Here are 100 books that The Cry of the Renegade fans have personally recommended if you like
The Cry of the Renegade.
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As someone who studies and writes about Latin American anarchism for a living, I’ve encountered no shortage of influential historical accounts written by scholars and activists writing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English during the past sixty years. My “best of” list includes English-language histories that reflect important shifts in how people began to study and write about anarchism beginning in the 1990s. Before then—and continuing up to today to some extent—historians often focused on the role of anarchists in a country’s labor movement. Today, historians increasingly explore both the cultural and transnational dimensions of Latin American anarchism. In these studies, authors frequently explore the roles of and attitudes toward women in anarchist politics.
Paradoxes—a 2010 translation of his 2001 work—was an important addition to the emerging literature on anarchist cultural politics—a literature that began with a fellow Argentinian historian Dora Borrancos, who wrote Anarquismo, educación y costumbres en la Argentina de principios de siglo (1990). My book built on this emerging exploration of anarchists outside the workplace. Paradoxes explores anarchist newspapers, culture, plays, meetings, and other activities radicals used to promote anarchism while also offering entertainment and relaxation. Suriano is not myopic. He notes that in a time when other forms of entertainment like cinema emerged, workers had competing forms of commercialized amusement to pursue. This book—like other cultural histories—breathes life into old histories of anarchism that often were boring “ABC histories,” i.e., stories of one union acronym after another.
An engaging historical look at fin de siécle Buenos Aires that brings to life the vibrant culture behind one of the world’s largest anarchist movements: the radical schools, newspapers, theaters, and social clubs that made revolution a way of life. Cultural history in the best sense, Paradoxes of Utopia explores how a revolutionary ideology was woven into the ordinary lives of tens of thousands of people, creating a complex tapestry of symbols, rituals, and daily practices that supported—and indeed created the possibility of—the Argentine labor movement.
Juan Suriano is a professor of social history at the University of Buenos Aires.
As someone who studies and writes about Latin American anarchism for a living, I’ve encountered no shortage of influential historical accounts written by scholars and activists writing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English during the past sixty years. My “best of” list includes English-language histories that reflect important shifts in how people began to study and write about anarchism beginning in the 1990s. Before then—and continuing up to today to some extent—historians often focused on the role of anarchists in a country’s labor movement. Today, historians increasingly explore both the cultural and transnational dimensions of Latin American anarchism. In these studies, authors frequently explore the roles of and attitudes toward women in anarchist politics.
Hernández’s book is one of the latest to pick up on the growing trend of studies about or that include anarchist women activists. What is particularly alluring about her book is its transnational focus as she explores how Mexican women agitated for anarchism in the decades preceding, during, and following the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Hernández focuses on one woman in particular: Caritina Piña Montalvo, an anarcho-syndicalist whose fight for gender equity linked anarchists on both sides of the border. Besides its important focus on gender and women’s issues, Hernández’s study illustrates how so much of the writing about Latin American anarchism has become transnational in focus as activists crossed borders—either physically or through correspondence—to promote the anarchist ideal.
Caritina Pina Montalvo personified the vital role played by Mexican women in the anarcho-syndicalist movement. Sonia Hernandez tells the story of how Pina and other Mexicanas in the Gulf of Mexico region fought for labor rights both locally and abroad in service to the anarchist ideal of a worldwide community of workers. An international labor broker, Pina never left her native Tamaulipas. Yet she excelled in connecting groups in the United States and Mexico. Her story explains the conditions that led to anarcho-syndicalism's rise as a tool to achieve labor and gender equity. It also reveals how women's ideas and…
As someone who studies and writes about Latin American anarchism for a living, I’ve encountered no shortage of influential historical accounts written by scholars and activists writing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English during the past sixty years. My “best of” list includes English-language histories that reflect important shifts in how people began to study and write about anarchism beginning in the 1990s. Before then—and continuing up to today to some extent—historians often focused on the role of anarchists in a country’s labor movement. Today, historians increasingly explore both the cultural and transnational dimensions of Latin American anarchism. In these studies, authors frequently explore the roles of and attitudes toward women in anarchist politics.
Soares’ very funny novel bridges my focus on anarchist culture and transnational anarchism. Soares’ title character is an anarchist born of a Brazilian woman. His anarchist politics are always on display as he sets out to assassinate tyrannous figures around the world. For those looking for a sympathetic story of anarchists, our clumsy, error-prone, would-be assassin does not fit the bill. However, his popping up around the world at times of key global events is bizarre and ultimately quite entertaining. If nothing else, Twelve Fingers is a reminder of how even the best-laid plans with noble intents can go disastrously astray.
A burlesque smorgasbord of international high jinks—the “biography” of a hapless, twelve-fingered, would-be assassin who lurches from Sarajevo to Paris to Hollywood to Chicago to Rio, leaving high-stakes chaos in his wake. Our hero, Dimitri Borja Korozec, is born in the late 1800s to a Brazilian contortionist mother and a fanatically nationalist Serbian linotypist father.
Dimitri enrolls in a training school for assassins, where he excels—except for his troubling propensity for fouling things up at the last moment. Part Carlos the Jackal, part Woody Allen’s Zelig, part Inspector Clouseau, and part Forrest Gump, Dimitri is a schlemiel of an assassin…
As someone who studies and writes about Latin American anarchism for a living, I’ve encountered no shortage of influential historical accounts written by scholars and activists writing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English during the past sixty years. My “best of” list includes English-language histories that reflect important shifts in how people began to study and write about anarchism beginning in the 1990s. Before then—and continuing up to today to some extent—historians often focused on the role of anarchists in a country’s labor movement. Today, historians increasingly explore both the cultural and transnational dimensions of Latin American anarchism. In these studies, authors frequently explore the roles of and attitudes toward women in anarchist politics.
Spanish-speaking anarchists from Spain and Latin America often circularly migrated between the United States and Latin America, especially Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, and Mexico. Writing Revolution’s fifteen chapters explore the transnational and print culture of these anarchists in the United States as they communicated with, learned from, and supported their colleagues across Latin America. Correspondence and newspapers from Latin America fueled their support for Cuba’s War for Independence in the 1890s, the Mexican Revolution, social justice campaigns across the Americas, and hemispheric-wide efforts to support the Spanish Civil War and Revolution in the 1930s. Again, anarchist culture and transnational politics are intimately interlinked and illustrate how these two approaches provide a wealth of material to write the histories of radical leftists who agitated for anarchism decades before the emergence of Moscow-influenced Marxist political parties.
In the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, the anarchist effort to promote free thought, individual liberty, and social equality relied upon an international Spanish-language print network. These channels for journalism and literature promoted anarchist ideas and practices while fostering transnational solidarity and activism from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles to Barcelona. Christopher J. Castaneda and Montse Feu edit a collection that examines many facets of Spanish-language anarchist history. Arranged chronologically and thematically, the essays investigate anarchist print culture's transatlantic origins; Latina/o labor-oriented anarchism in the United States; the anarchist print presence in locales like Mexico's borderlands and Steubenville, Ohio; the…
I’m always delighted when a reader asks, “Did you work for the CIA?” It tells me I achieved the verisimilitude I was striving for in Under a False Flag. I’m also proud that my novel has been included in a university-level Latin American history curriculum. That tells me I got the history right. No aspect of modern history is more intriguing or controversial than the role covert action played, for better or worse, in the Cold War. With the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took us to the brink of nuclear disaster, the Cold War in Latin America was mostly fought in the shadows with markedly ambivalent achievements.
The 1973 coup in Chile violently destroyed the freely elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende and installed the brutal 17-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. For years afterward suspicions swirled that the U.S. was behind the event. But evidence was largely anecdotal. What is so impressive about this book is Kornbluh’s persistence deploying the Freedom of Information Act to obtain thousands of classified documents related to the coup. Kornbluh connects the dots and reveals the smoking guns. Through facsimiles of actual cables, telexes, and phone memos (many still highly redacted) this dossier allows you to draw your own conclusions about what really happened in Chile.
The Pinochet File reveals a record of complicity with atrocity by the U.S. government. The documents, first declassified for the original edition of the book, formed the heart of the campaign to hold Gen. Pinochet accountable for murder, torture and terrorism. The New York Times wrote of the original 2003 edition, 'Thanks to Peter Kornbluh, we have the first complete, almost day-to-day and fully documented record of this sordid chapter in Cold War American History.' With this 40th anniversary edition, the record is even more complete and up-to-date.
I am a historian of twentieth-century Argentina and a professor of modern Latin American history currently teaching at the University of Houston. Born and raised in Argentina, I completed my undergraduate studies at the National University of Rosario and moved to the United States in 2000 to continue my education. I received my M.A. in history from New York University and my Ph.D. in history from Indiana University, Bloomington. I have written extensively about gender, working-class history, consumer culture, and sexuality in Argentina. I am the author of Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture and Destape! Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina.
Using a truly interdisciplinary approach anchored in queer studies and affect theory, Frazier subverts the common approach to sex as privatized and located in individual subjectivity by looking at desire as a central component of political culture and power. The book explores a variety of Chilean political projects and actors throughout the twentieth century including feminists, the revolutionary left, and the military dictatorship to understand the ways in which both sexual and non-sexual practices and ideologies were intrinsically connected to emotions and ideas of pleasure and to sexualized and gendered discourses and experiences.
Desired States challenges the notion that in some cultures, sex and sexuality have become privatized and located in individual subjectivity rather than in public political practices and institutions. Instead, the book contends that desire is a central aspect of political culture. Based on fieldwork and archival research, Frazier explores the gendered and sexualized dynamics of political culture in Chile, an imperialist context, asking how people connect with and become mobilized in political projects in some cases or, in others, become disaffected or are excluded to varying degrees. The book situates the state in a rich and changing context of transnational…
I’m a Colorado-raised and California-based historian, professor, and writer. I recently published my first book, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism, which explores the history of one of the longest-running consumer boycotts in American history – the boycott of Coors beer. In telling this particular history, I became fascinated with the boycott as a tool of protest and activism. The boycott is an iconic and regular feature of American politics and history, but it is often dismissed as ineffective or passive. The books on this list (as well as many others) have helped to convince me that the boycott and consumer activism can be powerful forms of solidarity-building and protest.
You’ll never look at table grapes the same after reading Tinsman’s excellent Buying into the Regime. Her book takes a different approach from the texts above – instead of looking at a single movement, she focuses on a single industry (Chilean grapes) in multiple contexts: cultivation in Chile, Cold War consumption in the United States, and consumer activism and grape boycotts in both nations. The result is a remarkable transnational history that underscores how consumption itself is a “terrain of political struggle.” Tinsman’s expansive perspective, which engages a number of different fields, also offers lessons for activists in the age of globalization, notably that building transnational alliances is incredibly difficult work.
Buying into the Regime is a transnational history of how Chilean grapes created new forms of consumption and labor politics in both the United States and Chile. After seizing power in 1973, Augusto Pinochet embraced neoliberalism, transforming Chile's economy. The country became the world's leading grape exporter. Heidi Tinsman traces the rise of Chile's fruit industry, examining how income from grape production enabled fruit workers, many of whom were women, to buy the commodities-appliances, clothing, cosmetics-flowing into Chile, and how this new consumerism influenced gender relations, as well as pro-democracy movements. Back in the United States, Chilean and U.S. businessmen…
I worked at the International Center for Transitional Justice in 2009 when Uruguay held a second referendum to overturn the country’s amnesty law that protected the police and military from prosecution for human rights abuses during the country’s dictatorship. Despite the country’s stable democracy and progressive politics in the 21st century, citizens quite surprisingly rejected the opportunity to overturn the state-sanctioned impunity law. My interest in broader accountability efforts in the world and that seemingly shocking vote in Uruguay drove me to want to study the roots of that failed effort, ultimately compelling a broader investigation into how human rights culture in Uruguay evolved, particularly during and after its period of military rule.
So many books about the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile focus on the particularities of violence during that awful period in the country’s history.
Yet, Bread, Justice, and Liberty looks at a longer trajectory of the struggle for human rights in the country that focuses on socioeconomic justice that began long before the coup of September 11, 1973, and also continued much further afterward.
It is a beautifully written monograph that focuses on shantytown communities’ experiences and activism and expands our understanding of Chilean politics and human rights.
Winner of the SECOLAS Alfred B. Thomas Book Award Named Best Social Science Book, LASA Southern Cone Studies Section
In Santiago, Chile, poverty and state violence have often led to grassroots resistance movements among the poor and working class. Alison J. Bruey offers a compelling history of the struggle for social justice and democracy during the Pinochet dictatorship. Deeply grounded by both extensive oral history interviews and archival research, Bread, Justice, and Liberty provides innovative contributions to scholarship on Chilean history, social movements, popular protest and democratization, neoliberal economics, and the Cold War in Latin America.
Writer and essayist Agnes Borinsky called my debut novel The Seep, “A swift shock of a novel that has shifted how I see our world.” Here are five short, urgent novels that continue to live with me in the months and years after reading them. These are some of my most beloved books, all of which happen to be under 200 pages, which ache with the inner mystery of what is hidden, and what is revealed. These books are my teachers, each a precise masterclass in world building, suspense, and purposeful storytelling. Enjoy these ‘swift shocks!’
I’m also a playwright, so I really admire a full story told in propulsive first-person monologue. This novella is a confession of Father Urrutia from his deathbed, beginning with the line “I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.” As he speaks, the priest untangles the twisted, uncomfortable agreements between artists and institutions in Chile under Pinochet. I often recommend this book for people who have not yet read Bolaño and might feel intimated by the length of his major works.
As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel-Roberto Bolano's first work available in English-recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to…
Chriselda is a multi-genre, prolific author, and speaker, with a background in Business Administration and Chemistry/Microbiology. She speaks 5 languages & has published over 50 books. Her expansive writing covers poetry, horror, thriller, romance, children’s illustration, educational... but she enjoys telling a story in narrative poetry the most. Currently, she is working on her next dark poetry book Me and Him, where she will invoke one of the greatest poets – EA Poe. In her effort to promote more learning, she is also wrapping up the fourth book in her - Sigils, Symbols and Alchemy Series. Her passion for writing, lifelong learning, creativity, and her curiosity all help spark her innovative mindset.
Gabrielawas a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator, and humanist, who became the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature. Her poetry often focuses on dark, humane themes that undoubtedly reflect on traumatic episodes that she had personally endured.
Gabriela has the knack of scratching the surface, which is potent enough to get all your senses actively experiencing the emotions and character she puts forth. The poems resonate on a deep level, offering a compelling clarity of life with its tragedy and complications. The women depicted here are anything but mad; some would say entirely strong-willed and intense, with a collected control and a modernistic sense of independence.
Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among Mistral's most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis - poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning. Madwomen promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated 'madwoman' than most have ever known.
