Global Politics of Welsh Patagonia - (Race, Ethnicity, Wales and the World) by Lucy Taylor (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A necessary examination of Wales and its Patagonian settlement Y Wladfa through a decolonial lens.

Inspired by decolonial thinking, Global Politics of Welsh Patagonia challenges romantic images of Y Wladfa, the Welsh Patagonian settlement founded in 1865. Drawing on archival sources written in Spanish, Welsh, and English, it exposes the complex human relationships of this settler colony and disrupts the myth of Welsh-Indigenous friendship by foregrounding Indigenous experience and revealing underrepresented accounts in the record. A newly developed framework applies three logics--possession, racialization/barbarization, and assimilation--to make sense of settler colonialism in Patagonia and to debate Wales's complex position as both colonized and colonizer. A new analysis of contemporary cultural products (television, film, textbooks) further demonstrates how the romantic view continues to shape racial stereotypes today, concluding that such settler-origin countries as Wales are vital sites of decolonial debate.

Review Quotes

"By avoiding an already conventional polarization between celebration and condemnation, Lucy Taylor succeeds in creating a new theoretical ground for understanding Y Wladfa. Starting from a recognition of the ambiguity of the Welsh as both colonized and colonizers, she re-writes the history of the Patagonian venture, challenging the long hegemonic status of the Welsh and the Welsh language, and incorporating new voices and testimonies. Acknowledging the implication of the Welsh in global colonialism is a debt that contemporary and more politically mature Wales cannot afford to ignore. Taylor's theoretical and empirical work goes a long way towards paying that debt. As a fundamental contribution to the historiography of Y Wladfa, Taylor's book at the same time redraws the entire map on which we can locate Wales not only during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also in today's globalized world."-- "Fernando Williams, CONICET/Universidad Nacional de La Plata"

About the Author

Lucy Taylor is a senior lecturer at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University.