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As a collective effort, this volume locates the formation of the
middle classes at the core of the histories of Latin America in the
last two centuries. Featuring scholars from different places across
the Americas, it is an interdisciplinary contribution to the world
histories of the middle classes, histories of Latin America, and
intersectional studies. It also engages a larger audience about the
importance of the middle classes to understand modernity,
democracy, neoliberalism, and decoloniality. By including research
produced from a variety of Latin American, North American, and
other audiences, the volume incorporates trends in social history,
cultural studies and discursive theory. It situates analytical
categories of race and gender at the core of class formation. This
volume seeks to initiate a critical and global conversation
concerning the ways in which the analysis of the middle classes
provides crucial re-readings of how Latin America, as a region, has
historically been understood.
In Makers of Democracy A. Ricardo Lopez-Pedreros traces the ways in
which a thriving middle class was understood to be a foundational
marker of democracy in Colombia during the second half of the
twentieth century. Drawing on a wide array of sources ranging from
training manuals and oral histories to school and business
archives, Lopez-Pedreros shows how the Colombian middle class
created a model of democracy based on free-market ideologies,
private property rights, material inequality, and an emphasis on a
masculine work culture. This model, which naturalized class and
gender hierarchies, provided the groundwork for Colombia's later
adoption of neoliberalism and inspired the emergence of alternate
models of democracy and social hierarchies in the 1960s and 1970s
that helped foment political radicalization. By highlighting the
contested relationships between class, gender, economics, and
politics, Lopez-Pedreros theorizes democracy as a historically
unstable practice that exacerbated multiple forms of domination,
thereby prompting a rethinking of the formation of democracies
throughout the Americas.
In Makers of Democracy A. Ricardo Lopez-Pedreros traces the ways in
which a thriving middle class was understood to be a foundational
marker of democracy in Colombia during the second half of the
twentieth century. Drawing on a wide array of sources ranging from
training manuals and oral histories to school and business
archives, Lopez-Pedreros shows how the Colombian middle class
created a model of democracy based on free-market ideologies,
private property rights, material inequality, and an emphasis on a
masculine work culture. This model, which naturalized class and
gender hierarchies, provided the groundwork for Colombia's later
adoption of neoliberalism and inspired the emergence of alternate
models of democracy and social hierarchies in the 1960s and 1970s
that helped foment political radicalization. By highlighting the
contested relationships between class, gender, economics, and
politics, Lopez-Pedreros theorizes democracy as a historically
unstable practice that exacerbated multiple forms of domination,
thereby prompting a rethinking of the formation of democracies
throughout the Americas.
Social Protests in Colombia: A History, 1958-1990 examines social
mobilization in Colombia through a variety of lenses in an
interdisciplinary approach. Mauricio Archila-Neira incorporates
theories from diverse social sciences including subaltern studies
and postcolonial approaches to open up an intergenerational
dialogue about political transformation and social change.
Archila-Neira approaches this history from an objective viewpoint,
offering an analysis from a distance not altered by emotion or
hyperbole as he examines the values, traditions, and social
collective action of subaltern sectors without external influence
or motive. The book argues that academia bears the responsibility
to put into play its accumulated symbolic capital to critically
understand society, without abandoning the utopic effort to imagine
another world is possible. Social Protests in Colombia teaches
readers how to inhabit differences-of historical experiences,
knowledge, and understandings-and why it is crucial to challenge a
world that claims to be homogenous. Scholars of Latin American
studies, sociology, political science, and history will find this
book especially useful.
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.
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.
In this important and timely collection of essays, historians
reflect on the middle class: what it is, why its struggles figure
so prominently in discussions of the current economic crisis, and
how it has shaped, and been shaped by, modernity. The contributors
focus on specific middle-class formations around the world-in
Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas-since the
mid-nineteenth century. They scrutinize these formations in
relation to the practices of modernity, to professionalization, to
revolutionary politics, and to the making of a public sphere. Taken
together, their essays demonstrate that the historical formation of
the middle class has been constituted transnationally through
changing, unequal relationships and shifting racial and gender
hierarchies, colonial practices, and religious divisions. That
history raises questions about taking the robustness of the middle
class as the measure of a society's stability and democratic
promise. Those questions are among the many stimulated by The
Making of the Middle Class, which invites critical conversation
about capitalism, imperialism, postcolonialism, modernity, and our
neoliberal present. Contributors. Susanne Eineigel, Michael
A.Ervin, Inigo Garcia-Bryce, Enrique Garguin, Simon Gunn, Carol E.
Harrison, Franca Iacovetta, Sanjay Joshi, Prashant Kidambi, A.
Ricardo Lopez, Gisela Mettele, Marina Moskowitz, Robyn Muncy, Brian
Owensby, David S. Parker, Mrinalini Sinha, Mary Kay Vaughan, Daniel
J. Walkowitz, Keith David Watenpaugh, Barbara Weinstein, Michael O.
West
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