Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru

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University of California Press, Nov 15, 2023 - History - 496 pages
Peasant and Nation offers a major new statement on the making of national politics. Comparing the popular political cultures and discourses of postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Florencia Mallon provides a groundbreaking analysis of their effect on the evolution of these nation states. As political history from a variety of subaltern perspectives, the book takes seriously the history of peasant thought and action and the complexity of community politics. It reveals the hierarchy and the heroism, the solidarity and the surveillance, the exploitation and the reciprocity, that coexist in popular political struggle.

With this book Mallon not only forges a new path for Latin American history but challenges the very concept of nationalism. Placing it squarely within the struggles for power between colonized and colonizing peoples, she argues that nationalism must be seen not as an integrated ideology that puts the interest of the nation above all other loyalties, but as a project for collective identity over which many political groups and coalitions have struggled. Ambitious and bold, Peasant and Nation both draws on monumental archival research in two countries and enters into spirited dialogue with the literatures of post-colonial studies, gender studies, and peasant studies.


Peasant and Nation offers a major new statement on the making of national politics. Comparing the popular political cultures and discourses of postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Florencia Mallon provides a groundbreaking analysis of their effect on the
 

Contents

I
1
III
23
IV
63
V
89
VI
137
VII
176
IX
220
X
247
XI
276
XII
310
XIV
331
XV
449
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Page ix - ... the representatives, who constantly appeal to public opinion, give public opinion the right to speak its real mind in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside parliament not want to decide? When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance? Thus, by now stigmatizing as "socialistic" what it had previously extolled as "liberal...
Page xxi - Acknowledgments This book has been a long time in the making, and I have accumulated many more obligations than it is possible to acknowledge fully here.

About the author (2023)

Florencia E. Mallon is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (1983) and the coeditor of Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor and the Capitalist World-System in Africa and Latin America (1992).

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