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Books > History > American history
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Latin America's Middle Class - Unsettled Debates and New Histories (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,235
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Latin America's Middle Class - Unsettled Debates and New Histories (Paperback)
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As middle classes in developing countries grow in size and
political power, do they foster stable democracies and prosperous,
innovative economies? Or do they encourage crass materialism,
bureaucratic corruption, unrealistic social demands, and
ideological polarization? These questions have taken on a new
urgency in recent years but they are not new, having first appeared
in the mid twentieth century in debates about Latin America. At a
moment when exploding middle classes in the global South
increasingly capture the world's attention, these Latin American
classics are ripe for revisiting. Part One of the book introduces
key debates from the 1950s and 1960s, when Cold War era scholars
questioned whether or not the middle class would be a force for
democracy and development, to safeguard Latin America against the
perceived challenge of Revolutionary Cuba. While historian John J.
Johnson placed tentative faith in the positive transformative power
of the "middle sectors," others were skeptical. The striking
disagreements that emerge from these texts lend themselves to
discussion about the definition, character, and complexity of the
middle classes, and about the assumptions that underpinned
twentieth-century modernization theory. Part Two brings together
more recent case studies from Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Colombia,
Chile, and Argentina, written by scholars influenced by
contemporary trends in social and cultural history. These authors
highlight issues of language, identity, gender, and the multiple
faces and forms of power. Their studies bring flesh-and-blood Latin
Americans to the forefront, reconstructing the daily lives of
underpaid office workers, harried housewives and striving
professionals, in order to revisit questions that the authors in
Part One tended to approach abstractly. They also pay attention to
changing cultural understandings and political constructions of who
"the middle class" is and what it means to be middle class.
Designed with the classroom and non-specialist reader in mind, the
book has a comprehensive critical introduction, and each selection
is preceded by a short description setting the context and
introducing key themes.
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