Reimagining Colonised Landscapes Book Club: Open Veins of Latin America

The Reimagining Colonised Landscapes Book Club will meet monthly.

This reading group aims to create a space for collective reflection and discussion on colonialism, decolonisation, power, resistance, and knowledge production.

Through non fiction texts, we will examine the historical, political, and social contexts of selected books, discussing how these texts resonate with the present, what they represent for whom, and how they can be read.

Meetings are open; anyone interested may join in any meeting. Regular attendance is not mandatory, and if you have only managed to read part of the book or even a couple of chapters, we would still love for you to join us for a discussion.

Due to the sensitivity of the topics, participants are expected to approach the discussion with respect, attentive listening, and careful language. This space is geared toward learning, questioning, and collaborative thinking.

Each session will focus on the following topics related to the book:

• The accessibility and comprehensibility of the text
• Its relevance to contemporary contexts
• How it intersects with different experiences and perspectives
• The discussion will mainly revolve around these topics.

Book club members get 15% off book club books with the code DECOLONIAL-LANDSCAPE-BOOKS.

This meeting will be in-person in the bookshop, from 5-7pm.

The book

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.

Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.

Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.