Modernity, Postmodernity, and Transformation of Revolutions

Our views of revolutions are changing along with the changing faces of revolutionaries. Most of the authors reviewed here are shaping a new paradigm for understanding multicultural globalization. Modernity brought an ethos of universally accepted, inalienable rights to social justice and freedom, investing these conditions in individuals as citizens of sovereign nations. The image of a revolutionary was that of a man taking up arms in defense of those rights and of men sitting down with quills or fountain pens to sign documents of implementation. This view was embedded in histories recounting the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the revolutions of independence in the Western Hemisphere in the early nineteenth century. The anticolonial revolutions of Africa and Asia after World War II introduced new strategies of nonviolence. Ongoing struggles against neoliberal globalization in Latin America and the Caribbean have introduced new images, reflecting the growing preponderance of indigenous people, particularly women, among the revolutionary cohorts that oppose the invasion of their territories by ranchers and by global mining, lumber, and agricultural corporations.

By the end of the second millennium, emergent ideologies and strategies could no longer be contained within the modernity ethos, which stressed individual rights. The individualist ideals of earlier revolutionaries were impinged on by the collectivist goals of “peoples without history” and of women excluded from the implementation of constitutions drafted by the leaders of past revolutions. New revolutionaries now challenge nations that defined themselves in terms of ethnic and cultural homogeneity brought about by the melting pot (or pressure cooker, as some call it) of the industrialized United States or of indigenista policies in Latin America.

The books under review present both the embodiment of revolution in revolutionaries (Escobar’s autobiographical account of Bolivia’s revolutionary trajectory; Henck’s biography of Subcommander Marcos) and analyses of revolutions in process (the anthology on women in the Zapatista uprising edited by Speed, Hernández Castillo, and Stephen; Lazar’s ethnography of El Alto, a city that grew with the displaced populations of the mines and campo following the debt crisis of the 1980s).

James Dunkerley’s telescopic history of Bolivia’s three revolutions provides a framework for the revolutionary eras that have pervaded Latin America. The first of these revolutions arose in the independence movements of the late eighteenth century, which Dunkerley quixotically chooses to memorialize with the Irish adventurer Francisco Burdette O’Conor, who fought with Simón Bolívar in Ayacucho in 1809. The second revolution of 1952 succeeded in uniting a weak middle class of mestizos and criollos with a rebellious working class in a populist overthrow of the tin barons or rosca. The leaders of the third, still-ongoing revolution were forged in the successful battle against the privatization of water by the transnational Bechtel Corporation, and in the efforts of cocaleros to assert their right to grow a traditional crop in the face of drug wars.

Dunkerley’s seven essays were written over a thirty-year period and range back in time from the recently contested victory of Evo Morales, the first Indian president in South America, to the independence battles of the turn of the nineteenth century. What...