Histories of Perplexity

By combining chronological coverage, analytical breadth, and interdisciplinary approaches, these two volumes study the histories of Colombia over the last two centuries as illustrations of the histories of democracy across the world. The volumes bring together over forty scholars based in Colombia, the United States, England, and Canada working in various disciplines to discuss how a country that has been consistently presented as a rarity in Latin America provides critical examples to reexamine major historical problems: republicanism and liberalism; export economies and agrarian modernization; populism and cultural politics of state formation; revolutionary and counterinsurgent Cold War violence; neoliberal reforms and urban development; popular mobilization and counterhegemonic public spheres; political ecologies and environmental struggles; and labors of memory and the challenge of reconciliation. Contributors are sensitive to questions of subjectivity and discourse, observant of ethnographic details and micro-politics, and attuned to macro-perspectives such as transnational and global histories. These volumes offers fresh perspectives on Colombia and will be of great value to those interested in Latin American and Caribbean history.