New Books in Native American Studies
Society & Culture
Bringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024) by Dr. Brooke Larson maps the moral dilemmas and political stakes involved in the protracted struggle over Indian literacy and schooling in the Bolivian Andes.
Dr. Larson traces Bolivia’s major state efforts to educate its unruly Indigenous masses at key junctures in the twentieth century. While much scholarship has focused on “the Indian boarding school” and other Western schemes of racial assimilation, Dr. Larson interweaves state-centred and imperial episodes of Indigenous education reform with vivid ethnographies of Aymara peasant protagonists and their extraordinary pro-school initiatives. Exploring the field of vernacular literacy practices and peasant political activism, she examines the transformation of the rural “alphabet school” from an instrument of the civilising state into a tool of Aymara cultural power, collective representation, and rebel activism. From the metaphorical threshold of the rural school, Dr. Larson rethinks the politics of race and indigeneity, nation and empire, in postcolonial Bolivia and beyond.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2016)
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Matthew Restall, “When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History” (Ecco, 2018)
Dawn Peterson, “Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion” (Harvard UP, 2017)
Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala” (U Arizona Press, 2015)
Mark Rifkin, “Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination” (Duke UP, 2017)
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Colin G. Calloway, “The Indian World of George Washington” (Oxford UP, 2018)
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