in November 2013. Most of the selections are by Chileans; many have never before appeared in English. Perfect for the student or traveler, The Chile Reader covers more than 500 years of Chilean history, with an emphasis on the past half-century. Its many selections include interviews, travel diaries, diplomatic cables, cartoons, and photographs.

Violence in Latin America

NPR has been running a series of stories this week and last about violence in Latin America. Their reporters have been to Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, reporting on extortion, kidnapping, and police violence. If you'd like to learn more about violence in the region, its roots and causes, we recommend the following books.

In her painful but important new book Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco examines the conditions under which extreme cruelty became the instrument of armies, governments, rebels, and rogue groups in Latin America. She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of the continent over the last eighty years and how its causes differ from the conditions that brought about the Holocaust, which is generally the atrocity against which the horror of others is measured.

Violent Democracies in Latin America is a collection edited by Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein. Contributors explore why violence persists in the region despite the establishment of democratic governments. From vigilantism, to human rights violations, to police corruption, violence persists. It is perpetrated by state-sanctioned armies, guerillas, gangs, drug traffickers, and local community groups seeking self-protection. The everyday presence of violence contrasts starkly with governmental efforts to extend civil, political, and legal rights to all citizens, and it is invoked as evidence of the failure of Latin American countries to achieve true democracy. The contributors to this collection take the more nuanced view that violence is not a social aberration or the result of institutional failure; instead, it is intimately linked to the institutions and policies of economic liberalization and democratization.

Daniel M. Goldstein's Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City is an ethnography examining how indigenous residents of crime-ridden, marginalized neighborhoods in Cochabamba, Bolivia, struggle to balance human rights with their need for safety and security.

We have several books about violence in Guatemala. In Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death, Deborah T. Levenson examines how the Guatemalan gangs that emerged from the country's strong populist movement in the 1980s had become perpetrators of nihilist violence by the early 2000s. In Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala, Diane M. Nelson looks at how Guatemalans are reckoning with the aftermath of a civil war that left fundamental assumptions about selves and others in tatters when it officially ended in 1996. And in her forthcoming book Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, Kristen Weld uses poignant, intimate oral history interviews and on-the-ground participant observation to take readers inside the complex process by which “terror archives” are found, grappled with, and put to use. 

We have several other titles that, like Paper Cadavers, deal with the aftermath of violence in Latin America: how people remember and memorialize genocide and other state violence. Accounting for Violence:Marketing Memory in Latin America, offers bold new perspectives on the politics of memory in Latin America. Scholars from across the humanities and social sciences provide in-depth analyses of the political economy of memory in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. It is edited by Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh A. Payne. In Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence Leigh A. Payne argues that rather than reconcile past violence, truth commissions actually catalyze contentious debate. She argues that this debate—and the public confessions that trigger it—are healthy for democratic processes of political participation, freedom of expression, and the contestation of political ideas. Steve J. Stern looks at memory and reconcilation in Chile in his book Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006. Stern’s analysis integrates policymaking by elites, grassroots efforts by human rights victims and activists, and inside accounts of the truth commissions and courts where top-down and bottom-up initiatives met.