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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.3 (2004) 573



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Correspondence

December 31 , 2003

To the Editors:

To Steve Stern's objections (vol. 83 , no. 4 , p. 780 ) to my review of Gilbert M. Joseph, ed., Reclaiming the Political in Latin America (vol. 83 , no. 2 , pp. 374-75), I offer four brief responses.

  1. In Reclaiming the Political, Stern writes, "scholarship is usually a modest and indirect form of political engagement" (p. 33 ). He writes much more (and autobiographically) of "politically engaged writing of Latin American history" happening "on a terrain between tragedy and promise" (pp. 50 ff, 65 n38 ) and finally gives advice on "an emancipatory and empathic vision of subaltern history" (p. 57 ).
  2. About "radical evil" (e.g., Pinochet) he writes, "Inevitably, we will draw a line beyond which the dash of sympathy required for profound historical understanding proves impossible, pointless, or perverse. . . . [N]ot only issues of punishment and forgiveness . . ., but also issues of historical understanding and representation, seem to lie beyond the outer limits of our capacities. As historians, we perch ourselves on the edge of the abyss and come face to face with our inadequacy" (p. 55 ).
  3. Klubock misunderstood the Popular Front mainly in muddling post-1934 anti-fascism, pre-1945 nationalism, post-1945 nationalism, and post-1945 populism.
  4. Any review of a collection of 12 essays in eight hundred words will have some "broad-brush characterizations," positive and negative.

Yours,
John Womack Jr



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