An excerpt from Gary Wilder’s Remembrance of Fernando Coronil, “Dear Fernando” (globalization.gc.cuny.edu/in-memoriam-fernando-coronil/)
“Before moving to New York and the Graduate Center, Fernando spent decades in Ann Arbor where he and Julie raised their daughters and taught on the faculty at University of Michigan. There they played an integral role in building the legendary Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. Moreover they helped to make Michigan the dynamic center of an insurgent movement within historical anthropology and colonial studies whose impact resonated across the human sciences. A Venezuelan citizen, Fernando was a specialist in Latin American society and politics. But at Michigan he trained multiple generations of graduate students in a wide range of fields, so many of whom are now important scholars. During these years, he also produced a body of extraordinary work that has made signal contributions to numerous fields.
“Fernando’s interventions have resonated with special force in Latin American history and politics, colonial studies and postcolonial theory, Third World state formations, historical anthropology, and Marxist geography and state theory. He was part of the innovative Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. He engaged forcefully with contemporary Venezuelan state politics and oil policies while also introducing synthetic and comparative frameworks for understanding the Latin American left today and the history of empire in the Southern Hemisphere. He argued persuasively that the field of colonial studies was too focused on Northern Europe and the modern period. He insisted that scholars of empire integrate into their analytic frameworks the history of early modern Iberian imperialism as well as the precocious experiments in decolonization and national emancipation that unfolded in nineteenth-century Latin America. His work demonstrated that political economy, historical geography, state forms, and political discourses cannot be studied in isolation from one another. He developed a path breaking approach to what we might call a political anthropology of nature (or a natural history of politics). He reminded us that social and political elites were as important to understand as the disenfranchised communities that motivated his own scholarship and political commitments. And he believed passionately that anthropology must be a heterogeneous and heterodox enterprise.”