Our Time is Now
Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala

An illustration of how indigenous and non-indigenous actors deployed concepts of time in their conflicts over race and modernity in postcolonial Guatemala.

Julie Gibbings (Author)

9781108489140, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 June 2020

419 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 3.1 cm, 0.79 kg

'… a fascinating history … meticulously researched … this book has much to offer both historians of Guatemala and people interested in historical methodologies.' Catherine A. Nolan-Ferrell

Postcolonial histories have long emphasized the darker side of narratives of historical progress, especially their role in underwriting global and racial hierarchies. Concepts like primitiveness, backwardness, and underdevelopment not only racialized and gendered peoples and regions, but also ranked them on a seemingly naturalized timeline - their 'present' is our 'past' - and reframed the politics of capitalist expansion and colonization as an orderly, natural process of evolution towards modernity. Our Time is Now reveals that modernity particularly appealed to those excluded from power, precisely because of its aspirational and future orientation. In the process, marginalized peoples creatively imagined diverse political futures that redefined the racialized and temporal terms of modernity. Employing a critical reading of a wide variety of previously untapped sources, Julie Gibbings demonstrates how the struggle between indigenous people and settlers to manage contested ideas of time and history as well as practices of modern politics, economics, and social norms were central to the rise of coffee capitalism in Guatemala and to twentieth century populist dictatorship and revolution.

Introduction: History Will Write Our Names
I. Translating Modernities: 1. To Live without King or Castle: Maya Patriarchal Liberalism on the Eve of a New Era, 1860-1871
2. Possessing Sentiments and Ideas of Progress: Coffee Planting, Land Privatization, and Liberal Reform, 1871-1885
3. Indolence is the Death of Character: The Making of Race and Labor, 1885-1898
4. El Q'eq Roams at Night: Plantation Sovereignty and Racial Capitalism, 1898–1914
II. Aspirations and Anxieties of Unfulfilled Modernities: 5. On the Throne of Minerva: The Making of Urban Modernities, 1908–1920
6. Freedom of the Indian: Maya Rights and Citizenship in a Democratic Experiment, 1920–1932
7. Possessing Tezulutlán: Splitting Time in Dictatorship, 1931-1939
8. Now Owners of Our Land: Nationalism, History, and Memory in Revolution, 1939-1954.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK], Regional & national history [HBJ], History [HB], Humanities [H]