Histories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s-2010s (Routledge Studies in the History of the Americas)

By combining chronological coverage, analytical breadth, and interdisciplinary approaches, these two volumes―Histories of Solitude and Histories of Perplexity―study the histories of Colombia over the past two centuries as illustrations of the histories of democracy across the Americas.

The volumes bring together over 40 scholars based in Colombia, the United States, England, and Canada working in various disciplines to discuss how a country that has been consistently presented as a rarity in Latin America provides critical examples to re-examine major historical problems: republicanism and liberalism; export economies and agrarian modernization; populism and cultural politics of state formation; revolutionary and counterinsurgent Cold War violence; neoliberal reforms and urban development; popular mobilization and counterhegemonic public spheres; political ecologies and environmental struggles; and labors of memory and the challenge of reconciliation. Contributors are sensitive to questions of subjectivity and discourse, observant of ethnographic details and micro-politics, and attuned to macro-perspectives such as transnational and global histories.

These volumes offer fresh perspectives on Colombia and will be of great value to those interested in Latin American and Caribbean history.

Lina Britto is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She is the author of Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise.

A. Ricardo López-Pedreros is Professor of History at Western Washington University. He has been a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at University College London. He is the author of Makers of Democracy: A Transnational History of the Middle Class in Colombia.