What If Latin America Ruled the World?: How the South Will Take the North into the 22nd Century

What If Latin America Ruled the World?: How the South Will Take the North into the 22nd Century

by OscarGuardiola-Rivera (Author)

Synopsis

For most Europeans and Americans, Latin America is still little more than their underdeveloped sibling, its inhabitants pitching up on its shores or struggling across the Rio Grande into the USA. It's a place of exuberant music, mesmerising football, extravagant beauty, fantastic literature, drug trafficking and guerrilla warfare - in short, exotic, dangerous and exciting. In this counterintuitive and fascinating book, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, who teaches international Law and International Affairs at London University, shows how, unafraid to turn its back on some commonly held economic views that have now lost their currency, Latin America is in fact making its presence felt from Lima to Shanghai, from Brazilia to London and from Buenos Aires to New York. While the world acknowledges the continuing importance of the US in international affairs, few people have noticed that with Spanish language and culture in the ascendant the US is quietly but quickly becoming the next Latin American country. In fact, Guardiola-Rivera argues, the next Barack Obama is as more than likely to be of Latino origin. Both a hidden history of the modern world from the silver peso (the world's first truly global currency) to the recent shift away from globalism and an imaginative vision rooted in a sure understanding of the past, What If Latin America Ruled the World? is certain to provoke interest and controversy.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 480
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 21 Jun 2010

ISBN 10: 1408805995
ISBN 13: 9781408805992
Book Overview: July 2010 sees the 200th anniversary of Colombia's liberation from Spanish rule Author publicity at the time of publication including anniversary celebrations and major literary festivals For fans of The State We're in by Will Hutton and The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Media Reviews
'Oscar Guardiola-Rivera has written a smart, original, provocative, and timely book. He analyzes and pushes beyond the recent leftward turn in Latin American politics and in so doing he offers a hopeful new genealogy of the globalized present' Marcus Rediker 'Remarkable, stimulating and illuminating, What if Latin America Ruled the World? is unlike anything I've ever read ... a breathless rollercoaster ride that also offers a brilliantly creative approach to history and geography' Gerald Martin, author of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life 'Puts the solutions to the current economic crisis of the rich world into their proper global perspective' Richard Gott, Guardian 'Kaleidoscopic ... enriching ... this is an ambitious book with an ambitious agenda' David Goldblatt, Independent
Author Bio
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera teaches International Law and International Affairs at Birkbeck College, University of London. He also served as an aid to the Colombian Congress, as a consultant for a unit of the United Nations in the region, taught and lectured in law, philosophy, and politics in three continents. He helped to found a think-tank still active in Colombia, dealing with Human Rights, policy, culture, and conflict resolution, and is recognised as one of the foremost younger voices in Latin American philosophy.