Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 (review)
As a highly intelligent postmodern ethnographer, Nelson dwells long and anxiously on her reflections about the role she played in doing ethnography in Guatemala. She adopts a fluidary strategy, where the focus is on relationships and ambiguous identities rather than fixed identities and positions. She consistently focuses on her own ambivalent identity as solidarist partisan in favor of the “people” vs. the state and U.S. imperialism. Nevertheless, she admits to personal uneasiness from having to disagree with her solidary friends on some points. Furthermore, she confesses that her research was partly done out of the pleasure derived from it, and the advantages resulting from her powerful gringa status (a “Lizard Queen”), although she has learned from the assassination of friends that gringa bodies are not invulnerable in Guatemala!