The Cry of the Renegade by Raymond B Craib

The Cry of the Renegade by Raymond B Craib

On October 1, 1920, the city of Santiago, Chile, came to a halt as tens of thousands stopped work and their daily activities to join the funeral procession of José Domingo Gómez Rojas, a 24 year old university student and acclaimed poet. Nicknamed "the firecracker poet" for his incendiary poems, such as "The Cry of the Renegade", Gómez Rojas was a member of the University of Chile's student federation (the FECh) which had come under repeated attack for its critiques of Chile's political system and ruling parties. Government officials accused the FECh's leaders of being advocates for the destruction of the social order, subversives who had the temerity to question national policy making, and insolent youths who did not know their place. Arrested for alleged sedition as part of a five-month-long "prosecution of subversives", Gómez Rojas joined other students and workers in Santiago's prison system. He never left. After two months in police custody, he died in Santiago's asylum, quickly to be reborn as a political martyr for students and workers alike. This microhistory recovers the context within which Gómez Rojas's arrest, imprisonment, and death unfolded and the experiences of men he counted as friends, comrades, colleagues, mentors, and pupils. Fifty years before the much-heralded student movements of 1968, Raymond Craib shows, university students and workers were active political collaborators and radicalized political subjects. In interwar Chile, members of Chile's sizeable working class marched side-by-side with students from the FECh. At the same time, increasingly radicalized university students, as well as former students, workers, and worker-intellectuals, gathered together to talk, read, and find common cause. Members of what Craib calls a "capacious Left", they shared a wide-ranging interest in works of sociology and political theory, a penchant for poetry, and an eclectic embrace of anarchist, socialist, and communist principles and practices. They also shared the experience of repression, an experience that ultimately cost Gómez Rojas his life and marked an entire generation of political organizers and agitators, including future president Salvador Allende and poet Pablo Neruda.

Raymond Craib's rendering is quite novel--and inspiring.. [A]ll the book's assertions are supported by copious and carefully marshalled sources... [I]t is a book that should attract not only Chileans or followers of Chilean history, but anyone with any sensitivity towards human agency writ large. * Julio Pinto Vallejos, Journal of Latin American Studies *
His book will interest scholars working on twentieth-century Chile, anarchism in Latin America, and student movements in general... [A] compelling narrative... Craib's book provides a more humanized and quotidian account of real people struggling for their right to a just salary, education, free speech, and mobility within and among nation-states... [A] beautifully written story of the alliance among students and workers during the 1920s in Santiago... We need more books like this; books focused on real activists with multiple needs, desires, frustrations, and interests; stories anchored in the streets in which anarchists walked and marched, spaces that were contested, disputed, and challenged by insolent actions and subversive words * Sabrina González, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *
Craib succeeds in painting a vivid picture of the lived experience of these creators of Santiago's 'capacious left' in 1920. With 52 illustrations including photographs, detailed maps, and periodical reproductions, a narrative structure organizing each chapter around a different individual story, and an evocative, almost poetic narrative voice, the book can place the reader amid the blocks of anarchist Santiago, allowing him or her to imagine its shoemakers, printers, and students living, arguing, and agitating in the streets * Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes, Hispanic American Historical Review *
Through a deep, moving, historically embedded homage to Chilean student, poet, and rebel Gómez Rojas, Craib illuminates an entire epoch of emancipatory fervor, circulating internationally but solidly rooted in the lived experience of Santiago. Very, very rarely is history so vivid, closely documented, passionate, and, above all, alive. * James C. Scott, Yale University *
Craib uses the life and death of an anarchist poet, his friends and comrades, as a window on an era, a city, a country, and a movement. This is a luminous book, hard-hitting and incisive, but also eloquent and nuanced, at once an evocative account of everyday anarchism and a portrait of the 'capacious left' of the post-World War I years, when students and workers joined together to protest social injustice. * Peter Winn, author of Weavers of Revolution *
Approaching anarchism not so much as an ideology or a movement, but rather as a personal and collective disposition to what he terms 'insolence,' Raymond Craib explains brilliantly what drew people to anarchist ideas and forms of activism. A rich and compelling narrative history that marshals, effortlessly, economic, social, and political history and an impressive range of sources, The Cry of the Renegade sheds new light on a pivotal moment in Chile's modern history while making a major and highly original contribution to the comparative study of anarchism. * Paulo Drinot, author of The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race and the Making of the Peruvian State *
Raymond Craib's wise and informative book narrates the violence -- and the context of the violence -- of the third week of July 1920 in Santiago, Chile, which was marked by the imprisonment of a great many young anarchists, guilty of thinking ideas about a more just society. Among them was José Domingo Gómez Rojas, a 24-year-old poet who was tortured and died after weeks in prison. Gómez Rojas's spirit and the spirit of his poetry live on in Craib's The Cry of the Renegade. This book is a service to the history of Chile, to the history of Latin America, and to the history of the world. * Thomas E. Kennedy, author of The Copenhagen Quartet *
The link Craib makes with the transnational aspect takes the book from the details of what was happening in Santiago in a particular moments in time and puts it in context, giving a sense and perspective to the decision making of the authorities and the discourses and speeches of those considered subversive. * Camila Gatica, Reviews in History *
Craib's rich and compelling stories and insights together stand as a significant contribution to what is a thin Chilean historiography on a period during which class conflict intensified, the old elite saw its commanding grip on politics slip away, and student groups, anarchists, and other emergent forces claimed spaces in the public sphere and on the streets ... [It] will appeal to scholars and students interested in politics, ideology, class conflict, labor, student organizations and mobilization, and nationalism. Craib's writing is lively and often poetic, tying together the life stories of the study's main actors, and the discourses, institutions, and events that shaped their world ... Provides us a deeper and more nuanced understanding of episodes with far-reaching implications in twentieth-century Chilean society, politics, and collective memory. * Patrick Barr-Melej, American Historical Review *
In his impassioned and deeply researched book, The Cry of the Renegade, Raymond B. Craib brings alive the roiling streets of Santiago in the interwar years. ... Craib tells a romantic story of martyrdom, while always being especially careful not to romanticize it, and of how a kind of radicalism of another era tried to face down a world looking far too much like our own ... without ever falling into the traps of presentism. ... At the same time, he provides a compelling and complex account of anarchism, which is far more attractive, far more radical, and far more open -- especially to other currents in the' capacious Left' -- than any presented by its current acolytes in geography. * Don Mitchell, AAG Review of Books *

Raymond B. Craib is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780190241353
ISBN 10	0190241357
Title	The Cry of the Renegade
Author	Raymond B Craib
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	Oxford University Press Inc
Year published	2016-09-15
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable