If we understand Alvarez’s decision to tattoo as a direct response to the soldiers’ threats, his story elucidates the limits of state power. Where death squads in Guatemala repeatedly executed civilians and deprived their families of closure, Alvarez’s tattoo might have thwarted such efforts had he died. If the army killed him, or Felipe, or Alberto, their markings might have rendered them more recognizable to their families regardless of the military’s brutality. Their mothers and fathers could then recite the Lord’s Prayer and give them a proper burial. In this sense, Alvarez’s tattoo embodies rebellion against the Guatemalan government’s authority to deprive families of the ability to grieve. His indelible ink, even in death, may have prevented the state from terrorizing his people and denying them this right.
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman (2018)
by Ashley Garcia The Field of Blood is a timely publication that examines congressional violence in antebellum America. The work reorients our understanding of the road to American disunion and the political conflicts that dominated Congress in the three decades before the Civil War. Freeman has unearthed an overlooked history of congressional brawls, fights, duels, […]
Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation
by Candice D. Lyons In the spring of 1852, Benjamin Roper, overseer to Galveston area plantations Evergreen and Headquarters, wrote a short letter to his employer to inform him that “on the night of [April] 30 I cut Lewis [an enslaved man] with a knife…He is now and has been since his misfortune at Dr. […]
Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016)
By Tiana Wilson After reading this book in three different graduate seminar courses, I can confidently argue that Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is one of the most important texts of our time, and a must read for anyone interested in overcoming the limitations of archival research. For many scholars […]
Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain by Martin Nesvig (2018)
By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Power, he argues, was “promiscuous” in sixteenth-century Michoacán because there were dozens of claimants to overlapping jurisdictions: indigenous nobilities, native commoners, encomenderos (tributary lords responsible for conversion of entrusted indigenous communities), bishops, parish priests, friars, audiencia (high court) magistrates, alcaldes mayores (city mayors), city councils, corregidores (regional authorities), viceroys, general inquisitors, inquisitorial […]
More than Archives: Dealing with Unfinished History
by Jimena Perry In July 2017, as part of my dissertation research, I had the opportunity to participate in an assembly of the Association of Victims of Granada (Asociación de Víctimas de Granada, ASOVIDA), in Colombia. This organization is composed of the survivors of the violence inflicted by guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the National Army during […]
Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez: An unusual disappearance
by Nathan Stone They weren’t all the same. We know of at least one soldier who had a conscience. There were several, actually. Most were weighty figures, captains and colonels who refused to follow orders. Some of them quit or went into exile. Others died. But I’m talking about conscripts, the powerless boys who were […]
Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice From the Sixteenth Century to the Present, edited by Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (2016)
This review was originally published on the Imperial & Global Forum on May 22, 2017. By Ben Holmes (University of Exeter) What does it mean to belong to the human race? Does this belonging bring with it particular rights as well as responsibilities? What does it mean to act with humanity? These are some of […]
Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse (2013)
By Aden Knaap, Harvard University The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer has a thing for squid. (Think less calamari, more American Pie.) The bastard son of a Vietnamese maid and a French priest, he discovers at the age of thirteen that he has a peculiar fetish for masturbating into gutted squid, […]
Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler, by Stefan Ihrig (2016)
By Kelly Douma, Penn State University Stefan Ihrig closes this book with a quote that encompasses his argument from Raphael Lemkin, the father of the word genocide: “Genocide is so easy to commit because people do not want to believe it until after it happens.” All the signs and symptoms of Nazi-perpetrated genocide existed throughout […]