Today we offer you reviews of books on three of the largest human ecologies of Latin America. These reviews range from mental illness in the southern cone, to the overflowing of Caribbean culture, and all the way to rhythms of crises in Mexico. The books are a monograph and two collections of essays. They are mostly concerned with the national period.
In the first review, Luis García Fanlo tells us about a book that unravels Buenos Aires’ madness as part of nation building. The Nineteenth Century brought more than immigrants and science to explain normalcy. There was a sinister positive design for homogeneity. To be crazy was not simply a mental illness, but also the unwillingness or incapacity to fit conceptual molds of citizenship. Fanlo tells us that Jonathan Ablard’s book, _Madness in Buenos Aires_, fills a niche in the history of psychiatry. In short, through careful archival research, the book’s author shows how cultural, political and social factors helped determine the capacity of the state to define and provide mental services. The reader may reasonably ask how would Ablard’s approach compare to Foucault’s study on madness and how was Argentina different from, for example, Brazil?
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31688
While exploring _Constructing Vernacular Culture_ Kate Houlden shows us a book on the edge of inter-disciplinarity that studies the Caribbean region through an array of provocative angles. This is a collection of fifteen tightly written essays meant to push the envelope. The authors propose to look at the Caribbean not only through the islands, but also beyond them to include the diasporic communities, to examine the migratory culture through the volatile vernacular and to include the electronic world as more
than an abstract venue of connection (among other views). Hardly any aspect of the trans-Caribbean culture goes unchallenged; even gossip is shown as a form of agency. And yet, the reviewer carefully reveals where the essays are at their best and where they could have been better. The historian may find this collection of studies a tease or a stimulus to move beyond geographical and traditional approaches to studying Caribbean History (the late nineteenth-century Antillean leaders/writers like Martí, Hostos, and Betances would be grateful).
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31721
Timothy J. Henderson cracks open _Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change_ a loquacious book of loosely assembled essays centered on a comparative rubric of Mexican revolutions or crises. The editors are concerned with the possibility that there is a spiral pattern of some sort revealed in the years of 1810 and 1910. (A colonialist could even add the years 1519, 1610s and 1710s). Are we seeing here a (rather dismal) vision of the future? The book brought together a group of well-known Mexicanists who, while exceptionally redundant, do manage to suggest new approaches and directions for the study of Mexican revolutions/crises. Yet, I still wonder if there aren’t enough commanding events in Mexican history for the historian to create countless of other rhythmic patterns?
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31471
A big thank-you to the reviewers for their time and for sharing their analyses with us:
Luis García Fanlo, Universidad de Buenos Aires
https://profiles.google.com/106846042918531195240/about
Kate Houlden, Queen Mary, University of London
http://qmul.academia.edu/KateHoulden
Timothy J. Henderson, Auburn University Montgomery
http://www.aum.edu/profile_ektid9416.aspx
And thank-you also to the team of editors from H-LatAm who assisted me in preparing these reviews for publication:
Peter Blanchard
Matthew Rothwell
John F. Schwaller
Sincerely yours,
Dennis R. Hidalgo
