After decades of denying racism and underplaying cultural diversity, Latin American states began adopting transformative ethno-racial legislation in the late 1980s. In addition to symbolic recognition of indigenous peoples and black populations, governments in the region created a more pluralistic model of citizenship and made significant reforms in the areas of land, health, education, and development policy. Becoming Black Political Subjects explores this shift from color blindness to ethno-racial legislation in two of the most important cases in the region: Colombia and Brazil. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Tianna Paschel shows how, over a short period, black movements and their claims went from being marginalized to become institutionalized into the law, state bureaucracies, and mainstream politics. The strategic actions of a small group of black activists—working in the context of domestic unrest and the international community's growing interest in ethno-racial issues—successfully brought about change. Paschel also examines the consequences of these reforms, including the institutionalization of certain ideas of blackness, the reconfiguration of black movement organizations, and the unmaking of black rights in the face of reactionary movements. Becoming Black Political Subjects offers important insights into the changing landscape of race and Latin American politics and provokes readers to adopt a more transnational and flexible understanding of social movements.

The 1990s marked a dramatic shift throughout Latin America from constitutions and state policies that hinged on ideas of colorblindness and mestizaje to targeted policies for black and indigenous peoples. This study analyzes the role black social movements played in this shift in Colombia and Brazil, two countries where the state adopted the most comprehensive reforms for black populations in the region. It also analyzes the impact of achieving such reforms on black movements' trajectories in the two countries. In so doing, I not only examine how black movements are shaped by the political context in which they emerge, but how they are able to reconfigure that political context in ways that ultimately reshape black movements themselves. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork including in-depth interviews, archival analysis, and ethnographic methods, this study reveals new ways of understanding ethno-racial politics in these countries and offers insights about the relationship between movements and the state, as well as contestation within movements. Further, in examining how black movements seize upon changes in the global political field, appropriate global discourses into local struggles, and build transnational alliances, this work also challenges us to integrate the constant interplay between global and local processes into our analyses, especially when our aim is to understand social movement dynamics in the Global South. In the first part of the dissertation, I show how the rise of global policy norms around multiculturalism, and the Durban World Conference against Racism, provided political openings for black movements in Colombia and Brazil, respectively. However, I maintain that it was the interplay between such global factors and national political developments paired with strategic action by black movements that best explains states' adoption of these historic reforms. Even so, while both countries adopted policies for black populations beginning in the 1990s, the dominant discourse around black rights in Brazil centers on notions of "the right to equality" and inclusion, whereas black issues in Colombia are largely framed in terms of the "right to difference", culture, territory and autonomy. I suggest that these discursive differences have as much to do with how black populations were historically imagined by the state in the two cases, as they do with the different discursive tactics used by black movements when making demands on the state. The second part examines the consequences of the shift to ethno-racial legislation on internal black movement dynamics in the two countries. More specifically, I analyze the nature of formal structures of political participation set up for black populations in response to movement pressure. I do this by examining how movement actors negotiate, inhabit and contest such spaces, revealing a reality of social movement institutionalization that is much more complex than the literature suggests. Whereas black movements in Brazil have been absorbed into mainstream politics within a relatively democratic state, black movements in Colombia have either been repressed violently or institutionalized into precarious alternative political structures leading to unique internal movement dynamics. In order to understand the relationship between structure and agency as well as ntional and international political processes in these two cases, I propose the conceptual framework of national and global political fields which I argue contributes both to the literature on race in Latin America and social movements.

Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews offer the first systematic, book-length survey of humanities and social science scholarship on the exciting field of Afro-Latin American studies. Organized by topic, these essays synthesize and present the current state of knowledge on a broad variety of topics, including Afro-Latin American music, religions, literature, art history, political thought, social movements, legal history, environmental history, and ideologies of racial inclusion. This volume connects the region's long history of slavery to the major political, social, cultural, and economic developments of the last two centuries. Written by leading scholars in each of those topics, the volume provides an introduction to the field of Afro-Latin American studies that is not available from any other source and reflects the disciplinary and thematic richness of this emerging field.

A supplemental textbook for middle and high school students, Hoosiers and the American Story provides intimate views of individuals and places in Indiana set within themes from American history. During the frontier days when Americans battled with and exiled native peoples from the East, Indiana was on the leading edge of America’s westward expansion. As waves of immigrants swept across the Appalachians and eastern waterways, Indiana became established as both a crossroads and as a vital part of Middle America. Indiana’s stories illuminate the history of American agriculture, wars, industrialization, ethnic conflicts, technological improvements, political battles, transportation networks, economic shifts, social welfare initiatives, and more. In so doing, they elucidate large national issues so that students can relate personally to the ideas and events that comprise American history. At the same time, the stories shed light on what it means to be a Hoosier, today and in the past.

In this sparkling new work, Benedict Anderson provides a radical recasting of themes from Imagined Communities, his classic book on nationalism, through an exploration of fin-de-siecle politics and culture that spans the Caribbean, Imperial Europe and the South China Sea. A jewelled pomegranate packed with nitroglycerine is primed to blow away Manila's 19th-century colonial elite at the climax of El Filibusterismo, whose author, the great political novelist Jose Rizal, was executed in 1896 by the Spanish authorities in the Philippines at the age of 35. Anderson explores the impact of avant-garde European literature and politics on Rizal and his contemporary, the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes, who was imprisoned in Manila after the violent uprisings of 1896 and later incarcerated, together with Catalan anarchists, in the prison fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona. On his return to the Philippines, by now under American occupation, Isabelo formed the first militant trade unions under the influence of Malatesta and Bakunin. Anderson considers the complex intellectual interactions of these young Filipinos with the new "science" of anthropology in Germany and Austro-Hungary, and with post-Communard experimentalists in Paris, against a background of militant anarchism in Spain, France, Italy and the Americas, Jose Marti's armed uprising in Cuba and anti-imperialist protests in China and Japan. In doing so, he depicts the dense intertwining of anarchist internationalism and radical anti-colonialism. Under Three Flags is a brilliantly original work on the explosive history of national independence and global politics.

Written in a detailed and fascinating manner, this book is ideal for general readers interested in the English language.

Scholars in many fields increasingly find themselves caught between the academy, with its demands for rigor and objectivity, and direct engagement in social activism. Some advocate on behalf of the communities they study; others incorporate the knowledge and leadership of their informants directly into the process of knowledge production. What ethical, political, and practical tensions arise in the course of such work? In this wide-ranging and multidisciplinary volume, leading scholar-activists map the terrain on which political engagement and academic rigor meet. Contributors: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Edmund T. Gordon, Davydd Greenwood, Joy James, Peter Nien-chu Kiang, George Lipsitz, Samuel Martínez, Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Dani Nabudere, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Jemima Pierre, Laura Pulido, Shannon Speed, Shirley Suet-ling Tang, João Vargas

Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and fourteen territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.