What If Latin America Ruled the World?: How the South Will Take the North Through the 21st Century - Softcover

Oscar Guardiola-River

Softcover

ISBN 10: 140880977X ISBN 13: 9781408809778

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2011

Synopsis

For most Westerners, Latin America is the junior partner of the New World, an underdeveloped sibling to the US and Canada. The vibrancy of its culture is unquestionable, but the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries of Central and South America are easily typecast and overlooked as exotic, dangerous, and decidedly not part of the First World. In his provocative and powerful book, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera shows how Latin America and its people are making their presence felt across the world by upsetting long-standing political and economic assumptions and orthodoxies. The US will still occupy center stage in the West for the time being, but few observers have taken notice of the rapid growth of Spanish language and culture within the USA - which is quietly and quickly becoming part of Latin America in its own way. Guardiola-Rivera's stimulating work is equally a hidden history of the modern world (the silver peso was the first global currency) and a piercing look at the future. Latin America has been in the vanguard of opposition to globalization, and its politics are imaginative, innovative and unlike those anywhere else in the world. For anyone interested in the future of the Western hemisphere or the world economy, "What if Latin America Ruled the World?" is a must-read.

About this title

About the Author

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera teaches international law and international affairs at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has served as an aide to the Colombian Congress and as a consultant to the United Nations in South America. He has lectured in law, philosphy, and politics on three continents.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. As the Great Recession rolled across the globe in 2008, the economies of Latin America proved unexpectedly resilient--a happy occurrence that legal scholar Guardiola-Rivera credits to the majority of Latin American societies veering away from the neoliberal paradigm and the shadow of the empire to the north. Guardiola-Rivera puts this remarkable trend among Latin American countries--a category into which the U.S. is destined for inclusion, with its projected Latino majority by 2040--into the historical context of enduring pre-Columbian values and popular resistance to imperialism among the dispossessed of North and South America (indigenous peoples and African slaves disproportionately among them).The nuanced narrative, while sometimes too theoretically subtle, links broad and localized struggles to current issues of global justice. Such key episodes as the Spanish conquest of Incan society, the multiethnic alliances of slave revolts in England's North American colonies, and the worker-farmer alliances in Bolivia's recent water wars highlight the ongoing clash of human and social values that attend globalization in the Americas.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 140880977X
• ISBN 13: 9781408809778
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464