Provides an overarching historical and geographical analysis of the region combined with a focus on many important themes and issues of contemporary Latin American development. Introduces readers to the politics, economies, and cultures of Latin America, outlining the region’s key development challenges, the diverse ways in which its peoples are responding to such challenges and ways in which such challenges and responses can be theorized.
Existing competition is either dated, lacks a consistent focus on development or else lacks the student friendly pedagogy of the text. Empirical information and analysis is drawn from all areas of the region and includes the majority of important events over an extended period of time, but especially in recent years. Focus on transformations provides a unifying theme and focuses the text and provides a useful avenue for engaging students.
Key Changes for the New Edition
The entire text will be revised and updated in a way that takes into account changes that have taken place since publication (deaths of leaders, elections of new leaders, retreat of Pink Tide, Colombian peace accords, new forms of social mobilization, the intensification of extractivism, murders of environmental defenders, major disasters, the new contours of feminist and anti-patriarchal struggles).
All of the boxes will be replaced with new and more recent examples, as will many of the photos, illustrations and web resources.
The new edition will feature new chapters on conceptual underpinnings, Latin America and the World, Disastrous Development, Afro-descendent Struggles and the Latin American City.
The chapters will also be reordered so that the theoretical approaches covered in the text are foregrounded and so the new edition will start with the key theoretical approaches to be covered (especially decolonial theory) and then the theory will be drawn upon throughout. There is also a need for nuanced analysis of contemporary and highly polarizing events that students are seeking to understand (in particular, what went wrong in Venezuela or whether what is going on in Bolivia is a coup) so there will be good coverage of these aspects.
