The first literary geography of the Putumayo, exploring its history and enduring significance through literature of and on this Colombian region by Latin American, US and European writers.

Coming to prominence during the rubber fever of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the Putumayo has long been a site of political turmoil, a place of mass immigration, exile, subjugation, insurgency, and violence, all of which have fostered a long, international literary history. Colombia's Forgotten Frontier maps a literary map of this history for the first time. Lesley Wylie looks at works by writers from Latin America, the United States, and Europe— including works by Roger Casement, José Eustasio Rivera, and Williams Burroughs—in order to examine Colombia's literary legacy of marginality and conflict.

Frontier Road uses the history of one road in southern Colombia—known locally as “the trampoline of death”—to demonstrate how state-building processes and practices have depended on the production and maintenance of frontiers as inclusive-exclusive zones, often through violent means. Considers the topic from multiple perspectives, including ethnography of the state, the dynamics of frontiers, and the nature of postcolonial power, space, and violence Draws attention to the political, environmental, and racial dynamics involved in the history and development of transport infrastructure in the Amazon region Examines the violence that has sustained the state through time and space, as well as the ways in which ordinary people have made sense of and contested that violence in everyday life Incorporates a broad range of engaging sources, such as missionary and government archives, travel writing, and oral histories

The humanitarian movement against Leopold’s violent colonisation of the Congo emerged out of Europe, but it depended at every turn on African input. Individuals and groups from throughout the upper Congo River basin undertook journeys of daring and self-sacrifice to provide evidence of atrocities for the colonial authorities, missionaries, and international investigators. Combining archive research with attention to recent debates on the relation between imperialism and humanitarianism, on trauma, witnessing and postcolonial studies, and on the recovery of colonial archives, this book examines the conditions in which colonised peoples were able to speak about their subjection, and those in which attempts at testimony were thwarted. Robert Burroughs makes a major intervention by identifying African agency and input as a key factor in the Congo atrocities debate. This is an important and unique book in African history, imperial and colonial history, and humanitarian history.

In recent decades, the international recognition of Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez has placed Colombian writing on the global literary map. A History of Colombian Literature explores the genealogy of Colombian poetry and prose from the colonial period to the present day. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction that charts the development of a national literary tradition, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of Colombian literature. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse and fiction of such diverse writers as José Eustacio Rivera, Tomás Carrasquilla, Alvaro Mutis, and Darío Jaramillo Agudelo. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism and multiculturalism in Colombian literature. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Colombian writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. This book explores the pivotal role that football played as part of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’ national unity project centred on the peace process with the FARC. Football has huge political and social capital in Latin America, and has often been rhetorically deployed by governments for various ends; rarely, however, has football’s power and potential been used in such a deliberate, strategic and active way towards a national peace process and targeted such enduring divisions that have historically impeded a sense of a united nation and national identity. Football in Colombia is understood popularly as one of the few things capable of uniting the country, a belief that Santos seized upon as the national team had a successful campaign in the 2014 World Cup. This first book on Colombian football in English explores previous iterations of football nationalism in the country, including the El Dorado and ‘Narcofootball’ eras, before analysing Santos’ three-pronged strategy empowering professional and amateur football, including the use of political speeches and Twitter, legislation and public policy, and Sport for Development and Peace campaigns, with a particular focus on football in the FARC demobilisation and reincorporation camps following the historic peace agreement.

Containing over one hundred selections—most of them published in English for the first time—The Colombia Reader presents a rich and multilayered account of this complex nation from the colonial era to the present. The collection includes journalistic reports, songs, artwork, poetry, oral histories, government documents, and scholarship to illustrate the changing ways Colombians from all walks of life have made and understood their own history. Comprehensive in scope, it covers regional differences; religion, art, and culture; the urban/rural divide; patterns of racial, economic, and gender inequalities; the history of violence; and the transnational flows that have shaped the nation. The Colombia Reader expands readers' knowledge of Colombia beyond its reputation for violence, contrasting experiences of conflict with the stability and significance of cultural, intellectual, and economic life in this plural nation.

A collection of multinational scholarly contributions on various cultural aspects of the Amazon region in the 20th century.

This concise history of guerilla warfare presents profiles in combat courage from George Washington to Simón Bolívar, Mao Zedong, and beyond. The concept of guerrilla warfare is centuries old, with Sun Tzu’s writing on the subject dating back to the sixth century BC. One of the earliest recorded examples of guerrilla tactics deployed by a military leader was the campaign of Roman general Fabius Maximus, who took a course of evasion and harassment against Hannibal’s columns. Guerilla Warfare is a compendium of prominent guerrilla leaders across the globe, from thirteenth-century Scotland’s William Wallace to modern-day Sri Lanka’s Velupillai Prabhakaran. It profiles each leader to analyze their personal history, military tactics, and political strategy. All are home-grown leaders of extended guerrilla campaigns. Many became the first leaders of their liberated countries. Both victories and defeats are included here in an analysis of effective guerrilla tactics as well as counterinsurgency strategies. Today, the labels of insurgent, freedom fighter, and jihadi are fast replacing guerrilla. The old notion of the guerrilla, associated with fights for independence and the end of colonialization, has dimmed with modern and far-reaching religious insurgencies taking their place. This concise history gives a fascinating overview of a once history-altering form of warfare.

Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the full scope of anthropogenic climate change manifests itself and large-scale natural resource extraction has expanded into formerly remote areas that seemed beyond the reach of industrialization. Scientists and popular culture alike have turned to the term "Anthropocene" to capture the global scale of environmental and even geological transformations that humans have carried out over the last two centuries. The chapters in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America examine the dynamics and interplay between local cultures and the expansion of global capitalism in Latin America, emphasizing the role of art in bearing witness to and generating awareness of environmental and social crises, but also its possibilities for formulating solutions. They take particular care to draw out the ways in which local environmental crises in Latin American nations are witnessed and imagined as part of a global system, focusing on the problems of time, scale, and complexity as key terms in conceiving the dimensions of crisis. At the same time, they question the notion of the Anthropocene as a species-wide "human" historical project, making visible the coloniality of natural resource extraction in Latin America and its dire effects for local people, cultures, and environments. Taking an ecocritical approach to Latin American cultural production including literature, film, performance, and digital artwork, the chapters in this volume develop a notion of ecological crisis that captures not only its documentary sense in the representation of environmental destruction (the degradation of the oikos), but also the crisis in the modern worldview (logos) that the acknowledgment of crisis provokes. In this sense, crisis is also the promise of a turning point, of the possibilities for change. Latin American representations of ecological crisis thus create the conditions for projects that decolonize environments, developing new, sustainable ways of conceiving of and relating to our world or returning to old ones.