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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Julie Gibbings, "Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Description: Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is an ambitious exploration of modernity, history, and time in post-colonial Guatemala. Set in the Qâeqchi Maya highlands of Alta Verapaz from the 19th century into the 20th, Julie Gibbings explores how Qâeqchi, ladino, and German immigrant actors created the overlapping, messy and contentious political worlds of modern Guatemala, with attention to the âasymmetric information, expectations, and power ...their mutual misunderstandings and distinct worldviewsâ of each of these groups. More specifically, Gibbings argues that in the state and coffee plantersâ active erasure of Maya political...