Here, Sanchez-Godoy discusses Miguel Cabello Balboa's Verdadera descripcion de la provincia de Esmeraldas (1583), which exemplifies the complex layering of early colonial configurations of race, ...bodies, and maroon cultures in Latin America. With his reading of Balboa's text as a painful inscription of conflictive events, Sanchez-Godoy examines the role of writing in the formation of early Spanish America. Exploring the ways a text produced from a Spanish/Christian point of view overruns its colonizing intentions, he exposes how the Afro-Amerindian maroon community of Esmeraldas claims its existence in relation to Spanish colonial authority and its mechanisms of objectification and domination.
A review essay on books by (1) Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, Abridged (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006); (2) El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal ...Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, Abridged (Indianapolis: Hackett pUblishing, 2006); (3) Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, The History of the Incas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); (4) Deigo de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui, An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2005); (5) Diego de Castro Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui, History of How the Spaniards Arrived in Peru (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006) & (6) Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui, Titu Cusi: A 16th Century Account of the Conquest (Cambridge, MA: David Rockafeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, 2005).
An early Spanish explorer’s account of American Indians.   This volume mines the Pardo documents to reveal a wealth of information pertaining to Pardo’s routes, his encounters and ...interactions with native peoples, the social, hierarchical, and political structures of the Indians, and clues to the ethnic identities of Indians known previously only through archaeology. The new afterword reveals recent archaeological evidence of Pardo’s Fort San Juan--the earliest site of sustained interaction between Europeans and Indians--demonstrating the accuracy of Hudson’s route reconstructions.  
The history of Pakistan's nuclear program is the history of Pakistan. Fascinated with the new nuclear science, the young nation's leaders launched a nuclear energy program in 1956 and consciously ...interwove nuclear developments into the broader narrative of Pakistani nationalism. Then, impelled first by the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan Wars, and more urgently by India's first nuclear weapon test in 1974, Pakistani senior officials tapped into the country's pool of young nuclear scientists and engineers and molded them into a motivated cadre committed to building the 'ultimate weapon.' The tenacity of this group and the central place of its mission in Pakistan's national identity allowed the program to outlast the perennial political crises of the next 20 years, culminating in the test of a nuclear device in 1998. Written by a 30-year professional in the Pakistani Army who played a senior role formulating and advocating Pakistan's security policy on nuclear and conventional arms control, this book tells the compelling story of how and why Pakistan's government, scientists, and military, persevered in the face of a wide array of obstacles to acquire nuclear weapons. It lays out the conditions that sparked the shift from a peaceful quest to acquire nuclear energy into a full-fledged weapons program, details how the nuclear program was organized, reveals the role played by outside powers in nuclear decisions, and explains how Pakistani scientists overcome the many technical hurdles they encountered. Thanks to General Khan's unique insider perspective, it unveils and unravels the fascinating and turbulent interplay of personalities and organizations that took place and reveals how international opposition to the program only made it an even more significant issue of national resolve. Listen to a podcast of a related presentation by Feroz Khan at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation.
This article juxtaposes two very different texts, Charles de Bovelles's Ars oppositorum (1511) and Maurice Scève's Délie (1544), examples of Latin prose philosophy and vernacular love lyric ...respectively. It is not a study of sources: it considers the literary text, like the Latin prose, as an instrument for thinking with. Furthermore, I suggest that contrasting conceptual possibilities arise from generic differences, so that the study of two divergent genres illuminates a variety of related conceptions of difference. I trace a shared interest in the respective roles of cognition and causality in establishing differences, but also a divergence concerning the value of difference, in particular for the human subject. Thus, in the Délie, I focus upon images of illuminating, looking, perceiving, and disintegrating. Both texts suggest that cognition is crucial to the establishment of differences, so that it even seems to usurp the function of natural causality. However, in the Délie the je suffers from difference — both difference within the self and difference from the divine — whereas in the Ars difference can be thought of as a violation but more often is perceived in Trinitarian terms, so that the human subject achieves a privileged sort of self-difference resembling that of the divine.
An early Spanish explorer's account of American Indians. This volume mines the Pardo documents to reveal a wealth of information pertaining to Pardo's routes, his encounters and interactions with ...native peoples, the social, hierarchical, and political structures of the Indians, and clues to the ethnic identities of Indians known previously only through archaeology. The new afterword reveals recent archaeological evidence of Pardo's Fort San Juan--the earliest site of sustained interaction between Europeans and Indians--demonstrating the accuracy of Hudson's route reconstructions.
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