¹ Rafael, Vicente L., “Regionalism, Area Studies, and the Accidents of Agency,” American Historical Review 104:4 (October 1999), p. 1213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² See, for example, Bruce Cumings sweeping critique of area studies in “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War,” Bulletin for Concerned Asian Scholars (January-March 1997).

³ Rafael, , “Regionalism,” pp. 1214–15.Google Scholar The larger quote is Rafael’s words; the quote within the quote is Said’s.

⁴ Bridenbaugh, Carl, “The Great Mutation,” American Historical Review 68:2 (January 1963), pp. 315–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bridenbaugh lamented that many new doctoral students were “products of lower middle-class or foreign origins,” and they were therefore “outsiders” who lacked the “priceless asset of a shared culture” (pp. 322–3). According to him, this cultural handicap led them to import “social-science techniques” from sociology into history since they were trying to compensate for their lack of erudition through a readily acquired technical expertise.

⁵ This citation amounts to the academic equivalent of hearsay evidence—I cannot remember the date or even the exact year of the Aronowitz talk, though I do remember that it was at the Stony Brook Humanities Institute in the early 1990s. As is true for many Stony Brook faculty (current and former), I am grateful to that institute for the many intellectual encounters—stimulating as well as irritating—that it made possible over the last fifteen years. I can, however, cite a few of Aronowitz's many publications. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working-Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973); Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1988), and The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 1991).

⁶ For an early discussion of Foucault’s preference for ruptures over continuity, see White, Hayden, “Foucault Decoded,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1978), pp. 230–60.Google Scholar

⁷ As with the Aronowitz talk, I will be discussing this paper from memory—I no longer have the original copy, and sadly, Bill Roseberry died this past summer. His untimely death has deprived the fields of Latin American history and anthropology of one of its most thoughtful and influential scholars. For a particularly stimulating sample of his work, see Roseberry, William, Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U. Press, 1989).Google Scholar

⁸ Particularly widely cited is Roseberry, William, “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” in Joseph, Gilbert M. and Nugent, Daniel, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke U. Press, 1994), pp. 355–66.Google Scholar

⁹ Weinstein, Barbara, For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920–1964 (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina Press, 1996).Google Scholar

¹⁰ The best examples of this trend are the essays in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation.

¹¹ To be sure, Montgomery’s, David pathbreaking work, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1979)Google Scholar inspired many valuable studies in working-class history, and aspects of it continue to inspire my own.

¹² For a more detailed discussion of this point see Sewell, William H. Jr., “Toward a Post-materialist Rhetoric for Labor History,” in Berlanstein, Lenard R., ed., Rethinking Labor History (Urbana, IL: U. of Illinois Press, 1993).Google Scholar

¹³ I have discussed these issues at much greater length in “A Pesquisa sobre Identidade e Cidadania nos EUA: da Nova Història Social à Nova Història Cultural,” Revista Brasileira de Història, XVIII, 35 (1998), pp. 227–246.

¹⁴ Chalhoub, Sidney and de, Leonardo A. Pereira, M., eds., A História Contada: Capítulos de História Social da Literatura no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Nova Fronteira, 1998), especially pp. 7–9.Google Scholar

¹⁵ The “abertura” was the period from approximately 1979 to 1982, when the military dictatorship (in power from 1964 to 1985) began to ease its grip on Brazilian society, ending censorship, freeing political prisoners and allowing exiles to return.

¹⁶ If anyone is curious, the full citation is da Silva, Marcos Antônio, “Notícias do Brasilianismo: Saudades da Historiografia Brasileira,” Revista Brasileira de História 16:31–32 (1996), pp. 76–88.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Rafael, , “Regionalism,” p. 1219.Google Scholar

¹⁸ A classic example of a North American-based historian arguing for local (Latin American) agency is Stern, Steve J., “Feudalism, Cápitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean,” American Historical Review 93:4 (October 1988), pp. 829–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In my own study of the Amazon rubber boom, an economie episode that might seem to defy all attempts to attribute agency to local actors, I argued that the struggles of rubber tappers to maintain control over their work rhythms and over the disposition of their product played a significant role in influencing the course of the rubber boom. Weinstein, Barbara, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 1983).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Joseph, Gilbert M., LeGrand, Catherine C., and Salvatore, Ricardo D., eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, NC: Duke U. Press, 1998).Google Scholar