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Confronting
Historical Paradigms
Peasants, Labor, and
the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America
Frederick Cooper, Allen F. Isaacman, Florencia C. Mallon, William
Roseberry, and Steve J. Stern
"The introduction is a brilliant essay
on the place of African and Latin American history in the cultural
politics of the last thirty years. It establishes a context in
which the reader can place the separate essays." —Steven Feierman, University of Florida
Confronting Historical Paradigms argues that confrontation
with major paradigms of world history has marked the fields of
African and Latin American history during the last quarter-century,
and that the process has dramatically restructured historical
and theoretical understanding of peasantries, labor, and the
capitalist world system. Moreover, it maintains, the intellectual
reverberations within and across the African and Latin American
fields constitute a challenging and under appreciated counterpoint
to laments that contemporary historical knowledge has suffered
a splintering so extreme that it undermines larger dialogue and
meaning.
The authors, in their substantive essays, synthesize, order,
and evaluate the significance of the enormous resonating literatures
that have come to exist for Africa and Latin America on the themes
of the capitalist world system, labor, and peasantries. They
historicize these literatures by analyzing an entire cycle of
critical dialogue and confrontation with historical paradigms
and the professional upheavals that accompanied them. They review
the initial confrontations with frameworks of historical knowledge
that erupted in the 1960s and the early 1970s; the emergence
of new "dissident" paradigms; the outpouring of subsequent
scholarship on peasants, labor, and capitalism that began to
unravel the newly proposed paradigms by the 1980s and 1990s;
and the outlines of the new interpretive frameworks that tended
to displace both the "traditional" and "early
dissident" paradigms. They also suggest possible outlines
of a new cycle of "Third World" confrontations with
paradigm, anchored in themes such as gender and ethnicity.
Confronting Historical Paradigms employs a historicized
awareness of intellectual networks, conversations, and historytheory
dialogues. The result is a critical analysis and synthetic presentation
of substantive advances that have preoccupied scholarship on
Africa and Latin America in recent decades and a powerful challenge
to notions that "new" fields of history have ended
up destroying intellectual coherence and community.
"This work will be important not only
to specialists in African and Latin American history, but to
social science theorists as well as intellectual historians and
commentators across disciplines and regional specializations.
All of the essays are uncommonly well written. The volume will
no doubt begin to appear on the required reading lists of graduate
seminars in history, anthropology, and sociology, as well as
courses on third world topics for advanced undergraduates.... Nothing comparable is available in a single volume."—John
Coatsworth, Harvard University
Frederick Cooper is professor of history at the University
of Michigan. Allen F. Isaacman is professor of history
and adjunct associate professor of Afro-American studies at the
University of Minnesota. Florencia E. Mallon is professor
of modern Latin American history at the University of WisconsinMadison.
William Roseberry is associate professor of anthropology
at the New School for Social Research. Steve J. Stern is
a professor in the History department at the University of WisconsinMadison.
His books include Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish
Conquest,
and
Resistance, Rebellion, and Consiousness in the
Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries both
published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@wwwtest.uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.) |
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April 1993
LC: 92-039242 HC
430 pp. 6 x 9
ISBN 0-299-13684-1 Paper $24.95 x
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