Raymond B. Craib

Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History

305 McGraw Hall
rbc23@cornell.edu
607/255-6745

Education

BA, History, Eastern Michigan University, 1990

MA, Latin American Studies, University of New Mexico, 1994

PhD, History, Yale University, 2001

Departments and programs

History
Latina/o Studies Program
Romance Studies

Academic interests

Comparative and Transnational
Cultural
Historical Geography
Social

Overview

I am a historian of modern Latin America with research and teaching interests in the intersections of space, politics, and everyday practice. My home department is History and I have affiliations with Romance Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Latino Studies and work with students from a wide range of disciplines and with a particular focus on the history of modern Latin America.

Research Focus

Trained as a Latin Americanist, my research and teaching interests revolve around the intersections of space, politics, and everyday practice. Although trained as a historian, I am deeply invested in the field of geography and critical spatial theory. My first book, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duke U. Press, 2004; Sp. trans. by Rossana Reyes, México Cartográfico: Una historia de límites fijos y paisajes fugitivos, UNAM, 2013), attempted to wrestle with questions of space, property and belonging through a close, social history of cartography. The book examines the cartographic routines—exploring, mapping, and surveying—through which Mexican national sovereignty and a series of property regimes (from communal landholding, through to privatization and enclosure, to the creation of the post-revolutionary ejido, as well as riparian and water rights) were forged. A ‘social history of cartography,’ the book focuses in particular on the points of contact, cooperation, and conflict between those living and working on particular lands (in this case, peasants in highland Veracruz) and those charged with translating legislative decrees in to social and juridical realities (in this case, land surveyors in highland Veracruz).

My second book, The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016; Sp. trans. by Pablo Abufom, Santiago Subversivo 1920: Anarquistas, universitarios y la muerte de José Domingo Gómez Rojas, Ediciones LOM, 2017), sought to fuse more directly—in micro-historical fashion—relationships between space and politics, in this instance in the context of post-World War I Santiago, Chile, a city then undergoing dramatic spatial and social transformation. The book takes a six-month period of time—from the initial crackdowns on purported anarchists and foreign agitators through to the eventual release six months later of most of those illegally detained—and examines in close detail what unfolded. My research came out of an effort to understand the processes and events that led to the death of a young poet named José Domingo Gómez Rojas. In the process I sought to rescue him from the flat oblivion of martyrdom and instead to bring him to life through the lives and struggles of his comrades and friends. I emphasize a number of issues in the book: I pay close attention to university students and the radicalization and “disidentification” they experienced over the course of the 1910s as well as the close relationships they forged with working people. My focus on university students was intended to move beyond the persistent discourse of students as socially privileged and politically naive and therefore somehow less authentic political subjects, while at the same time moving to a period prior to the heavily-fetishized 1968. The book also stresses the importance of anarcho-communism in Chile in the first two decades of the 20^th century. I was particularly interested in anarchist organizers who spent most, if not all, of their lives in Santiago. They were not peripatetic radicals but sedentary ones and this in part, I argue, explains why they faced such severe persecution: they knew labor law, they knew who the industrialists and manufacturers and landlords were who did not abide by the laws or who attempted to break unions or strikes; they lived next door to the policemen who occasionally arrested them; they knew on which doors to knock and upon which neighbors to rely when it came time for organizing demonstrations or mobilizing in solidarity; and they were part of a capacious Left that tended to avoid sectarianism and to build meaningful alliances with a wide array of political and social actors. I also sought to move beyond the new orthodoxy of transnational history in order to look at the immediacy of place in relation to peoples’ politics without sacrificing the context of the international circulation of people and ideas. A preliminary version of this work resulted in an invitation to deliver one of three plenary lectures at Chile’s Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in 2014. The museum subsequently published the lecture as a small book, Martirio, memoria, historia: Sobre los subversivos y la expulsión de Casimiro Barrios, 1920 as part of their Signos series.

My work is disciplinarily eclectic and pulls from a range of geographical subfields. I have sought repeatedly in my work to find thematic, methodological, and explanatory linkages with other areas and literatures, in part in order to deparochialize area studies itself and in part to find commonalities across national, regional and continental boundaries. I read extensively outside of my discipline and subfield and my teaching and advising—especially at the graduate level—is purposefully interdisciplinary and geographically wide-ranging. These interests are expressed in my most recent book, Adventure Capitalism: A history of libertarian exit from the era of decolonization to the digital age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022; Sp. trans. forthcoming with Editorial Katakrak [Pamplona, Spain]). Imagine a capitalist paradise. An island utopia governed solely by the rules of the market and inspired by the fictions of Ayn Rand and Robinson Crusoe. Sound far-fetched? It may not be. The past half century is littered with the remains of such experiments in “libertarian exit.” Often dismissed as little more than the whacky dreams of wealthy preppers, exit strategies have been tried out from the southwest Pacific to the Caribbean, from the North Sea to the high seas, often with dire consequences for local inhabitants. Based on research in archives in the US, the UK, and Vanuatu, as well as in FBI files acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, I explore in careful detail the ideology and practice of libertarian exit and its place in the histories of contemporary capitalism, decolonization, empire, and oceans and islands. Adventure Capitalism is a global history that intersects with an array of figures: Fidel Castro and the Koch brothers, American segregationists and Melanesian socialists, Honolulu-based real estate speculators and British Special Branch spies, soldiers of fortune and English lords, Orange County engineers and Tongan navigators, CIA operatives and CBS news executives, and a new breed of techno-utopians and an old guard of Honduran coup leaders. This is not only a history of our time but, given the new iterations of privatized exit—seasteads, free private cities, and space colonization—it is also a history of our future.

Publications

Books:

Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022).

The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and poetry in interwar Chile (Oxford University Press, 2016) Published in translation as: Santiago Subversivo 1920: Anarquistas, universitarios y la muerte de José Domingo Gómez Rojas. Trans. by Pablo Abufom Silva, LOM Ediciones, Chile, 2017

Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duke University Press, 2004). Published in translation as: México Cartográfico: Una historia de límites fijos y paisajes fugitivos. Trans. by Rossana Reyes, UNAM/Inst. de Geografía/CISAN, Mexico, 2014

Martirio, memoria, historia: Sobre los subversivos y la expulsión de Casimiro Barrios, 1920 (Santiago: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Serie Signos de la Memoria, 2015)

Edited books:

No Gods No Masters No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms [co-edited with Barry Maxwell] (PM Press, 2015). German translation, edition assemblage, forthcoming.