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Lesley Gill , A Century of Violence in a Red City: Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia (Durham, NC, and London : Duke University Press , 2016), pp. xiv + 287, £18.99 pb.
Reviews
A Century of Violence in a Red City is a monumental achievement from one of the most important anthropologists currently working on Latin America. The book cuts against the grain of much recent ethnographic work on Latin America, which has tended to eschew Marxian categories of inquiry over the last few decades, seeing them as antiquated at best. It offers a historical and processual reconceptualisation of a set of still-unfashionable concepts - class, capitalism and the state - as well as their concrete elucidation through fine-grained, multiple determinations and mediations in a specific case study. Lesley Gill has produced one of those rare books whose value is likely to endure for decades and whose universal import extends far beyond the territorial boundaries of Colombia.
The product of over a decade of painstaking ethnographic fieldwork and digging through historical archives, this book's remit covers a century of the violent making and unmaking of the working class in the Middle Magdalena region of Colombia, and particularly in the oil town of Barrancabermeja. Gill seeks to explain 'the composition and decomposition of working-class power, organisation, and culture' (pp. 6-7), with the 'working class' understood expansively, to include 'uprooted peasants, wage laborers, and unwaged and wage-insecure urban immigrants' (p. 7). Together with class formation, this book is about contested capital accumulation and state formation, as well as the ways in which these processes have engendered fierce geographic battles over territorial space. Tracing a century of capitalist development and popular mobilisation, Gill shows how class relations have been continually remade through 'the periodic dispossession, displacement, and disorganisation of working people and their institutions' (p. 13), as well as their political resistance 'over spaces of labor exploitation, capital accumulation, and power'...