A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (American Encounters/Global Interactions) - Softcover

"A Century of Revolution offers the field a new way to periodize and organize instances of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence. . . . [It] provides a powerful corrective, illuminating how world-historical events like the overthrow of Salvador Allende or the bola of the Mexican Revolution were anything but predetermined, reconstructing the cycles of escalation and radicalization that produced them, and chronicling the unstable chemical reactions sparked as the twin Furies of rebellion and reaction met." -- Kristen Weld * Latin American Research Review * "A Century of Revolution has much of value to offer. . . . The ten essays by Latin Americanists in A Century of Revolution bear out the considerable historiographical value of the reinterpretive efforts in which Grandin and Joseph have been engaged for over a decade." -- Arthur Schmidt * A Contracorriente * "Yet few works provide a perspective as wide-ranging as A Century of Revolution. This important collection - with its careful attention to causes, processes, and outcomes - goes a long way toward debunking the widespread view that political violence is `natural' to Latin America." -- Michael Gobat * Hispanic American Historical Review * "The combined expertise of Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph makes A Century of Revolution analytically rich, especially in describing of the growing agency of mass organizations. . . . A Century of Revolution offers a nuanced theoretical framework, which can help historians interested in new models of analysis to explain the dynamics of late-twentieth-century Latin America." -- Alejandro Quintana * History: Reviews of New Books * ". . . [E]xcellent case studies based on careful archival work that broaden our understanding of Latin America's experience of the Cold War in the twentieth century." -- Paulo Drinot * Cold War History * "The abstract rejection of violence is one of the pillars of today's hegemonic liberal ideology, and is paradoxically used to legitimize the most brutal forms of actual violence. This is why this outstanding book not only offers an excellent study of the Latin American revolutionary process, but has universal relevance. Its precise analysis of the necessary role of emancipatory violence against the violence of the system itself brings a breath of fresh air into the stale moralism of the liberal Left. A much-needed awakening from our humanitarian dogmatic dream!"-Slavoj Zizek "Showcasing the work of a remarkable group of scholars, this collection provides a sweeping reinterpretation of Latin America's twentieth century and a thought-provoking intervention into our understanding of the history and meaning of political violence."-Laurent Dubois, author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution

Latin America experienced an epochal cycle of revolutionary upheavals and insurgencies during the twentieth century, from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 through the mobilizations and terror in Central America, the Southern Cone, and the Andes during the 1970s and 1980s. In his introduction to A Century of Revolution, Greg Grandin argues that the dynamics of political violence and terror in Latin America are so recognizable in their enforcement of domination, their generation and maintenance of social exclusion, and their propulsion of historical change, that historians have tended to take them for granted, leaving unexamined important questions regarding their form and meaning. The essays in this groundbreaking collection take up these questions, providing a sociologically and historically nuanced view of the ideological hardening and accelerated polarization that marked Latin America's twentieth century. Attentive to the interplay among overlapping local, regional, national, and international fields of power, the contributors focus on the dialectical relations between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes and their unfolding in the context of U.S. hemispheric and global hegemony. Through their fine-grained analyses of events in Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru, they suggest a framework for interpreting the experiential nature of political violence while also analyzing its historical causes and consequences. In so doing, they set a new agenda for the study of revolutionary change and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America.Contributors Michelle Chase Jeffrey L. Gould Greg Grandin Lillian Guerra Forrest Hylton Gilbert M. Joseph Friedrich Katz Thomas Miller Klubock Neil Larsen Arno J. Mayer Carlota McAllister Jocelyn Olcott Gerardo Renique Corey Robin Peter Winn