This study traces the development of the sketch of manners (cuadro de costumbres), beginning in 1838 until the end of the century. Although the Colombian sketch is not in general distinguished artistically, its scope and variety of subject produce a richly detailed picture of the life, people, and institutions of mid-century Colombia. The author shows the influence of the Spaniards Larra and Mesonero Romanos, and discusses authors of El Mosaico literary group and their predecessors who also wrote in the costumbrista style.
This book tells the compelling story of postemancipation Colombia, from the liberation of the slaves in the 1850s through the country's first general labor strikes in the 1910s. As Jason McGraw demonstrates, ending slavery fostered a new sense of citizenship, one shaped both by a model of universal rights and by the particular freedom struggles of African-descended people. Colombia's Caribbean coast was at the center of these transformations, in which women and men of color, the region's majority population, increasingly asserted the freedom to control their working conditions, fight in civil wars, and express their religious beliefs. The history of Afro-Colombians as principal social actors after emancipation, McGraw argues, opens up a new view on the practice and meaning of citizenship. Crucial to this conception of citizenship was the right of recognition. Indeed, attempts to deny the role of people of color in the republic occurred at key turning points exactly because they demanded public recognition as citizens. In connecting Afro-Colombians to national development, The Work of Recognition also places the story within the broader contexts of Latin American popular politics, culture, and the African diaspora.
David Sowell traces the history of artisan labor organizations in Bogotá and examines long-term political activity of Colombian artisans in the century after independence. Relying on contemporary newspapers, political handouts, broadsides, and public petitions, Sowell analyzes the economic, social, and political history of the capital's artisan class, a middling social sector with very significant social and political strengths. This is the first study in English of nineteenth-century Latin American artisans and one of the few treatments that spans the whole of nineteenth-century Colombian history.The rise and late decline of artisan class political activity coincided the Colombia's integration into the world market. Initially petitioning for tariff protection, Bogotá's craftsmen in time mobilized to address numerous issues, including industrial education, internal trade order, credit, and better health and educational facilities. Sowell traces the transformation of Colombia's economy and the (mainly negative) effects its evolution had on bogotano artisans. By the end of the nineteenth century, the artisans class was fragmented, their labor leadership replaced by workers associated with industrial production, transportation systems, and the production of coffee. Author note: David Sowell is Assistant Professor of History at Juniata College.
Novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude have awakened English-language readers to the existence of Colombian literature in recent years, but Colombia has a well-established literary tradition that far predates the Latin American "boom." In this pathfinding study, Raymond Leslie Williams provides an overview of seventeen major authors and more than one hundred works spanning the years 1844 to 1987. After an introductory discussion of Colombian regionalism and novelistic development, Williams considers the novels produced in Colombia's four semi-autonomous regions. The Interior Highland Region is represented by novels ranging from Eugenio Díaz' Manuela to Eduardo Caballero Calderón's El buen salvaje. The Costa Region is represented by Juan José Nieto's Ingermina to Alvaro Cepeda Samudio's La casa grande and Gabriel García Márquez' Cien años de soledad; the Greater Antioquian Region by Tomás Carrasquilla's Frutos de mi tierra to Manuel Mejía Vallejo's El día señalado; and the Greater Cauca Region by Jorge Isaacs' Maria to Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal's El bazar de los idiotas. A discussion of the modern and postmodern novel concludes the study, with special consideration given to the works of García Márquez and Moreno-Durán. Written in a style accessible to a wide audience, The Colombian Novel will be a foundational work for all students of Colombian culture and Latin American literature.
This study provides a radical re-examination of the regional novel, which played a central part in the development of Latin American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Professor Alonso presents his argument through challenging readings of three works: Rivera's La Voragine; Gallegos's Dona Barbara and Guiraldes's Don Segundo.
The first work in English to discuss the social and political history of lawyers in a Latin American country, Honorable Lives presents a portrait of lawyers in late colonial and early modern Colombia. Uribe-Uran focuses on the social origins, education, and careers of those qualified to practice law before the highest colonial courts—Audiencias—and the republican courts after the 1820s. In the course of his study, Uribe-Uran answers many questions about this elite group of professionals. What were the social origins and families of lawyers? Their relation to the state? Their participation in political movements and parties, revolutions, civil wars, and other political processes? Their ideas, education, and training? By exploring the lives of lawyers, Uribe-Uran is also able to present a general history of Latin America while examining the key social and political changes and continuities from 1780 to 1850—particularly the elites and state managers.Honorable Lives features three genealogical charts detailing bureaucratic networks established by families of lawyers in different historical periods. The text also contains an abundant series of statistical tables and charts, and concise biographical information on approximately 150 Latin American lawyers. This book will appeal to Latin Americanists, students of law, and anyone interested in the lives and histories of lawyers.
In this audacious book, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the politics of life. Drawing primarily from nineteenth-century Colombian sources, Ochoa Gautier locates sounds produced by different living entities at the juncture of the human and nonhuman. Her "acoustically tuned" analysis of a wide array of texts reveals multiple debates on the nature of the aural. These discussions were central to a politics of the voice harnessed in the service of the production of different notions of personhood and belonging. In Ochoa Gautier's groundbreaking work, Latin America and the Caribbean emerge as a historical site where the politics of life and the politics of expression inextricably entangle the musical and the linguistic, knowledge and the sensorial.
Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies is a collection of new essays by recognised experts from around the world on various aspects of the new discipline of Latin American cultural studies. Essays are grouped in five distinct but interconnected sections focusing respectively on: (I) the theory of Latin American cultural studies; (II) the icons of culture; (III) culture as a commodity; (IV) culture as a site of resistance; and (V) everyday cultural practices. The essays range across a wide gamut of theories about Latin American culture; some, for example, analyse the role that ideas about the nation - and national icons have played in the formation of a sense of identity in Latin America, while others focus on the resonance underlying cultural practices as diverse as football in Argentina, TV in Uruguay, cinema in Brazil, and the 'bolero' and soaps of modern-day Mexico. Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies has an introduction setting the ideas explored in each section in their proper context. The essays are written in jargon-free English (all Spanish terms have been translated into English), and are supplemented by a concluding section with suggestions for further reading.
