My eyes!

4 hours reading

Happy July! Please welcome new blog monitor Dan Faltz, in Los Angeles. Dan is a friend from my San Francisco days who's in film school at USC. His excellent short Lucky Man has been featured in festivals across the country, including one in New York last month, at which Cathy and I were lucky enough (ha, ha) to catch it. Definitely a name to watch! Welcome, Dan.

I had an eye appointment this afternoon, and they dilated my eyes, so I've been out of commission pretty much since then. Today, I read two interesting analyses of Colombian regional history by young American historians, Nancy Appelbaum and James Sanders. I audited a course on race, region, and nation that Nancy taught at Berkeley, at a time when there was a real critical mass of top-flight historical work coming out about Colombia's regions between 1850 and 1950. Blood and Fire, about Antioquia, which I've written about glowingly in this space, is of that group, and came out in 2002, followed the next year by Nancy's Muddied Waters, about a town in the coffee-growing region that subverts usual understandings of regional identity and brings to the fore the racially coded ways in which regions have been defined in Colombia. (I love that the name of the town, Riosucio, literally means "dirty river," allowing for the great and thematically appropriate title.)

Finally, in 2004, James Sanders's Contentious Republicans documented a rich popular-democratic tradition in the southern Cauca region during the second half of the nineteenth century, as elite Liberals made alliances with lower-class (or "popular") blacks and mulattos to contend for regional and national power. Sanders complicates our picture of nineteenth-century electoral contention and civil warmaking in Colombia, adding race and class perspectives that help us see in new ways and understand that complicated time more clearly. For my purposes, there's some good stuff in there about the connection between the state-level army and the incipient political parties. That'll be useful for my chapter on the time leading up to the institutional design of the army and police that are central for my analysis.

Tomorrow I'll be back up to speed and ready to write more.