i

NEW APPROACHES TO LATIN

AMERICAN STUDIES

Academic and research fields are moved by fads, waves, revolutionaries, paradigm
shifts, and turns.They all imply a certain degree of change that alters the conditions of
a stable system, producing an imbalance that needs to be addressed by the field itself.
New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power offers researchers
and students from different theoretical fields an essential, turn-​organized overview
of the radical transformation of epistemological and methodological assumptions
in Latin American studies from the end of the 1980s to the present. Sixteen chap-
ters written by experts in their respective fields help explain the various ways in
which to think about these shifts. Questions posited include:

• Why are turns so crucial?

• How did they alter the shape or direction of the field?
• What new questions, objects, or problems did they contribute?
• What were or are their limitations?
• What did they displace or prevent us from considering?

Among the turns included are: memory, transnational, popular culture, deco­
lonial, feminism, affect, indigenous studies, transatlantic, ethical, post/​hegemony,
deconstruction, cultural policy, subalternism, gender and sexuality, performance,
and cultural studies.

Juan Poblete is Professor of Latin/​o American Literature and Cultural Studies

at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Literatura chilena
del siglo XIX (2003); editor of Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (2003);
and coeditor of Andrés Bello (2009), Redrawing The Nation: National Identities in
Latin/o American Comics (2009), Desdén al infortunio: Sujeto, comunicación y público en
la narrativa de Pedro Lemebel (2010), Sports and Nationalism in Latin America (2015),
and Humor in Latin American Cinema (2015).
ii

New Approaches to Latin American Studies offers an invaluable collective account

of the transformations and “turns” that the field of Latin American Studies has
experienced in the past twenty-five years. Discussing significant theoretical
paradigms and concepts (from cultural studies to memory and ethics to affect and
posthegemony), the top-ranked scholars contribute, in each individual chapter, to
the construction of a comprehensive, sophisticated, and rigorous cartography of
the field of Latin American Studies.
—Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Author of Screening
Neoliberalism and Strategic Occidentalism

What is the status of theoretical thinking about Latin America? New Approaches to
Latin American Studies: Culture and Power includes thought-provoking and engaging
answers to this question offered by contemporary thinkers and critics who trace
the genealogies, challenges, and contributions of sixteen “turns” or paradigm shifts
in the critical engagement of Latin America as an object and subject of study.
—Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and
Comparative Literature, Rutgers-New Brunswick

What a wonderful set of mappings of the analytical and theoretical frameworks

that have informed Latin American Studies and of the salient texts that pioneered
these frameworks! They shed new light for seasoned scholars, not to mention for ii
those engaging this highly transdisciplinary field for the first time. Juan Poblete
has gathered the very best writers to focus on the various scholarly turns, enabling
the reader not only to understand how Latin American realities are understood at
different junctures but also how those turns, often initially formulated elsewhere,
developed and how they have been adapted. This book is a must for every student
of Latin America in the humanities and social sciences.
—George Yudice, Professor, Department of Modern
Languages and Literatures, University of Miami
 iii

NEW APPROACHES
TO LATIN AMERICAN
STUDIES
Culture and Power

ii

Edited by Juan Poblete

iv

First published 2018

by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Juan Poblete to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Poblete, Juan, editor.
Title: New approaches to Latin American studies: culture and power /​edited by Juan Poblete.
Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020212 (print) | LCCN 2017021841 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315158365
(Master) | ISBN 9781351656351 (WebPDF) | ISBN 9781351656344 (ePub) |
ISBN 9781351656337 (Mobipocket/​Kindle) | ISBN 9781138067967 (hardback: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781138067974 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315158365 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Latin America–​Study and teaching (Higher) |
Hispanic Americans–​Study and teaching (Higher)
Classification: LCC F1409.9 (ebook) | LCC F1409.9 .N49 2018 (print) |
DDC 980.007–​dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2017020212
ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​06796-​7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​06797-​4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​15836-​5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Out of House Publishing
v

Dedicated to my children, Miguel, Samson, Natalia, and Esther, who, in the

past twenty years, have shown me why it all matters.
In loving memory of my father, Juan Poblete Merino, and my brother,
Juan Claudio Poblete Garrido.
vi
vi

CONTENTS

Notes on contributors ix
Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: Twenty-​Five Years of Latin American Studies 1

Juan Poblete

1 The Memory Turn 14

Michael J. Lazzara

2 The Transnational Turn 32

Juan Poblete

3 The Popular Culture Turn 50

Pablo Alabarces
(Translated by Joanna Meadvin)

4 The Ethical Turn 65

Erin Graff Zivin

5 The Subalternist Turn 80

Gareth Williams
vi

viii Contents

6 The Cultural Studies Turn 95

Mabel Moraña
(Translated by Robert Cavooris)

7 The Decolonial Turn 111

Nelson Maldonado-​Torres
(Translated by Robert Cavooris)

8 The Indigenous Studies Turn 128

Nicole Fabricant and Nancy Postero

9 The Performance Turn 145

Angela Marino

10 Turning to Feminisms 161

Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa

11 The Turn of Deconstruction 179

Alberto Moreiras
vi
12 The Cultural Policy Turn 194
Ana Wortman
(Translated by Juan Poblete)

13 The Transatlantic Turn 206

Bécquer Seguín

14 The Gender and Sexuality Turn 223

Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk

15 The Affect Turn 237

Laura Podalsky

16 The Posthegemonic Turn 255

Abraham Acosta

Index 272
 ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Abraham Acosta is Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at

the University of Arizona. He specializes in literary and cultural analysis, focusing
on questions of subalternity, postcoloniality, and biopolitics in the Americas. His
vi
book, Thresholds of Illiteracy: Theory, Latin America, and the Crisis of Resistance (2014)
is published by Fordham University Press.

Pablo Alabarces holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Brighton

(England) and is currently Professor in Popular Culture in the Faculty of Social
Sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina), where he chaired its
doctoral program; he is also senior researcher at CONICET. He has been a visit-
ing lecturer and an invited speaker at various universities and academic institutions
in Argentina and abroad (Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Uruguay,
United States, Germany, and UK). He is considered one of the founders of the
Latin American sociology of sport. Among his published books are Entre gatos
y violadores: el rock nacional en la cultura argentina (1993); Fútbol y Patria (2002);
Hinchadas (2005), Resistencias y mediaciones: estudios sobre cultura popular (2008, edi-
tor), and Peronistas, populistas y plebeyos: crónicas de cultura y política (2011). In 2014,
he published Héroes, machos y patriotas: el fútbol entre la violencia y los medios.

Sonia E. Alvarez is Director of the Center for Latin American Studies, Caribbean
and Latina/​o Studies and Leonard J. Horwitz Professor of Latin American Politics
and Society at the University of Massachusetts-​Amherst. She is author or coed-
itor of Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transition Politics,
The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy,
Cultures of Politics/​Politics of Cultures: Re-​visioning Latin American Social Movements,
Translocalities/​Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/​a Américas,
x

x Contributors

and Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation and Protes. She has published exten-
sively, in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as English, with many essays written col-
laboratively, on topics including social movements, feminisms, NGOs, civil society,
race/​racism, transnational activism, and democratization. She is currently engaged
in research on women, gender, and sexuality in contemporary protest and, with
Barbara Cruikshank, co-​coordinates an international research-​action network on
the global politics of protest.

Robert Cavooris is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Consciousness department

at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on Marxism and
political theory in Latin America. His work has appeared in the Socialist Register,
Reclamations Journal, and Viewpoint Magazine, where he is also an editor.

Claudia de Lima Costa teaches literary theory, feminist theories, and cultural
studies at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Florianópolis, Brazil. She is
coeditor of Translocalities/​Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/​
a Américas (2014). She has also published journal articles and book chapters on
feminist translations and decolonial feminisms. Her current research focuses on
the intersections between material feminisms, decolonial feminisms, and the onto-
logical turn.
x
Nicole Fabricant received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Northwestern
University in 2009 and is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Towson
University. She is author of Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and
the Struggle over Land (2012). She is coeditor with Bret Gustafson (Washington
University) of Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Indigeneity and Territory in a Plurinational
State (2011). She has written a series of peer-​reviewed and popular articles on
the Cruceño right wing, resource extractivism, and landless movement politics in
lowland Bolivia.

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature,
and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of
Southern California. She is the author of Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture,
and Truth in the Luso-​Hispanic Atlantic (2014; winner of the 2015 Award for Best
Book, Latin American Jewish Studies Association) and The Wandering Signifier:
Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (2008), and the editor of The
Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise (2007) and The Marrano
Specter: Derrida and Hispanism (forthcoming, 2017).

Michael J. Lazzara is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and

Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Luz Arce
and Pinochet’s Chile: Testimony in the Aftermath of State Violence (2011), Luz Arce:
después del infierno (2008), Prismas de la memoria: narración y trauma en la transición
xi

Contributors xi

chilena (2007), Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (2006), Diamela
Eltit: conversación en Princeton (2002), and Los años de silencio: conversaciones con nar-
radores chilenos que escribieron bajo dictadura (2002). He is also coeditor, with Vicky
Unruh, of Telling Ruins in Latin America (2009), and of Latin American Documentary
Film in the New Millennium (2016), with María Guadalupe Arenillas.

Robert McKee Irwin is Chair of the Graduate Group in Cultural Studies and
a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of
California, Davis. He is author of Mexican Masculinities and Bandits, Captives,
Heroines and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico’s Northwest Borderlands. He is coeditor
of Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies with Mónica Szurmuk (English and
Spanish editions), Hispanisms and Homosexualities with Sylvia Molloy, Sports and
Nationalism in Latin America with Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Poblete,
and The Famous 41 with Edward McCaughan and Michelle Nasser, as well as
coauthor with Maricruz Castro Ricalde of El cine mexicano “se impone” and Global
Mexican Cinema: Its Golden Age. He also edited new editions of Eduardo Castrejón’s
Los 41: novela crítico-​social and Aurelio Pérez Peña’s Heroína. He is currently work-
ing on a digital storytelling project with recent deportees in Tijuana.

Nelson Maldonado-​Torres teaches in the Department of Latino and Caribbean

x
Studies (LCS) and is a member of the core faculty of the Comparative Literature
Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is also a research fellow in the
Department of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa and a member
of the international board of the Frantz Fanon Foundation in Paris, France. He has
been President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2008–​2013), Director
of the Center for Latino Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley
(2009–​2010), and Chair of LCS at Rutgers (2012–​2015). His publications include
Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (2008), and the collection of
essays La descolonización y el giro decolonial, compiled by the Universidad de la Tierra
(Mexico) in 2011. He has guest-​edited two issues on the decolonial turn for the
journal Transmodernity and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled
Theorizing the Decolonial Turn.

Angela Marino (Ph.D., New York University) is an assistant professor in the

Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at University of
California, Berkeley. Her research areas are performance and political theory, fiesta
and carnival of Latin America, popular performance, theater history, and Latin
American studies. Marino is coeditor of Festive Devils in the Americas in Richard
Schechner’s Enactments Series (2015) and has published in the Latin American
Theater Review (2008), Harvard Revista (2014), e-​misférica Journal of the Hemispheric
Institute of Performance and Politics (2013) and Cultural Anthropology (2014). Her
book, Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution is forthcoming with
Northwestern University Press in 2018.
xi

xii Contributors

Joanna Meadvin holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California,

Santa Cruz. She has articles forthcoming in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary
History, The Jewish Quarterly Review and the MLA publication, Teaching American
Jewish Literature.

Mabel Moraña (Ph.D., Universidad de Minnesota) is the William H. Gass

Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, where she
directs the Latin American studies program. She served for ten years as Director of
Publications of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. She has
been a visiting professor at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Harvard University,
UNAM, the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, and the University
of California at Santa Cruz. She has published more than forty books, among
them Arguedas: Vargas Llosa—​Dilemas y ensamblajes (2013) (Katherine Kovacs Prize
from the MLA and Premio Iberoamericano from the Latin American Studies
Association), Crítica impura (2004), La Escritura del límite (2010), Inscripciones críti-
cas: Ensayos de crítica cultural (2014), Bourdieu en la periferia (2014), and Churata
postcolonial (2015).

Alberto Moreiras is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M. He has pub-

lished over 125 essays, and his books include Interpretación y diferencia (1992), Tercer
espacio: Duelo y literatura en América Latina (1999), The Exhaustion of Difference: The xi
Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (2001), Pensar en post/​dictadura (2001),
coedited with Nelly Richard, Línea de sombra: El no sujeto de lo político (2007), and
Marranismo e inscripción (2016). He has also edited eleven monographic collec-
tions of essays in journals or multivolume works. His work in progress includes
“Piel de lobo: Ensayos de posthegemonía e infrapolítica,” “Approssimazione
all’infrapolitica,” and “Manual de infrapolítica.”

Juan Poblete is Professor of Latin/​o American Literature and Cultural Studies at

the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author of Literatura chilena del siglo
XIX: entre públicos lectores y figuras autoriales (2003); editor of Critical Latin American
and Latino Studies (2003) and New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and
Power (2017); and coeditor of Andrés Bello (with Beatriz Gonzalez-​Stephan, 2009),
Redrawing the Nation: National Identities in Latin/​o American Comics (with Héctor
Fernández L’Hoeste, 2009), Desdén al infortunio: Sujeto, comunicación y público en la
narrativa de Pedro Lemebel (with Fernando Blanco, Cuarto Propio, 2010), Sports and
Nationalism in Latin America (with Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Robert McKee
Irwin, 2015), and Humor in Latin American Cinema (with Juana Suárez, 2015).

Laura Podalsky teaches Latin American film and cultural studies at the Ohio State
University. Her research and teaching interests are in Latin American film, cultural
studies, urban studies, and youth studies. She is the coeditor of the forthcom-
ing Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema (along with Marvin D’Lugo
 xi

Contributors xiii

and Ana López) as well as the author of The Politics of Affect and Emotion in the
Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico (2011) and
Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955–​
1973 (2004) on Argentine film and urban culture. She serves as an editor on the
peer-​reviewed journal Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas and is cur-
rently working on a book manuscript comparing youth, film, and youth cultures
in Argentina and Mexico.

Nancy Postero received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of

California, Berkeley in 2001, and is Associate Professor of Anthropology at
the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of The Indigenous
State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia (2017) and Now We
Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Post-​multicultural Bolivia (2007). She has edited
several collections and special journal issues including: The Struggle for Indigenous
Rights in Latin America (with Leon Zamosc, 2003); Living in Actually Existing
Democracies (with Phil Oxhorn, 2010); Neoliberalism, Interrupted, Social Change
and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America (with Mark Goodale,
2013); The Politics of Indigeneity in Bolivia, Past and Present (2013); and Performance
Politics: Spectacular Productions of Culture in Contemporary Latin America, (with
Nicole Fabricant, 2014).
xi
Bécquer Seguín is Assistant Professor of Iberian Studies at Johns Hopkins
University. Previously, he taught at Lawrence University and was an Andrew W.
Mellon and John E. Sawyer seminar fellow at Cornell University. His work on
Latin American and Iberian culture has appeared in Hispanic Review, Hispania,
diacritics, ARTMargins, Radical Philosophy, and Postmodern Culture, as well as in sev-
eral edited volumes. In addition to his academic work, he regularly writes for The
Nation, Dissent, and other magazines.

Mónica Szurmuk is a researcher at the National Council for Science and

Techonology (CONICET) of Argentina. She has published widely on gender,
cultural studies, and comparative literature including Women in Argentina, Early
Travel Narratives (2000), Mujeres en viaje (2000), the edited volumes Memoria y
Ciudadanía (2008), Sitios de la Memoria: México Post ’68 (2014) and the Diccionario
de estudios culturales latinoamericanos (2009, published in English as the Dictionary of
Latin American Cultural Studies). Her most recent books are The Cambridge History
of Latin American Women’s Literature (2015) and a forthcoming biography of Alberto
Gerchunoff.

Gareth Williams is a professor of romance languages and literatures at the University

of Michigan. He is the author of The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and
Subalternity in Latin America (2002), The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police, and
xvi

xiv Contributors

Democracy (2011), and numerous articles examining the relations among cultural
history, literature, and political philosophy. He is the co-​translator to English of
Roberto Espósito’s The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil? (2017),
a coeditor of the University of Texas Series Border Hispanisms, and general editor
of the online journal Política común (https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​p/​pc/​).

Ana Wortman (Ph.D. in social sciences, University of Buenos Aires) is a researcher

at the Instituto Gino Germani de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, University of
Buenos Aires, and a professor of contemporary sociology. She coordinates the
Grupos de Trabajo de FOMERCO (Foro de Universidades del Mercosur), along
with Dr. Filipe Reis and the Grupo de Trabajo Arte y Cultura del Mercosur.
She has studied urban middle classes, focusing on consumption, cultural policies,
cinema, and, more recently, independent or self-​managed cultural efforts. Among
her books are Construcción imaginaria de la desigualdad social (2007), Entre la política
y la gestión de la cultura y el arte. Nuevos actores en la Argentina contemporánea (2009),
and Mi Buenos Aires querido. Entre la democratización culturalcultural y la desigualdad
educativa (2012).

xvi
 xv
newgenprepdf

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the work, friendship, and patience of all the con-
tributors in this volume. Important too was the support of my colleagues in the
Culture, Power, and Politics section of the Latin American Studies Association.
xvi
I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Literature and Latin American
and Latino Studies departments at the University of California at Santa Cruz, for
two decades of engagement in thinking transnationally. Finally, thanks are due to
Natalja Mortensen and Maria Landschoot, editors extraordinaire, and the rest of
the production team at Routledge.
xvi
1

INTRODUCTION
Twenty-​Five Years of Latin American Studies

Juan Poblete

How, when, and to what effect did we come to see affect as a form of social
dynamic and power different and distinct from reason and ideology? When was
hegemony, as the production of common sense through intellectual means, dis-
placed by a posthegemonic account of nonideological control in immanent pro-
cesses of daily life? When and why was the long-​lasting man of reason, modernity,
and humanism critiqued from the viewpoint of his exclusions; when was his foun-
dational social contract perceived as the basis of oppression? When and how was
modernity seen as having less to do with the eighteenth century of rationalism,
secularization, and science-​based progress and more with colonial religious zeal and
racist articulations of labor and subjecthood? When was Latin America extended to
the north of the continent and beyond? When, why, and how were its nation-​states
seen as not fully capable of accounting for the diverse social, cultural, economic,
and political processes that multiplied difference within and beyond their borders?
This volume was born out of an interest to respond to these and many other
questions that point to a radical transformation of the issues, scales, scopes, episte-
mological, and methodological assumptions of Latin American studies in the past
quarter century, from the end of the 1980s to the current moment. More specifi-
cally, the volume wants to organize the answers to these questions around the issue
of turns in disciplinary and interdisciplinary spaces (as in linguistic or cultural turn
as I show below).
In 2013, I became the co-​chair of the Culture, Power, and Politics section of
the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). One of the immediate responsi-
bilities of the job was to organize the three congress panels our section gets, based
on the number of members associated with the section, in order to showcase
research in the area. My idea for the section’s three slots was to organize three
2

2 Juan Poblete

workshops exploring the past twenty-​five years of intellectual production around

the concept of “turn.” My hope was that this would help us first map, assess, and
question the different paradigms that have affected the field in that period; second,
it might also suggest some paths for the future; and finally, it might result in an
interesting volume if the workshops were successful. Jon Beasley-​Murray, my then
section co-​chair, enthusiastically embraced the plan. It resulted in three workshops
that took place at the XXXII International Congress of LASA during May 21–​24,
2014, in Chicago.
The workshops were very successful (at least by the field’s own modest stan-
dards) and reinforced the idea that the project deserved to become a volume.
The book project, as usual, has seen some departures—​including that of Beasley-​
Murray and other colleagues—​and some significant expansions. The final slate
went from the original eleven participants to the current sixteen chapters consti-
tuting this volume.
The invitation to contributors to the book project suggested that there were
various ways in which to think about such a turn-​based cartography of the field
of Latin American studies relevant to the Culture, Power, and Politics section of
LASA. For instance, one might ask: What are the four or five key texts (or institu-
tions or events) in a given “turn”? Why are they so crucial? How did they alter the
shape or direction of the field? What new questions, objects or problems did they
contribute? What were or are their limitations? What did they displace or prevent 2
us from considering?
While the volume aimed to provide a broad assessment and survey, it was not
to be neutral or free of controversy, critique, or even polemic. Contributors were
selected because I valued both the originality of their thought and their expertise
in the field. I asked them to incorporate both of these elements in their chapter.
An ideal chapter, I suggested, would include a review of the literature defining
and advancing key aspects of a given “turn,” and their effects on the broader field,
as well as the author’s own take on the achievements, limitations, and ongoing
potential of the turn in question.

A Word or Two on the Turn to Turns

There are a number of related terms that could help explain what is specific to a
given theoretical turn. Academic and research fields are said to be moved by fads or
fashions, waves, revolutionaries, paradigm shifts, and turns. They all imply a certain
degree of change that alters the conditions of a stable system, producing an imbal-
ance that needs somehow to be addressed by the field itself. What may be at stake
in the distinctions is the degree and scope of the change thus brought, its capacity
to affect different dureés or time-​scales within that system or field. A fad may be
said to be a temporary and, by definition, always cyclical distraction in the form of
a hot author or book that for a year or two, coinciding with the moment of its first
publication or appearance, seems to become mandatory, at least as a reference, for
3

Introduction 3

participants within a field of knowledge or across fields. Thomas Piketty’s (2014)

Capital in the Twenty-​First Century could be said to have been such a book and author
in the very recent past. As proven by Piketty’s case, a fad does not necessarily involve
a lightweight author or book and may be, instead, the most visible part of a larger
wave of multidisciplinary and disciplinary studies, in this case, on inequality. Such
waves—​and here one could think of Joseph Stiglitz’s (2013) The Price of Inequality,
Robert Reich’s (2015) Saving Capitalism for the Many Not the Few, Branko Milanovic’s
(2016) Global Inequality, Anthony Atkinson’s (2015) Inequality: What Can Be Done,
CEPAL’s Inestabilidad y desigualdad: la vulnerabilidad del crecimiento en América Latina y el
Caribe (2015), etc.—​may be responding to more substantial social processes of change
whose internal dynamics and conflicts may demand a sustained effort at understand-
ing, manifested in a research series. The scale of the transformation determining the
wave can be said to be as big and long durée as the crisis of capitalism gone global,
medium term as in the questioning of neoliberal hegemony in the world, or relatively
shorter term as in political responses to the 2008 financial crisis.
Revolutionaries may be said to be, following Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts on the
origin and dynamics of intellectual fields, those who can only or more effectively
accumulate symbolic capital within the system by questioning its doxa, i.e. by
questioning what passes for accepted truths and dominant forms, arguments, and
validations within that field. The value of such a gesture can be either reactionary
2
or progressive, that is to say, it may attempt to return the field to a previous state of
stasis or introduce radically new propositions. An interesting case here is the col-
lection Theory’s Empire (2005). Coeditors Daphne Patai and Wilfrido Corral stated
right at the beginning of their introduction:

This anthology appears at a moment when not only have theoretical discus-
sions of literature become stagnant but articles and books are published in
defense of the conceptual stalemates that have led to this very immobility.
In the early years of the new millennium, theorists are busily writing about
the impasse in which theory finds itself.
(1)

Patai and Corral are part of a group of scholars in different fields who
reacted to what they considered Theory’s empire. The capitalization of the
noun alluded to a certain hegemony of French poststructuralism, the reactions
against which manifested in fields such as film studies (David Bordwell and
Noel Carroll’s 1996 Post-​theory: Reconstructing Film Studies) or philosophy (Paul
Boghossian’s 2007 Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism). The
arc they responded to is neatly summarized in the title of historian Georg
Iggers’ Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the
Postmodern Challenge (2005).
Theory, as such, may be have been a good example of what Thomas Kuhn
famously called a paradigm shift. Kuhn began distinguishing between normal
4

4 Juan Poblete

science, crisis, and extraordinary science, the latter being the result of cumulative
pressure produced by inexplicable anomalies that eventually force a revolution
and then a new phase of normal science. The activities of these periods of nor-
mal science are determined by paradigms, i.e. ensembles of shared understand-
ings of concepts, problems, and exemplary solutions to those problems and, thus,
models for new problems. The paradigm or disciplinary matrix provided a lan-
guage, a mode of reasoning and a modus operandi. But when it entered into crisis
due to the accumulation of persistent and important anomalies, the questions
became: What could remain in place? Was there a substantial enough continuity
of the basic disciplinary enterprise in question? Kuhn’s answer was that para-
digms are not just incompatible but also incommensurable. The world observed
by science, but also the world of the scientist, look and feel different from within
the new paradigm.
The cultural or linguistic turn, what eventually became Theory, with its
emphasis on historically produced languages of the social—​based on the artic-
ulation of both arbitrary and historically changing codifications, themselves
depending on sets of differences that established negative or relational rather
than positive or essential identities—​was a radical reconceptualization of the
ontology of the social. It was, we could say, a paradigmatic change or an episte-
mological break affecting the central definitions of what Man was, how human-
ism was thus defined, and what kinds of exclusions or plays of differences were 4
central to his identity. What are now called new materialisms and the anthro-
pocene may well be thought of as paradigmatic shifts in the general orientation
of, at least, the social and human sciences. They would include new materialism,
post-​human, and nonrepresentational turns that try to go beyond the limitations
(human and semiotic) of the previous Theory paradigm; or queer and disability
studies turns that operate past the normative models of humanism, history, and
society.
Turns, on the other hand, may then be area-​or issue-​specific reactions to
Theory’s underexamined and still humanist assumptions or, more radically, more
focused substitutes to Theory’s all-​encompassing ambitions. Thus, when Patricia
Ticineto Clough explains in the introduction to her coedited collection The
Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social the import of the affective turn, she states:

The affective turn, therefore, expresses a new configuration of bodies, tech-

nology, and matter instigating a shift in thought in critical theory. It is this
shift that the following essays engage. Taken together, the essays explore the
movement in critical theory from a psychoanalytically informed criticism
of subject identity, representation, and trauma to an engagement with infor-
mation and affect; from privileging the organic body to exploring non-​
organic life; from the presumption of equilibrium-​seeking closed systems to
engaging the complexity of open systems under far-​from-​equilibrium con-
ditions of metastability; from focusing on an economy of production and
5

Introduction 5

consumption to focusing on the economic circulation of pre-​individual

capacities or affects in the domain of biopolitical control. Taken together
the essays suggest that attending to the affective turn is necessary to theo-
rizing the social.
(2)

Thus conceived, the affective turn would seem to straddle the distinction
between a broad paradigm shift (of which it would seem to be a part) and a more
focused turn in the area of emotions and affects. As part of a paradigm shift, the
affective would participate in the displacement of the still-​human and subject-​
centered nature of Theory, despite the fact that Theory had emerged precisely as
a radical critique of what it conceived as the failures or limitations of the white
male subject of humanism. From the viewpoint of actor-​network theory, informa-
tion and systems theory, or Deleuzian philosophy,Theory seemed still too focused
on the singularity of the subject and the human, paying little attention to their
interactions and assemblages with technology, the nonorganic, and the nonhu-
man. As a turn, on the other hand, the affective could more specifically refer to
the multidisciplinary expansion of research at the intersection of the body–​mind
divide. In both cases a new form of materialism and posthumanism would seem
to be emerging.
4
In Re-​framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, Fluck et al. (2011)
assert: “ ‘The Transnational Turn’ in American studies has effected the most
significant re-​imagining of the field of American Studies since its inception”
(1). In introducing the contributions in their volume Beyond the Cultural
Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, Bonnell and Hunt (1999)
state that they all share the following: “(1) questions about the status of ‘the
social’; (2) concerns raised by the depiction of culture as symbolic, linguistic and
representational system; (3) seemingly inevitable methodological and epistemo-
logical dilemmas; (4) a resulting or perhaps precipitating collapse of explanatory
paradigms; and (5) a consequent realignment of the disciplines (including the rise
of cultural studies)” (6). Finally, striking a useful cautionary note, as historians
tend to do, but at the same time embracing the need to think through “turns,”
the editors of a 2012 American Historical Review forum on “Historiographic Turns
in Critical Perspective” declare:

While the contributors of this forum present different views on this intel-
lectual trajectory, for the most part they refuse to see “turning” as simple
or unproblematic […] Rather, they both analyze the turns and historicize
them—​subjecting them to a searching and wide ranging critique that at
once reminds us of what can be gained by such historiographical retrospec-
tion and also what might be lost in thinking of them in both definitive and
categorical terms.
(698)
6

6 Juan Poblete

In Latin American studies, as the essays in this collection seek to explain and
explore, there have been in the past twenty-​five years a number of influential
turns, many of which would seem to be part of a similar paradigmatic shift as that
which confronted Theory, transnationalism, or the cultural and linguistic turns.
Between the mid 1970s and the late 1980s, i.e. between the arrival of military
dictatorships and authoritarian governments in the continent, on the one hand,
and the end of the Cold War, on the other, the paradigm of dependency theory
and Third World inflected Marxisms, which had significantly influenced both the
social sciences and the humanities, began to yield to theories of world systems,
hybridization, financial restructuring, and migration flows, softening or blurring
the distance between First and Third Worlds and displacing nation-​centered meth-
odologies. Eventually they became first, the theorizing of postmodernity, a new
epoch in Western history, and then, globalization theory and the analysis of culture
and society under planetary neoliberalism. These, respectively, time-​and space-​
based new theories, pushed Latin Americanist humanities and social sciences into
deconstructing and overcoming the limitations of the nation-​state as a naturalized
container for the perfect coincidence of territory, culture, and society. In Latin
American studies this work was developed during the 1990s by, among others,
cultural-​studies scholars under the influence of their historian peers from India.
One of the clearest forms of this program and critique can be found in the Latin
American Subaltern Studies Group Manifesto. It highlights the need to distin- 6
guish among the state (historically at the service of the economic interests of
the national bourgeoisie), the nation (which the manifesto sees, in its historically
dominant discursive shape, as the almost exclusive result of the labor of the state
and its institutions, themselves dominated by the white bourgeoisie), and the peo-
ple, defined as the ensemble of subaltern populations whose participation, ways of
cultural, social and political organization, must be visibilized.
The nation-​state and the social sciences that naturalized some of its key cat-
egories, questions, ways of collecting data, methodologies, etc., was one of the
central elements against which a significant amount of what has been and is new
in the past twenty-​five years of Latin American studies was reacting. However, the
revalorization of civil society, democratic processes, cultural practices within the
nation and in the face of de-​nationalizing dynamics of transnational capital and
new-​media omnipresence, have also been important factors in such developments
in the past quarter century.
This radical rethinking of the temporal and spatial coordinates of nation-​state-
centered modernity led to intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches such as
feminism, cultural studies, transnationalism, and complexity-​based theories, which
questioned the previous epistemological hegemony of more disciplinary pure his-
tory, sociology, philosophy, and formalism. Theory, too, had its regional impact
through the diffusion in Latin America of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,
Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, French feminists, and others.Theory, cultural studies,
feminisms, intersectionality were also other names for a turn away or a distancing
7

Introduction 7

from the hegemony of mainstream sociology and economics, with the accompa-
nying reductions of the social to all-​encompassing and all-​explaining categories,
such as class and rational choice individual in the pursuit of maximizing individ-
ual gains. Culture and power were intertwined in more complex, interesting, and
promising ways that the many turns here included set out to investigate.
While a few of the contributors to this volume are Latin American scholars
residing in Latin America, most of them are US-​based Latin Americanists, and this
book reflects, by design, that perspective. I am beginning work on a companion
volume that will invite Latin American scholars in the south of the continent to
first determine which could be the turns that have actually shaped the conversa-
tions in that part of the region and then produce their own synthesis of why and
to what effect they matter for the subcontinent and beyond.

An Overview of This Volume

In “The Memory Turn,” Michael J. Lazzara explores memory as a concept around
which activists and academics have sought to denounce human-​r ights violations
and articulate the challenges of consolidating democracy in the aftermath of polit-
ical violence. Since the 1980s, it has become firmly entrenched in the disciplines
of the humanities and social sciences and, little by little, has gained institutional
6
presence.
Lazzara’s chapter offers key signposts and questions to invite a conversation
about the “memory turn”: the specific trajectories memory studies have taken
in Latin America, the challenges this area of inquiry presents, its possible futures,
and its pedagogical potential. He argues that while memory continues to har-
bor significant pedagogical and political potential for Latin American area studies,
scholars of memory studies must also remain on guard against an exhaustion of the
topic, always encouraging renewal and new theorizations germane to the scenarios
and cases that urgently need to be studied. Of equal importance, memory studies
must insist on the repoliticizing—​or continued politicizing—​of an interdisciplin-
ary space of inquiry that was born out of political struggle and that, through sub-
sequent institutionalization or inertia, risks losing touch with its activist origins
and mission. He suggests that despite certain limitations memory studies can still
be a powerful tool for facilitating conversations across disciplinary spaces within
the academy, as well as for building bridges between academic and extra-​academic
spaces, or between politically engaged and committed academics working in the
global north and global south.
In my chapter, “The Transnational Turn,” I state that transnationalism and
more generally transnational studies emerged in the early 1990s as a methodo-
logical, epistemological, and political response to the challenge of thinking the
brave new world that globalization had produced. This included the acceleration
of flows and time and the reconfiguration of space, with the concomitant rele-
vance of new scales and scopes but also the differential rates of the circulation of
8

8 Juan Poblete

goods and finance, on one end, and people, on the other. I study the transnational
turn through a focus on three texts that can be unquestionably called pioneering
within the field. They are: one justly famous article, “Mexican Migration and the
Social Space of Postmodernism” (1991) by Roger Rouse; and two books, Nations
Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-​
States by Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1994);
and The Transnational Villagers by Peggy Levitt (2001). I then assess the promises of
and critiques to transnationalism and conclude with some comments on current
neonationalists’ US-​based responses to it.
In “The Popular Culture Turn,” Pablo Alabarces states that the study of Latin
American popular cultures was marginalized during the neoliberal decade result-
ing in the expulsion of popular cultures from research agendas. They were dis-
solved instead into analytical categories that claimed to be more appropriate and
suitable during times of hybridization, “des-​colección” (de-​collection) and deter-
ritorialization, each of which gained popularity in the publishing and academic
markets.Twenty years later, proposes Alabarces, we are witnessing both a reopening
of those agendas and the reappearance of displaced categories and subjects. The
new political success of national-​popular narratives in the continent, for example,
speaks more of continuities and, again, returns, rather than dissolutions and clo-
sures. Popular cultures, which disappeared from the research agenda in the 1990s,
reappear in the new century because they never truly went away. Dressed in new 8
robes and including innovative practices and unstable and mobile texts, popular
cultures continue to function as signposts, revealing the degree to which the pos-
sibility of a democratic culture is negotiated, discussed, and disputed.
Erin Graff Zivin’s “The Ethical Turn” asks when did we, as a field, turn “toward”
ethics—​if we can say that we did—​and from what did we turn away? The so-​
called “turn to ethics” has itself become a trope, a turning, and a symptomatic trope
at that. It is a trope that reveals a profound anxiety with what has been a perva-
sive disciplinary obsession over the relation between politics and literature, and
between politics and intellectual and artistic production more broadly. The turn
to ethics tends to presuppose a turn away from politics or a substitution of one for
the other. The chapter focuses upon four types of readings of ethical philosophy
in Latin American and Latin Americanist thought: theological, literary, political, and
deconstructive. The first section evaluates Enrique Dussel’s assimilation of the work
of Emmanuel Levinas into his own philosophy of Latin American liberation. The
second section juxtaposes Dussel’s Levinasianism with Doris Sommer’s ostensibly
very different Levinasian approach to literary studies. The third section unpacks
the debate over the relation between ethics and political militancy that surfaces
in Argentina following the publication of philosopher Oscar del Barco’s letter
“No Matarás.” The final section considers several recent, more deconstructive
approaches to ethics in Latin American studies that refuse the logic of recognition-​
identification on which one paradigm of substitution turns, and which provide
new, unfamiliar concepts of ethics, politics, and the relation between the two.
9

Introduction 9

Gareth Williams’ “The Subalternist Turn” discusses the contributions and limi-
tations of the three main strands of thought that came out of the Latin American
subaltern studies configuration of the 1990s, taking into consideration the pos-
sibility of their relation, or lack of a relation, to an actual “turn” in the field.
The three main strands in question are: populism/​“post-​subalternism,” so-​called
“decolonial theory,” and the posthegemonic turn. Examining the three strands in
terms of their genealogies and internal logics, the essay concludes that the only
actual turn in the field is provided by the infrapolitical turn toward posthegemonic
democracy.This is the case because the two other configurations offer identitarian
grounds for thought that do nothing to dislodge the received anthro-​logocentrism
of the field in its criollista-​indigenista vein.
Under the title of “The Cultural Studies Turn” Mabel Moraña approaches
the social and ideological contexts that surrounded the emergence of cultural
studies and the circumstances of its adoption and transformation in American
and Latin American academic and intellectual environments. The chapter elabo-
rates on factors affecting knowledge production and models of representation in
Western cultures in the last decades of the twentieth century, thus precipitating the
restructuring of the humanities and the social sciences. These changes had direct
impact on the reconfiguration of Latin Americanism as a transnationalized field.
The chapter points to the contributions and shortcomings of cultural studies as
8
a new avenue for the comprehension of social change and for the interpretation
of new forms of subjectivity, collective agency, and social dynamics, such as those
related to the practices of migration, interculturalism, infrapolitics, and the like. It
also elaborates on the changing role of intellectuals and cultural institutions in a
world impacted by the new horizons opened by digital technologies.
Nelson Maldonado-​Torres’ chapter, “The Decolonial Turn” focuses on dis-
courses about coloniality and decoloniality. The concept of decolonial turn calls
attention to this work, but it can also be understood as a shift in attitude and as
a project that is grounded on various waves of decolonization efforts in Latin
America and other colonized settings. The decolonial turn also poses colonialism
as a fundamental problem that is intrinsic to Western modernity, and the colonized
as a potential agent of radical epistemic, symbolic, and material change. The essay
offers a definition of decolonial turn, an account of the origin of the concept, and
examples of twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century expressions, with emphasis in the
Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.
The past thirty years in Latin America, state Nicole Fabricant and Nancy
Postero in their “The Indigenous Studies Turn” chapter, have been marked by
the struggles of indigenous peoples, who have emerged as important political
actors, calling attention to the territorial, political, and economic exclusions that
continue to mark their everyday lives. Claiming citizenship and human rights,
indigenous peoples have demanded both self-​determination and political partici-
pation, calling for the decolonization of their nation-​states and an end to systemic
racism. Scholars have increasingly argued that who counts as indigenous is a fluid
10

10 Juan Poblete

political question, emerging from struggles over particular social, cultural, envi-
ronmental, and economic matters during particular moments. Indigeneity can
function as a powerful political force, utilized by indigenous groups as emancipa-
tory politics or by others seeking to appropriate it for their own interests to enact
forms of governance. The chapter focuses on four themes that are animating
scholarship today: (1) Since the 1990s, neoliberal states have instituted forms of
state recognition called “neoliberal multiculturalism.” Scholars have analyzed the
political openings this form of identity politics provided as well as the dangers
and limitations it entails. (2) As extractivist development continues across the
region, scholars have studied indigenous relations to natural resources, illustrating
the tensions indigenous communities face: resisting development or participating
in the global capitalist market knowing it may cause negative ecological, territo-
rial consequences for their lands and peoples. (3) The struggles of indigenous
women have been a key site for rethinking the intersectional relations between
gender, race, and class. (4) Finally, scholars in the ontological turn have drawn
attention to the radically different worlds indigenous people inhabit, calling us to
decolonize Western scholarship by attending to indigenous ontological relations
with nonhuman beings.
“The Performance Turn,” says Angela Marino in her chapter here, refers to
changing trends moving from text-​based to embodied forms of knowledge and
transmission. The chapter reviews three central debates in the fields of Latin 10
American studies and performance to suggest that the performance turn calls
for a shift in methodology to reflect the complexity of performativity and per-
formed behaviors. The debates discussed in the chapter are: (1) ephemerality and
evidence; (2) performativity and the performatic; and (3) approaches to aesthetics
and power. Through these debates, new models of approaching cultural memory
have emerged. In particular, combining praxis and scholarship sheds light on issues
of spatial and temporal difference, historically and currently, as well as questions
of spectatorship and reception. The effect of the performance turn has thus led to
new directions in methods, a broadening of objects of study to relationships and
process, and a renewed emphasis on transdisciplinarity in the arts and sciences.
In “Turning to Feminisms,” Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa sus-
tain that the “mainstream” of Latin American studies of culture, power, and politics
did not take (and perhaps still has not taken) feminist insights to heart and that
prevailing strands of early gender studies in the region did not make culture a cen-
tral axis of analysis either. Though feminist interventions arguably had a marked
impact on cultural studies in the Anglo-​American academy, Alvarez and Costa
argue that influence was marginal, at best, in scholarly circles in the South of the
Americas, despite the clear political significance of culture for early second-​wave
feminist activism in the region. Zeroing in on Brazil, they review several factors
that help explain why hegemonic feminist scholarship tended to neglect culture
and, especially, cultural politics. They further maintain that, by the early 1990s,
activist cultural interventions had been rendered less visible with the ascent of
 1

Introduction 11

more institutionalized, professionalized, and policy-​focused feminist politics. The

chapter ends with a consideration of how and why cultural politics have again
been foregrounded since the 2000s by multiple expressions of subaltern feminist
activism in Brazil.
Alberto Moreiras’s chapter, “The Turn of Deconstruction,” reflects on the dif-
ference between the import of deconstruction in the 1990s and its present import
for Latin American studies. It does so through a critique of Jacques Derrida’s
notion of a double register in political thought as offered in Specters of Marx. For
Moreiras, historical conditions have changed to such an extent that the Derridean
idea of a first register of thought is no longer functional, which also means, the
second register, as based on the first, fails as well. The conditions for deconstruc-
tion have therefore shifted, which leads toward the necessary affirmation of a
second deconstructive turn in the field, or a second stage in critical deconstruc-
tion. The essay then proceeds to discuss the first deconstructive turn, the moment
of incorporation of deconstruction into Latin American studies in the 1990s,
through a general revision of the irruption of so-​called critical theory in the US
university during the 1980s and its belated assimilation in Hispanist fields. The
third and last section of the essay attempts to formulate a new role for deconstruc-
tion in its second stage.
In “The Cultural Policy Turn,” Ana Wortman studies the close relation dur-
10
ing this period between concepts of culture and the state in Latin America and
the proper forms of action or intervention of the state in the realm of culture.
Culture itself, and not just the idea of the democratic state, has been changing in
the past few decades. This chapter explores the most important authors leading
this rethinking in Latin American cultural studies on cultural policy, on the one
hand, and a few instructive examples of concrete cultural policies in Argentina and
Brazil, on the other.
In the “The Transatlantic Turn,” Bécquer Seguín focuses on the two domi-
nant theoretical strands of transatlantic studies.Transatlantic studies, in the broadest
sense, attempted to break with the national paradigm of literary and cultural stud-
ies. Spurred by colonialist scholars such as Rolena Adorno and Walter Mignolo,
transatlantic studies replaced the emphasis on national boundaries with an expan-
sive account of transnational circuits of information, exchange, and political
solidarity across the continents. Today, scholars of modern Latin America, such
as Tania Gentic and Alejandro Mejías-​López, have used transatlantic studies to
point out, for example, the role the extensive circulation of newspapers in late-​
nineteenth-​century Latin America had in developing regional literary movements.
Other scholars, such as Rachel Price and Ignacio Infante, have called on transat-
lantic studies as a comparative method in order to study authors from Spain and
Latin America alongside one another. Despite the proliferation of transatlantic
studies, however, the field still appears to be dominated by two distinct theoretical
approaches: subalternism, which stems from the work of Mignolo, and textualism,
which derives from the work of Julio Ortega. This chapter attempts to explain
12

12 Juan Poblete

why this is and what theoretical impasses these two competing paradigms present
for future work in transatlantic studies.
In “The Gender and Sexuality Turn,” Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica
Szurmuk posit that new theoretical approaches to gender and sexuality, a grow-
ing participation of women and an increasing visibility of sexual diversity in the
academy, and the changing attitudes of a new generation led to a major shift in
the treatment of gender and sexuality both in the Latin American academy and
among Latin Americanists in the global north. The essay lays out how this shift
played out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, focusing on the work of several key
figures including Sylvia Molloy, Marta Lamas, Carlos Monsiváis, Nelly Richard,
and Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda. It also looks at more recent decolonial trends
that in the United States bring theories of intersectionality and especially race to
bear on theories of gender and sexuality under the rubric of what has come to be
known as queer of color critique, and in Latin America articulate autochthonous
perspectives on these issues through the development of “la teoría cuir” or theo-
ries of sexual dissidence. In both cases, contemporary theorists build on the think-
ing of pioneering (pre-​Judith Butler) scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa (in the
United States) and Néstor Perlongher (in Latin America) to address problematics
of race, transgenderism, rights, and bio-​and necro-​politics in a changing land-
scape in which many questions that were unthinkable in the 1980s (e.g., same-​sex
marriage) have become mainstream even as state violence has intensified against 12
disenfranchised women and sexually diverse populations.
Laura Podalsky’s “The Affect Turn” charts the growing acknowledgment of the
role of emotion, affect, and/​or sensorial flows as generative forces in larger socio-
cultural and political processes within particular disciplines—​most notably, literary
studies, cultural criticism, film studies, and, to a much lesser degree, anthropology
and history.The first section examines the motivating factors that have encouraged
scholars in those fields to “think affect” or to perceive in the cluster of terms asso-
ciated with that concept a means by which to illuminate Latin American sociocul-
tural dynamics. These include the interest in examining the psychosocial afterlife
of repressive dictatorships and armed conflicts; the role of affective dynamics in
uniting particular collectives from queer communities to social movements; and
the place of emotional regimes in bolstering a given sociopolitical order, socioeco-
nomic program or state-​formation from the colonial period to the present.
The essay further argues that this growing body of scholarship betrays an
underlying concern about the social function of emotion that emerges, in part,
from the valorization of “critical distance” and the suspicion about the sensorial
as hallmarks of scholarly inquiry in ways seldom acknowledged by the schol-
ars themselves. The essay concludes with a consideration of potentially fruitful
avenues for future research.
In his chapter, Abraham Acosta provides a reading of what has been called
the “posthegemonic turn” in Latin America. It develops a conceptualization of
posthegemony as, on the one hand, the generalized political condition brought
 13

Introduction 13

about by the social and economic effects of neoliberalism’s global reign and the
subsequent displacement of the nation-​state as arbiter of sovereign control and
governmentality. On the other, it reads posthegemony in light of, and as a direct
corollary to, the simultaneous emergence of affect theory in the US academy.
Drawing from theorists such as Gramsci, Hardt and Negri, Carlo Galli and Brian
Massumi, and reading from recent insights into the posthegemonic by Gareth
Williams, Jon Beasley-​Murray, and Alberto Moreiras, this essay explores the politi-
cal and epistemological implications of posthegemony in Latin America and else-
where as well as what the concept may mean in future critical discussions on
politics and culture.

References
AHR. “AHR Forum: Historiographic ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective.” American Historical
Review, vol. 117, no. 3, 2012, pp. 671–​813.
Atkinson, Anthony. Inequality:What Can Be Done. Harvard UP, 2015.
Basch, Nina, Glick Schiller and Cristina Blanc. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects,
Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Gordon & Breach, 1994.
Boghossian, Paul. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Oxford UP, 2007.
Bonnell,Victoria E. and Lynn Hunt, editors. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the
Study of Society and Culture. UC Press, 1999.
Bordwell, David and Noel Carroll, editors. Post-​theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. U of
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Wisconsin P, 1996.
CEPAL. Inestabilidad y desigualdad: la vulnerabilidad del crecimiento en América Latina y el Caribe.
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Fluck,Winfried, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, editors. Re-​framing the Transnational
Turn in American Studies. Dartmouth College Press, 2011.
Iggers, Georg. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the
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Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, fiftieth anniversary edition. Chicago
UP, 2012.
Milanovic, Branko. Global Inequality. Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2016.
Patai, Daphne and Wilfrido Corral, editors. Theory’s Empire. Columbia UP, 2005.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-​First Century. Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2014.
Reich, Robert. Saving Capitalism for the Many Not the Few. Knopf, 2015.
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Stiglitz, Joseph. The Price of Inequality. W. W. Norton, 2013.
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Duke UP, 2007.
14

1
THE MEMORY TURN
Michael J. Lazzara

More than four decades after repressive military dictatorships and bloody civil con-
flicts swept across Latin America, memory has become a battleground and a battle
cry, a concept around which activists and academics have sought to denounce
human-​r ights violations and articulate the challenges of consolidating democracy 14
in the aftermath of political violence. Since the 1980s, memory has become firmly
entrenched in the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences and, little by
little, has gained institutional presence. Aside from being a readily identifiable con-
cept with strong semantic and political linkages to human rights, activist culture,
and leftist politics, in the academic realm, there are now book series dedicated to
memory, specialized journals on the topic, myriad conferences, symposia, work-
ing groups, and even graduate programs in the United States, Europe, and Latin
America that focus on the subject.
Faced with this surfeit of memory and its pervasiveness in academia and society
at large, critics such as Andreas Huyssen have admonished against the dangers of
too much memory; others, even those who have done some of the most important
work in this area, have warned that the moment for memory has come and gone.1
Still others believe firmly in “memory studies” [in Spanish, estudios de memoria
or estudios sobre memoria(s)] as a productive inter-​or transdisciplinary space from
which to think about the dynamics of individual, social, and cultural “memory
acts” and their potential for strengthening democracies and consolidating cultures
of human rights in the aftermath of dictatorships, wars, and other kinds of violent
conflicts.
Given the consolidation of memory studies within Latin Americanism, my goal
in this chapter is to offer some signposts and questions to invite a conversation
about the “memory turn”: the specific trajectories memory studies have taken in
Latin America, the challenges the field presents, the field’s possible futures and its
 15

The Memory Turn 15

pedagogical potential. I will argue that while memory continues to harbor signifi-
cant pedagogical and political potential for Latin American area studies, scholars of
memory studies must seek renewal and remain on guard against an exhaustion of
the topic. Of equal importance, we must insist on the repoliticizing—​or continued
politicizing—​of an interdisciplinary space of inquiry that was born out of political
struggle and that, through subsequent institutionalization or inertia, can risk losing
touch with its activist origins and mission. If we remain mindful of memory stud-
ies’ limitations, the field can be a powerful tool for facilitating conversations across
disciplinary spaces within the academy, as well as for building bridges between
academic and extra-​academic spaces, or between politically engaged and commit-
ted academics working in the global north and global south.

Memory Studies in the Context of Latin American

Studies: Origins and Trajectories
The study of memory within Latin America has really taken root since the 1980s,
and more so throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as postdictatorial or postconflict
societies have struggled to forge democracies and negotiate the complex mean-
ings of the past.
Outside of Latin America, contemporary memory studies emerged in the mid
14
1980s in the context of Holocaust studies and focused primarily on memory’s
narrative aspects: the difficulties of speaking trauma in the aftermath of the Shoah,
the gaps and silences in victims’ posttraumatic narratives, the political and narra-
tive battles between official histories and subaltern histories and memories. These
thematic foci provided an initial conceptual map and helped create the conditions
of possibility for a series of conversations to emerge within Latin American soci-
eties, particularly those of the Southern Cone that were struggling in those same
years to understand the dictatorial states in which they were living (in the case of
Chile) or from which they were recently emerging (in the cases of Argentina and
Uruguay).
In Latin America, then, the “memory turn,” in its first wave (1980s to the
mid to late 1990s) was primarily concerned with traumatic memories and the
forms they took; it signaled the Freudian tonality of postdictatorial thought while
accenting the work of mourning and the fate of the left. In this first wave, works
by cultural critics such as Idelber Avelar, Nelly Richard, and Alberto Moreiras
were key, as were journals such as Beatriz Sarlo’s Punto de vista in Argentina or
Nelly Richard’s Revista de crítica cultural in Chile, all of which played a major role
in setting an intellectual agenda for what was still an inchoate area of inquiry; in
the realm of the social sciences, books by Guillermo O’Donnell and others fueled
reflections on transitions to democracy and the challenges they posed.2
The new millennium brought a second wave in memory studies (mid to late
1990s to the present), largely set in motion by Elizabeth Jelin and the Social
Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation’s cosponsored project
16

16 Michael J. Lazzara

“Collective Memories of Repression.” This influential project, and the twelve

published volumes it yielded, set an early intellectual agenda for a fledgling area of
inquiry by bringing into the debate new topics such as archives, memorials, sites,
pedagogies, and institutions. From its inception, Jelin’s project had an enormous
impact in academic spaces of the global north and south. It sought ways to adapt
and expand early reflections on memory and to systematize those reflections by
building networks of scholars and publications. All of this resulted in the emer-
gence of a Latin American and Latin Americanist community of memory schol-
ars. As of 2001, Jelin’s initiative was further institutionalized through a master’s
program in memory studies offered by the Núcleo de Estudios sobre Memoria
(Memory Studies Working Group) at the Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y
Social, Institute for Economic and Social Development in Buenos Aires.
The “Collective Memories of Repression” project was important not only
because of the networks it built and the intellectual work it did but also because
it challenged the Southern Cone dictators’ legacy of purging universities of intel-
lectual dissent. The military regimes, as part of their counterrevolutionary back-
lash of the 1970s and 1980s, eliminated from the region’s universities so-​called
“subversive” academics that they perceived as threatening to their neoliberal over-
hauling of society. Jelin’s project, born a decade into the Argentine transition,
valiantly worked to rebuild intellectual spaces that had been weakened (though by
no means destroyed) by centralizing memory within the Argentine academy and 16
training a generation of young scholars, both from the United States and Latin
America.
Without discounting the vital role the “Collective Memories” project played
in introducing memory into Latin American and Latin Americanist academic dis-
cussions, at the same time we must not lose sight of the fact that memory in
Latin America arose, first and foremost, out of political activism and struggle, and
only later (or perhaps somewhat simultaneously) became a banner for academics
who were themselves activists or who chose to act in solidarity with the political
projects of those who most suffered the atrocities of dictatorship. Consequently,
memory has a history that deserves to be acknowledged.
Speaking to this point, in her new prologue to Los trabajos de la memoria (1999,
2012; State Repression and the Labors of Memory, 2003), Jelin points out that the orig-
inal impetus of the “Collective Memories” project was to “critically accompany”
(acompañar críticamente) certain social actors, like the families of the disappeared,
and think alongside them about their engagements with the recent past. She clari-
fies in a subsequent interview that the notion of “citizenship”—​not memory—​
was the group’s first entry-​point into postdictatorial debates (Mombello 147).
By listening carefully to the language deployed by new social movements that
were emerging in postdictatorship Argentina, scholars discovered that memory
was a term already central to the struggles of human-​r ights activists. Steve Stern
echoes this point for the Chilean case by showing that there was already a tre-
mendous amount of memory struggle happening in post-​1973 Chile, long before
 17

The Memory Turn 17

an academic language of memory took hold. It was not until the late 1970s and
early 1980s that memory became readily identifiable and deeply rooted in Chilean
society as a cultural “code word” (Stern 122–​125). This code word acquired fur-
ther cultural and political weight following Pinochet’s 1998 detention in London.
Today, in Chile, as in other Latin American countries (to greater or lesser extents),
we have a Museum of Memory and Human Rights, students evoking memory in
the streets, and a language of memory that everyone recognizes as such.
In tandem with this process, throughout the 1990s and even more so in the
2000s, Southern Cone struggles over memory evolved into a full-​fledged poli-
tics of memory—​a much embattled and highly contentious politics, yet a politics
nonetheless—​that included truth commissions, reparations, and other measures.
Put another way, there came a point at which governments could no longer ignore
the calls for memory, truth, and justice originating in activist culture and academic
spaces.
Admittedly, the focus of Latin American memory studies has for a long time
been skewed toward the Southern Cone. Though the transitions to democracy in
Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay played out differently, the Southern Cone countries
share in common that the dictators waged their “dirty wars” against leftist militants
in conflicts that were largely one-​sided and in which the militants, brutally tor-
tured and repressed in so many ways, had little to no possibility of overcoming that
16
violence. The roles of victims and perpetrators—​despite the inevitable grays that
always arise—​were also fairly clearly delineated. This, of course, was not the case
in other Latin American countries such as Peru, Colombia, or Mexico that experi-
enced (or continue to experience) civil conflicts in which the victim–​perpetrator
binary is much less rigidly defined and in which issues such as race, ethnicity, and
indigeneity strongly come into play.3
Since the turn of the millennium, memory studies have consequently under-
gone an expansion of the field to illuminate the complexities and particulari-
ties of Latin American contexts beyond the Southern Cone: most notably, Peru,
Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, and Mexico.This geographi-
cal expansion of the field—​which, I would argue, constitutes a “third wave” in
Latin American memory studies—​begs new questions in so far as experiences
of political violence in the Southern Cone and the theorization they generated,
though analogous, are not directly translatable or applicable to these other contexts.
Peru and Colombia, for example, are both cases in which a long tradition of
studying violence—​particularly violence in rural areas—​formed the basis for an
emerging interest in memory as of the late 1990s and 2000s. From the early years of
the Peruvian “armed internal conflict,” social scientists at home and abroad dedicated
themselves to understanding the complex nature of the violence and its effects on a
largely peasant and indigenous population in Ayacucho. By the mid 1980s, publica-
tions such as El Diario Marka or the journal Ideele, along with later edited volumes
such as historian Heraclio Bonilla’s Perú en el fin del milenio (1994) or Steve J. Stern’s
Los senderos insólitos del Perú: Guerra y sociedad, 1980–​1995 (1999), which included
18

18 Michael J. Lazzara

contributions by pioneering voices such as Carlos Iván Degregori, Ponciano del

Pino, and Jo-​Marie Burt, created a vibrant and very public intellectual debate
about the conflict. The subsequent participation of Peruvian intellectuals such as
Degregori and Del Pino in the SSRC “Memories of Repression” project pro-
pelled the emergence of memory studies in Peru. A number of Peruvian case
studies soon appeared in a key book that Degregori edited titled Jamás tan cerca
arremetió lo lejos: memoria y violencia política en el Perú (2003), which one might
argue inaugurated memory studies in that country. The temporal coincidence of
Jamás tan cerca with the August 2003 publication of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission’s (TRC’s) final report created the perfect constellation of events for
memory studies to flourish.
Yet, despite the promise that memory held in Peru at the turn of the millennium,
it nevertheless seems fair to say that memory studies are not yet as firmly rooted
there today as studies of political violence were in the 1980s and 1990s. In the
present, political spaces for memory discussions in Peru remain highly conflictive
and memory’s uses somewhat limited. For example, Gabriel Salazar Borja argues
that the TRC’s emphasis on the need to create a culture based on an “imperative
to remember” (una memoria-​deber) has attributed to memory a humanitarian func-
tion that limits the ability of intellectuals—​many of whom continue to uphold the
commission’s mandate or who participated directly in it—​to use memory as a way
to truly critique the present (Degregori et al. 297).To remember past violence has 18
meant, above all, to reflect on the victims—​not so much to tackle the gray zones of
violence, ambiguous subjectivities, or the political implications of the past for the
present. Salazar Borja thus points to a number of challenges for memory studies in
Peru: the need to de-​link memory studies from an exclusive focus on “victims,”
the need to think about memory in locales other than Ayacucho (like Lima, the
jungle, or the coca production areas), and the need to create institutional spaces and
lend support to emerging groups of young intellectuals who are doing exciting
work, like the “Taller de Estudios sobre Memoria Yuyachkanik” at the Universidad
Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima) (Degregori et al. 297).
Colombia, according to Marta Cabrera, suffered from a different, though not
entirely unrelated problem by the mid 2000s: a prolific grassroots, academic, and
artistic production on memory that was ever more voluminous in quantity but
sometimes lacking in narrative complexity.4 Analogous to Peru in the 1980s and
1990s, a Colombian a tradition of violentología dated from the 1960s,5 yet a for-
malized academic reflection on memory (or its lack) only emerged much later—​
perhaps with the publication of Gonzalo Sánchez Gómez’s seminal work Guerras,
memoria e historia (2003), in which he argues that decades of amnesties and par-
dons, of imposed forgetting, had caused Colombians to “confuse amnesty with
peace” (90). A mystification of violence often occurred in which violence was
almost thought to be part and parcel with Colombian national identity. Memory
work often failed to detail specific causes and forms of violence and, as Cabrera
also argues, lacked “adequate rituals and a narrative capable of articulating the
 19

The Memory Turn 19

plurality of memories that comprise history” (52). This all started to change, how-
ever, after 2005.
The July 2005 Justice and Peace Law established the culpability of paramili-
taries in human-​rights violations and the mass displacements of civilians; it also
reiterated the role that guerrilla insurgent forces played in the conflict, as well as
the government’s collusion with paramilitary forces.This official acknowledgment
by the Colombian state of the layered and complex nature of the violence repre-
sented a major turning point for memory.The 2005 law established the Comisión
Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación (National Commission for Reparation
and Reconciliation) and the Grupo de Memoria Histórica (Historical Memory
Group), whose mandate was “to produce and distribute an historical account
of armed conflict in Colombia” (Cirociarri et al. 2012). The July 2014 ¡Basta
ya! report was followed by many other publications on diverse topics ranging
from forensic anthropology to gender, the role of the media, the effects of guer-
rilla action on the civilian population, forced disappearance, and displacement.
Emerging work on Colombia is focusing on racialized memories, memories of
marginalized communities like LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer
or questioning, and intersex) activists and previously ignored topics such as land
mines and their effects on people.
While this “boom” in Colombia’s memory is impressive and significant—​as
18
are the efforts of memory sites like the Museo Casa de la Memoria in Medellín,
we must also keep in mind that Colombia’s memory efforts remain, overall, very
much oriented toward the ideals of peace and reconciliation.This scenario marks a
major difference with countries such as Argentina and Chile, where, following the
early years of transition to democracy, the idea of reconciliation lost clout within
the lexicon of memory activism and study; Chilean and Argentine critics, after
much debate, seemed to conclude that conflict and differences of opinion—​more
than politically imposed accord—​must serve as the basis for healthy democracies,
and that memory is, in fact, most “productive” when it serves as a battleground for
differing visions of the past.6 In contrast, the ongoing nature of the Colombian
conflict makes it such that reconciliation and peace acquire different meanings
in that context and therefore begs the question: how do the particularities of the
Colombian situation color the type of memory work that is emerging there? It
seems necessary, therefore, to espouse a critical approach to memory while also
recognizing that the particularities and needs of each national context will dictate
the ways in which memory debates unfold.

Thematic “Moments” in Memory Studies

With the passage of time, discussions on memory in Latin America have moved
through stages that might be understood as moments within the major “waves”
that I described earlier. These moments have not been mutually exclusive or free
from overlap.
20

20 Michael J. Lazzara

To simplify matters greatly, a first moment, corresponding roughly to the

1980s and 1990s, focused on the victims of dictatorial violence and their testi-
monies of torture, exile, and other forms of suffering. This testimonial moment
foregrounded the silences and omissions in testimony as well as the possibilities
and “impossibilities” (following Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and others) of
bearing witness to traumatic experience. The need for “empathic listening” was
also central to the debate.7 During this first stage, literary and art critics espe-
cially wrote exhaustively on cultural production’s possibilities for expressing the
inexpressible.8
Once these debates on trauma, narrative, and witnessing were well estab-
lished, a second stage in memory debates shifted focus toward the predictato-
rial moment: the period of militancy and revolutionary struggle that preceded
the military regimes. This slight widening of the historical field to include the
1960s and early 1970s was not at all insignificant in so far as it signaled a desire to
move beyond an isolated understanding of the dictatorships toward a longer, more
contextualized view.
For many years after the military coups and well into the transitions to democ-
racy, leftist militancy was a taboo subject that, in general, was little discussed pub-
licly. To speak about memory or even about “recent history” was, for the most
part, limited to discussions of the human-​rights violations that occurred during
the military regimes, or to the international dimensions of those rights violations, 20
like Operation Condor or the School of the Americas. The defeat of the left was
a traumatic topic that many individuals and, more broadly, societies in transition
were not prepared to confront fully, or that in some cases carried a strong social
stigma. Challenging such stigmas, the late 1990s and early 2000s brought a wave of
books and films that blew open discussions on militancy through representations
that ranged from heroic vindications of the utopian dream, as in Argentine direc-
tor David Blaustein’s Cazadores de utopías (1996), to deeply revisionist and valiant
questionings of the ways in which organizations like Montoneros had gone about
achieving their goals, as in Pilar Calveiro’s Política y/​o violencia: una aproximación a la
guerrilla de los años 70 (2005). More recent reflections, as Hugo Vezzetti points out,
have questioned the guerrilla movements’ use of violence or encouraged nuanced
debates on the legitimacy of armed struggle as a means to change society.9 These
reflections have been accompanied, not without more controversy and discussion,
by an effort to recover the biographies of those who perished: to portray them not
just as combatants, but also as people, as human beings with lives, dreams, ideals,
and political convictions.
The third and most recent stage of development in memory debates, roughly
corresponding to the past ten or fifteen years (and overlapping to some extent
with the debates on militancy), has focused on the experiences and memories of
the children of dictatorship: either the sons and daughters of disappeared mili-
tants or those who grew up during dictatorships or civil conflicts but had no
 21

The Memory Turn 21

direct blood ties to the dead. Albertina Carri’s film Los rubios (2003) is perhaps
the most well known and widely analyzed example of the former, while the
literary fiction of Alejandro Zambra, in Chile, provides a good example of the
latter. Carri’s postmodern reflection on her disappeared parents is a provocative
and groundbreaking questioning of “truth”; the film generated much discussion
not only because of its experimental aesthetics but also because it dared to ques-
tion the discourses of victims, former militants, human-​r ights organizations, and
the state, leaving no group untouched. Zambra’s novels, like Formas de volver a
casa (2011), also take up little discussed issues like the memories of the middle
class or the figure of the bystander who was aware of the violence but did noth-
ing to stop it. Concurrent with this most recent stage, the newest research on
memory—​a topic to which I will return later—​is beginning to look at issues
like memories in “everyday” contexts, grassroots memories, the gendered nature
of memories, the role of new technologies in the configuration of memories,
the interplay of memories with race or ethnicity, and memory’s transnational
circulations.
Over its thirty-​plus-​year development memory studies have become an area
of inquiry—​perhaps even a field—​that has managed to generate fruitful interdis-
ciplinary work, help scholars break out of the traditional disciplines, and engage
in democratic political action in an expansive sense—​either through intellectual
20
intervention, activism, or a combination of both. Memory studies, moreover, have
facilitated the formulation of a set of questions about societies in transition and
permitted scholars to combat hegemonic or official narratives that impede the
deepening of democracy. Because memory has become, as I have noted, a univer-
sally recognized idiom both across the region and across different sectors of Latin
American societies, it has also been one effective framework for fomenting social,
ethical, and political legibility and action.

Challenges for Memory Studies

Like any emergent and consolidating field, memory studies also face challenges.
Given space limitations, I will focus on three areas that need to be addressed before
imagining possible futures for Latin American memory studies: (1) to overcome
the fragmentation of memory studies through more robust interdisciplinarity; (2)
to bridge the north–​south divide (that is, to mitigate the tensions between scholars
doing memory work in the United States and Europe and those who do memory
studies in Latin America); and (3) to mitigate the local–​global divide so as to foster
more rigorous comparative study of cases.
1. Overcome the fragmentation of memory studies through more robust interdisciplin-
arity. When we talk about memory work, we are likely discussing many things
at once: memory as politics, as activism, as policy, as institution, as critical prac-
tice, as artistic production, as academic production, as patrimony, etc. Given the
2

22 Michael J. Lazzara

breadth of topics memory studies encompass and the number of disciplines they
seek to include, memory studies risk fragmenting to the point of losing a basis for
fruitful dialogue among scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds.
We see this risk of fragmentation happening as early as the 1980s when a rup-
ture occurred between the social scientists affiliated with FLACSO-​Chile, who
were studying what it meant to live under an authoritarian regime, and those
scholars grouped around the avant-​garde art scene, who chose to explore the
dictatorial moment not by looking at the rationalizing processes of official mem-
ory and institutions, but instead by focusing on the residual and the subaltern as
vehicles for uncovering what official narratives eclipse. Nelly Richard reminds us
that, in the Chile of the 1980s, a potential basis for conversation existed between
“sociologists of culture” and those engaged with the humanities or the avant-​
garde art scene; those conversations broke down, however, when each group either
refused to understand or did not value the critical language in which the other
was speaking. Richard attributes the conflict—​essentially a disciplinary conflict—​
to the “critical tension between regular and irregular knowledge systems, between
techniques of defense and audacious languages, between forces of demonstrative
proof and zones of experimentation, between disciplinary contentions and the
overflowing of genres” (Richard 52).
In a similar way, the field of “transitional justice studies,” which also congealed
as a field of study in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has interfaced with and 2
coexisted alongside memory studies, though always remaining somewhat discon-
nected. Transitional justice studies provide a space in which scholars emphasize
and analyze institutional mechanisms for memory like trials, truth commissions,
peace talks, and official or unofficial justice processes. When questions of nar-
rative or representation intersect with such concerns, memory scholars tend to
engage in deeper and more productive dialogue with transitional justice scholars.
Yet frequently at conferences or in edited volumes, work on transitional justice
issues stands juxtaposed to work on narrative, art, or memories, without finding
productive ways of interfacing other than through implication or inference. One
new book that effectively tries to bridge this gap is Peter D. Rush and Olivera
Simić’s The Arts of Transitional Justice: Culture, Activism, and Memory after Atrocity
(2014), which specifically studies artworks from around the world that question
the limits and practices of justice in an attempt to rethink how transitional jus-
tice is carried out. Likewise, Rebecca J. Atencio’s Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with
Dictatorship in Brazil (2014) usefully shows how in the Brazilian case, memory and
truth—​particularly in cultural production—​have become sites in which to sym-
bolically mete out a delayed transitional justice that never materialized in reality;
this is because in Brazil there has been an egregious absence of trials of human-​
rights violators.
With noted exceptions, then, the same disciplinary diversity that makes
the coming together of memory scholars so exciting can also, paradoxically,
serve to isolate them from one another. One key opportunity for memory
23

The Memory Turn 23

studies is therefore to embrace more fully its interdisciplinary potential and

seek real points of cross-​pollination and conversation among different schol-
arly groups.
2. Bridging the north–​south divide. Anyone who has done work on memory is
likely to have perceived tensions between those who speak of memory from Latin
America and those who do memory studies in the universities of the United
States or Europe. Though not unique to memory studies, the questions of who is
authorized to speak and for whom are queries fraught with tensions, especially in the
highly politicized terrain of memory work.
People working on memory in Latin America, it is clear, do it either in direct col-
laboration with activists or as a way of engaging local struggles and processes.When
created from afar, however, academic production on memory (as in the United
States or Europe) can run the risk of becoming disengaged from the politicized
origins and ongoing commitments that inspired the “memory turn” in the first
place. However, it is also worth noting that scholars working on memory in the
United States and Europe frequently do it in ways that are politically engaged,
either through solidarity politics or through a desire to generate pedagogical or
activist interventions that can have a concrete impact in their own communities,
where violence and inequalities linked to neoliberalism also manifest in myriad
ways. With this in mind, the core issue may not really be one of here or there but
2
of the creative tensions and encounters that arise out of the dynamic interactions
between south and north.
Memory scholars doing important work exist all around the world and often
intervene in spaces and in ways that blur the north–​south divide. Conferences and
publications on memory can either seek to distort that divide or intentionally
stake their claim on upholding it. What might memory-​studies scholars in Latin
America gain if works like Michael Rothberg’s Mutidirectional Memory: Remembering
the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009); Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic
Memory: The Transformation of American Memory in the Age of Mass Culture (2004); or
Marita Sturken’s Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma
City to Ground Zero (2007)—​all of which are profoundly political and suggest new
avenues for research—​were translated into Spanish or circulated more in Latin
American contexts? By the same token, what would US-​based or European-​based
memory scholars gain through deeper contact with Latin American interventions
such as Beatriz Sarlo’s Tiempo pasado: cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo, una dis-
cusión (2005), Pilar Calveiro’s Política y/​o violencia: una aproximación a la guerrilla de
los años 70 (2005), or Ponciano del Pino and Caroline Yezer’s Las formas del recu-
erdo: etnografías de la violencia política en el Perú (2013)?
Memory studies will only bridge scholarly communities if scholars around the
world more readily ask questions about not just what divides and distinguishes
but also about the struggles with poverty, inequality, racism, and violence that tra-
verse the north–​south divide and lie at the very core of memory studies’ political
mission.
24

24 Michael J. Lazzara

3. Mitigating the local–​global divide to foster more rigorous comparative study.

Now that memory studies have firmly taken root in many Latin American
countries, another area for potential growth is better and more rigorous
comparative work.
An example: In Mexico or Colombia, where narcoviolence plays a major role
in generating the forced disappearances that occur today, where perpetrators so
often go unpunished, and in which the origins of violence can seem diffuse and
ambiguous, we see a need to reformulate the basic questions and assumptions that
originated in the Southern Cone. What specific forms of violence and resistance
does narcoviolence generate?10 And what memories? If indeed some parallels
exist with the Southern Cone cases—​for example, family members’ activism or
practices of protest and memorialization—​when conflicts are ongoing and there
is little to no accountability for atrocity, does it make sense to use words like
“reconciliation” or “transition” that came out of Southern Cone discussions on
memory? To what extent are we, as academics, willing to alter our frameworks
and vocabularies based on the new forms of violence and injustice that plague
our world?
Comparative study can lead to new questions, discoveries, and transnational
constellations of meaning.What might be learned, for example, by listening to the
memories of US activists who lived in Chile in the early 1970s and sympathized
with or actively participated in the Popular Unity project? What might we learn 24
by studying the ways in which the aesthetics of memory sites and memorials travel
from Europe to the Americas, North and South? And what might be gained by
looking at how perpetrators’ memories are configured in Indonesia vis-​à-​vis those
of Latin American perpetrators or former Nazis?
Comparative study can lead to more layered understandings of atrocity and
resistance that can complement the country-​specific research that has dominated
the field. It can also play a vital role in building bridges that are crucial for con-
solidating the energy of memory studies as a political project aimed at contesting
both neoliberalism and imperialism.

The Futures of Memory

In a recent forum published in the journal Memory Studies, Andreas Huyssen
argues that memory studies is a field, although it is a field that at present is lack-
ing renewal and energy. If the study of memory has had an undeniably transfor-
mative effect on traditional historiography and other disciplines, Huyssen notes
that: “clearly we need more than the memory of past injustices” (Vermeulen et al.
227). Elizabeth Jelin echoes this sentiment in a recently published interview in
which she warns of a banalization of memory: “Anything can be called ‘memory’
if we apply a common-​sense definition rather than an analytical one” (Mombello
151–​152). She goes on to point out that although memory work always seems to
come from a place of good intention—​such as a desire to participate in the politics
 25

The Memory Turn 25

of “Never Again”—​it does not necessarily lead to reframings or new analytical

questions that drive conversations forward. Jelin’s comments, as well as Huyssen’s
should be taken seriously and serve as an invitation to reassess the kinds of work
that memory studies allow us to do.
For a long time, disciplines like political science and history shied away from
talking about memory because they felt it was too subjective or not “scientific”
enough (Collins et al. 2013, 5–6). Social scientists often felt that studying institu-
tions was the most effective way to understand societal dynamics. A memory lens,
however, reminds us that institutions do not always tell the whole story. A memory
lens is primarily about discourse; it is about the stories that are told, circulate, sup-
port, challenge, or comprise the “collective” narratives that societies and groups
hold about themselves. Studying memory is, of course, about institutions on some
level, but one of memory studies’ major value propositions is the emphasis they
place on the affects, sentiments, and passions that escape institutions yet very much
participate in the “political.” Specifically, a memory lens can help us to understand
the “noninstitutionalized dimensions of politics,” to think about how groups and
individuals narrate and position themselves through discourse vis-​à-​vis the state
(Collins et al. 6). Moreover, it helps us to understand the political battles that are
waged around how to interpret the past and forces us to think about how tempo-
ralities affect the construction of meanings of the past. In short, memory studies
24
focus on the dynamic negotiations of meaning that happen in and through culture,
the entanglements of those meanings with history, and the political battles that
determine who gets to define the past, how, and to what ends (Sturken, Tangled
Memories 5). At stake are ultimately questions of politics, identity, and rights that
get discussed across the disciplines but that come into relief in specific ways when
intersected by the notion of memory.
A renewal of memory studies requires returning to the specific questions a
memory lens can offer and thinking about the role memory can play in fostering
democratic political change. Memory studies are always political.They are not just
about studying narrative for narrative’s sake, nor should they be singularly focused
on defeat and tragedy. Memories are as much about survival, resistance, and build-
ing something for the future as they are about past suffering. I agree with Estela
Schindel’s concern when she asks, provocatively: “Do we build monuments and
sites of memory because we haven’t been able to build more just societies? Do we
focus so much on the objects and platforms of memory because staring the past
squarely in the eye might blind us?” (9). In this sense, as Jelin and Huyssen suggest,
doing memory studies requires moving beyond the discrete study of an object or
objects to understand how memories powerfully determine realities, how they
either open or close-​off possibilities for political action, contestation, and change.
Memory studies offer the benefit of a common idiom that can inspire shared
political projects, a “practice” of memory that goes beyond a mere concern with
analyzing the “objects” of memory (Feld 2). In this conceptualization, memory
is not just a subject matter for scholars to study or even a duty for postconflict
26

26 Michael J. Lazzara

societies, but a right to which citizens are entitled: a right that implies truth, access
to information, transparency, justice-​seeking, and accountability.
As we think about the specificities of a memory lens and about memory as
a form of political intervention, we must also rethink certain associations that,
over time, have become naturalized in the field: namely, the linkages between
memory and democracy, on the one hand, and memory and human rights, on the other.
Elizabeth Jelin admonishes that memory scholars would benefit from decoupling
these notions (2014, 6–​7). We cannot assume that the labors of memory auto-
matically lead to a greater respect for human rights, nor can we assume that they
necessarily lead to a deepening of democracy.To be sure, memory plays a vital role
in these processes. But Aldo Marchesi’s recent reformulation of this idea leaves
us a question to ponder: “What kinds of memories,” he asks, “help to construct
what kinds of democracies?” (3). Memory, it seems, must be more than a politics
of condemning atrocity; it needs to be the very basis for thinking creatively about
political change in transitioning societies.
As we think about memory’s “futures,” it may be useful to enumerate some
possible lines of inquiry that might prove fruitful moving forward. These include
but are not limited to:

1. More research that “de-​centers” memories. This would imply focusing on the histo-
ries and memories of actors outside of the Latin American capitals, expanding 26
the field to include other forms of human-​rights violations (like migration
and displacement) that derive from scenarios of contemporary violence, and
more research on indigenous communities that embraces the ethnographic
tensions inherent in doing that work.
2. An expansion of the subjective positions and experiences that memory studies encom-
pass. To date, the bulk of the work that memory studies have produced has
focused on the victims of political violence (and to some extent on the perpe-
trators as well). An expansion of the field might consider gendered memories
that would include alternative sexualities as well as masculinities, or other
subject positions that go beyond the victim, the victimizer, or the blood rela-
tion: common citizens, the police, accomplices, the political right, memories
of resistance, memories of solidarity, etc.
3. Additional research on an “expanded field” of memory that would place dictator-
ships and civil conflicts in relation to broader histories of racism and colonialism.11
This expanded field might include more work on “everyday” memories
as they are constructed in specific, localized contexts; more studies that
historicize processes of memory; and further inquiry into the effects of
temporalities and generations on the construction of meanings of the past.
Such an expansion would also hope to understand dictatorships or civil
conflicts not as isolated episodes of violence, but rather as consequences of
larger structures of repression (historical, racial, ethnic, economic, colonial,
imperialist, etc.).
 27

The Memory Turn 27

Memory and Pedagogy

I have thus far suggested that memory studies have opened a set of questions
that has enriched how individual disciplines within Latin American studies
have approached contexts of ongoing and past violence. I have also suggested
that memory has provided an idiom with which scholars can intervene politi-
cally to advocate for democratic change in the face of neoliberalism, imperialism,
attendant forms of violence, and stifling inequality. This leads me to a final value
proposition for memory studies that I have not yet mentioned but that is vitally
important to the future of memory: its pedagogical function.
One of the most important ways in which we as memory scholars can intervene
politically is through our work with students both in the classroom and beyond
it. Ileana Rodríguez, cofounder of the new “Interdisciplinary Masters Program
in Memory, Culture, and Citizenship” at the Central American University in
Managua, Nicaragua, has made a crucial observation that applies to universities
throughout the Americas—​North and South. Our students, she notes, are squarely
situated within the contexts of neoliberalism, postmodernism, and the post-​Cold
War.12 Why does it matter, then, for us to talk with them about memories and
histories of state terror from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s? Her answer is sim-
ple: because these terrorist states persist today under other names: neoliberal state,
narco state, etc. Pilar Calveiro echoes this idea when she reminds us that “the
26
genocides of the past resonate in the offenses people suffer today.”13 Consequently,
cultivating effective pedagogies of memory and studying memory processes can
act as forms of resistance to criminality and abuses of power, while also providing
ways to forge community and exercise citizenship.
Training citizens to think critically in transitional societies is part of the work
memory studies can do in Latin America. To that end, the master’s program that
Ileana Rodríguez cofounded with Margarita Vannini in Nicaragua, like other pro-
grams that already exist in Argentina and Chile, is working diligently to equip
future teachers and scholars—​ particularly future elementary and high school
teachers—​with the tools to inspire their students to rebuild societies badly dam-
aged by violence, to work toward more complex visions of history, and to be
politically active participants in their societies. Moreover, programs like the one
at UCA-​Managua are seeking to put into practice some of the new articula-
tions in memory work that I described earlier. In addition to teaching the theo-
retical genealogies of “memory,” “culture,” and “citizenship,” required coursework
includes seminars on youth cultures, displacement, gender and sexuality, and race
and ethnicity, as they relate to memories.14
Thinking from my own professional space in the US academy, I can speak
to the pedagogical impact that teaching and debating memories of the “recent
past” have with US students. Over the past decade, I have given many courses
on dictatorships, memories, human rights, and transitions for undergraduate and
graduate students from the University of California. A summer abroad course
28

28 Michael J. Lazzara

that I teach in Santiago, Chile, every year has had a particular impact. By speaking
with local scholars and activists, talking to Chileans with different memories and
interpretations of the past, and visiting relevant sites, students come to understand
what happened before, during, and after Pinochet with an astounding degree of
nuance. Yet even more importantly, they learn to ask questions about their own
relationships to the violence that occurred in what, on first arrival, seems to be a
faraway land. We speak about the US role in the Chilean coup. We ask questions
about the extent to which sites like Villa Grimaldi are “our responsibility,” about
the ways in which global networks of violence and economic systems allow for
the destruction of bodies, dreams, and dissent (Taylor 21)? We wonder about the
ethics of memory and the kinds of memory politics that might be most effec-
tive for espousing change. We ask about the kinds of political activism to which
memory politics can lead. And we think about the connections that exist between
what happened in Chile in 1973 and what is happening now in places like the
Middle East.
Courses on memories, in this sense, can appeal to students on both an affec-
tive and an intellectual level, and offer, in the best of cases, a demand not to be
complacent, to figure out ways to understand and abate global networks of vio-
lence. Perhaps, then, an important aspect of memory’s future is to seize upon its
pedagogical potential and think seriously about the educational role it can play in
forming those who will shape our tomorrows. 28

Notes
1 See, for example, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia” in Huyssen.
2 See, for example, Avelar; Richard; Moreiras; and O’Donnell et al.
3 The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (1999–​2000) final report, for
example, offered: “a historical narrative that evinced the long-​standing problems of rac-
ism against the nation’s indigenous population, centralization of power in the hands of
the predominantly coastal mestizo-​white elite, and implementation of ‘rule by abandon’
whereby the state was largely absent in large swaths of the national territory … While the
commission condemned the armed group Shining Path as the main perpetrators of vio-
lence (in 54 percent of cases of death and disappearance) … the commission also placed
responsibility in the hands of successive governments (Belaúnde, García, and Fujimori)
and the political parties who had abdicated authority to the armed forces (found respon-
sible for 29 percent of the deaths and disappearances), and police (7 percent)” (Milton 7).
4 See Cabrera.
5 The intellectual tradition of violentología includes classic works like Monsignor Germán
Guzmán, Orlando Fals Borda and Eduardo Umaña Luna’s La violencia en Colombia: estu-
dio de un proceso social (1962) or María Victoria Uribe’s more recent Matar, rematar y
contramatar: las masacres de la violencia en el Tolima, 1948–​1964 (1990). These books, along
with many others, set the stage for Colombian memory studies.
6 See, for example, Moulián.
7 See Felman and Laub.
8 My own early work (Lazzara) participated in this moment.
9 My reference is to a recent presentation by Vezzetti (November 2014) at the
Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica (IHNCA), Universidad
 29

The Memory Turn 29

Centroamericana-​Managua: “Nuevas memorias de la violencia política en la Argentina.

La violencia revolucionaria en primera persona: del crimen y las víctimas a las escenas de
reconciliación” (unpublished). See also Vezzetti Sobre la violencia revolucionaria; and Beverley.
10 On this question, see Ovalle et al.
11 I am grateful to Florencia Mallon for her contributions on this point.
12 See Rodríguez (“Introducción a la Maestría en Memoria”, “Programa de Maestría
Interdisciplinaria”).
13 Calveiro’s comment was also offered as part of the Managua conference referenced
above in note 9.
14 For more information on this program, see http://​maestria-​ihnca.blogspot.com.

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P, 2014.
Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of
Mourning. Duke UP, 1999.
Beverley, John. “Rethinking the Armed Struggle in Latin America.” Boundary 2, vol. 36, no.
1, 2009, pp. 47–​59.
Bilbija, Ksenija and Leigh A. Payne, editors. Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin
America. Duke UP, 2011.
Bonilla, Heraclio, editor. Perú en el fin del milenio. Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las
Artes, 1994.
Cabrera, Marta. “Exceso y defecto de la memoria: violencia política, terror, visibilidad
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e invisibilidad.” Oasis (Universidad Externado de Colombia, Bogota), no. 11, 2005,
pp. 39–​55.
Calveiro, Pilar. Política y/​o violencia: una aproximación a la guerrilla de los años 70. Grupo
Editorial Norma, 2005.
Ciorciarri, John, Emad Anasari, Jesse Franzblau, Harlyn Pacheco, Dylan Presley, and Jessica
Presley. “Historical Memory in Colombia: The Work of the Grupo de Memoria
Histórica.” An International Economic Development Program Report, Centro de
Memoria Histórica, 2012.
Collins, Cath, Katherine Hite, and Alfredo Joignant, editors. The Politics of Memory in
Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013.
Degregori, Carlos Iván, editor. Jamás tan cerca arremetió lo lejos: memoria y violencia política en el
Perú. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2003.
Degregori, Carlos Iván, Tamia Portugal Teillier, Gabriel Salazar Borja, and Renzo Aroni
Sulca. No hay mañana sin ayer: batallas por la memoria y consolidación democrática en el Perú.
Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2015.
Del Pino, Ponicano and Caroline Yezer, editors. Las formas del recuerdo: etnografías de la violen-
cia política en el Perú. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2013.
Feld, Claudia. “Interrogantes sobre las ‘memorias vivas.’” Núcleo Memoria/​ IDES. Foro:
“Memoria y resistencias: experiencias comunitarias e indígenas en el México actual,” 2014.
Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,
and History. Routledge, 1992.
Hite, Katherine. Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America
and Spain. Routledge, 2012.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford UP, 2003.
Jelin, Elizabeth. Los trabajos de la memoria. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2012.
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30 Michael J. Lazzara

Jelin, Elizabeth. “Memoria y democracia: una relación incierta.” Núcleo Memoria/​IDES.

Foro: “Memoria y Democracia.”
Jelin, Elizabeth. Los trabajos de la memoria. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2012.
Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of
Mass Culture. Columbia UP, 2004.
Lazzara, Michael J. Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory. UP of Florida,
2006.
Marchesi, Aldo.“Comentario sobre ‘Memoria y democracia: una relación incierta.’” Núcleo
Memoria/​IDES. Foro: “Memoria y Democracia,” 2014.
Milton, Cynthia E., editor. Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-​Telling in Post-​Shining
Path Peru. Duke UP, 2014.
Mombello, Laura. “Entrevista a Elizabeth Jelin: La memoria, una bisagra entre pasado y
presente.” Clépsidra: revista interdisciplinaria de estudios sobre memoria, vol. 1, no. 2, October
2014, pp. 146–​157.
Moreiras, Alberto. Tercer espacio: literatura y duelo en América Latina. LOM/​ARCIS, 1999.
Moulian, Tomás. “La liturgia de la reconciliación.” Políticas y estéticas de la memoria, edited by
Nelly Richard. Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2000, pp. 23–​26.
O’Donnell, Guillermo, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, editors. Transitions
from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy. 4 vols, Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.
Ovalle, Lilian Paola, Alfonso Díaz Tovar, and Luis Arturo Ongay. “Pensar la memoria desde
la frontera: recuerdo, reconstrucción y reconciliación en el caso del ‘pozolero.’” A con-
tracorriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014,
pp. 279–​301.
Richard, Nelly. The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and the 30
Poetics of Crisis. Translated by Alice A. Nelson and Silvia R. Tandeciarz, Duke UP, 2004.
Rodríguez, Ileana. “Introducción a la Maestría en Memoria, Cultura, Cuidadanía.”
Revista de historia (Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica), vol. 27, 2012,
pp. 11–​15.
—​ —​ —​ . “Programa de Maestría Interdisciplinaria en Memoria, Cultura, Ciudadanía.”
Revista de historia (Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica), vol. 27, 2012,
pp. 11–​15.
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization. Stanford UP, 2009.
Rush, Peter D. and Olivera Simić, editors. The Arts of Transitional Justice: Culture, Activism, and
Memory after Atrocity. Springer, 2014.
Sánchez Gómez, Gonzalo. Guerras, memoria e historia. Instituto Colombiano de Antropología
e Historia, 2003.
Sarlo, Beatriz. Tiempo pasado: cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo, una discusión. Siglo XXI
Editores, 2005.
Schindel, Estela.“¿Hay una ‘moda’ académica de la memoria? Problemas y desafíos en torno
del campo.” Aletheia, vol. 2, no. 3, 2011, pp. 1–​11.
Stern, Steve, J., editor. Los senderos insólitos del Perú: Guerra y sociedad, 1980–1995. Instituto
de Estudios Peruanos, 1999.
Stern, Steve J. “Memory: The Curious History of a Cultural Codeword.” Radical History
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Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering. U of California P, 1997.
—​—​—​. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground
Zero. Duke UP, 2007.
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The Memory Turn 31

Taylor, Diana. “Performing Ruins.” Telling Ruins in Latin America. Edited by Michael J.
Lazzara and Vicky Unruh. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 13–​26.
Vermeulen, Pieter, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw et al. “Dispersal and Redemption: The
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2012, pp. 223–​239.
Vezzetti, Hugo. “Nuevas memorias de la violencia política en la Argentina. La violencia
revolucionaria en primera persona: del crimen y las víctimas a las escenas de reconcili-
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32

2
THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN
Juan Poblete

As I write, in early 2017, a number of important tensions between national agen-

das (especially those connected to labor policies, industrial development, and
immigration control) and local and city-​based ones (especially those connected
to city self-​positioning, labor force needs, and cosmopolitan agendas) are erupt- 32
ing out in the open in the United States after years of simmering and distancing.
During the Obama years (2009–​2016), a number of conservative city govern-
ments and county law enforcement agencies (especially those located in the bor-
der areas in the southwest) moved to use their own powers to force the federal
government into often inhumane and overstrict enforcement of its immigration
laws. Unhappy and unsatisfied with the Obama government presiding in its two
periods over the biggest wave of deportations in American history (at least 2.5
million people), these conservative local and city officials saw in the demonization
and persecution of undocumented immigrants a good basis for the advancement
of their own political agendas. But now that the Trump administration is the gov-
ernment in Washington and is beginning to use the powers of the state to deport
countless migrants, other cities with what we could call a different, progressive
transnational and cosmopolitan profile—​cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Seattle, Chicago, Denver, New York—​have joined in or insisted on their long
time-​honored self-​declaration as sanctuary cities, i.e. cities that do not persecute
undocumented workers on the basis of their legal status and often do not collabo-
rate with federal immigration control. In response, the Trump administration has
threatened to cut federal funding to these cities. According to a recent estimate:

There are at least 364 counties that limit their cooperation with federal
immigration authorities, including 39 cities. For years, these sanctuary cities
have resisted federal deportation efforts in different ways. Some jurisdictions
 3

The Transnational Turn 33

have policies that prevent police officers from inquiring into the immigra-
tion status of residents; in other locales, jails have refused to comply with
requests from the feds to hold suspected undocumented immigrants past
their scheduled release dates. Immigration advocates argue that these tactics
encourage immigrants in their communities to report crimes or cooperate
with police investigations.
(Rathod, n.p.)

This divergence/​convergence dynamics of local and city-​based agendas, on the

one hand, and national government agendas, on the other, speaks of the different
scales of life under globalization and the relative new territorializations of such life,
what is often called rescaling of sociospatial units, that has resulted from a global
restructuring of the economy under the aegis of neoliberalism (Glick Schiller and
Çaglar).
Transnationalism and more generally transnational studies emerged in the early
1990s precisely as a methodological, epistemological, and political response to the
challenge of thinking the brave new world that globalization had produced. This
included the acceleration of flows and time and the reconfiguration of space, with
the concomitant relevance of new scales and scopes, but also the differential rates
of the circulation of goods and finance, on one end, and people, on the other.
32
Although I will quote other descriptions below, it may be appropriate to start with
a working definition of transnationalism that distinguishes it from inter-​national
phenomena. In his useful book Transnationalism, Steven Vertovec proposes to keep
the designation “inter-​national” for government to government interactions and
for discreet exchanges of goods and people in trade and tourism, while reserving
transnational practices and actors to refer to those “sustained linkages and ongo-
ing exchanges among non-​state actors based across national borders—​businesses,
non-​government-​organizations, and individuals sharing the same interests” (3). He
then proposes, “The collective attributes of such connections, their processes of
formation and maintenance, and their wider implications are referred to broadly
as ‘transnationalism’” (3). As it turned out, transnational studies at its origins were,
to a significant degree, a Latin America-related phenomenon.
According to a UN 2016 report, in 2015 there were 244 million migrants
worldwide. Two-​thirds of them lived in just twenty countries, and the same pro-
portion of those migrants lived in Europe (76 million) and Asia (75 million).The
next region in number of migrants residing was North America (Canada, the
United States, and Mexico) with 54 million. The United States, however, was,
as a single country, the recipient of the largest number of migrants (47 million
or 14 percent of the US population) accounting for 19 percent of the total of
migrants globally. They included 98 percent of the 12 million Mexicans living
abroad (the second largest global diaspora after India with 16 million) and 2 mil-
lion each from El Salvador and Cuba. Just these three Latin American nations
accounted for close to 30 percent of the US migrant population. In fact, overall,
34

34 Juan Poblete

close to 50 percent of all migrants in the United States are of Latin American and
Caribbean origin (UN Report). If this is historically a country of immigrants, it
is then, to a significant degree, now a country of Latin American immigrants who
are often trying, and as often also forced, to lead transnational lives. Transnational
studies emerged, in part, to respond to the new realities created by the coming
together of a long historical process of connections between the United States and
Latin America with the now accelerated conditions created by economic, social,
political, and cultural globalization.

The Key Texts

It is not surprising then that a number of the key texts in the emergence of trans-
national studies were in fact devoted to Latin American and Caribbean migrations
to the United States. While there are others one could have included in this revi-
sion of key early texts, I have chosen three that can be unquestionably called pio-
neering within the field. They are: one justly famous article, “Mexican Migration
and the Social Space of Postmodernism” (1991) by Roger Rouse; and two books,
Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized
Nation-​States by Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc
(1994); and The Transnational Villagers by Peggy Levitt (2001).
Roger Rouse’s truly exceptional article “Mexican Migration and the Social 34
Space of Postmodernism” (1991), elegantly condensed a full new research agenda
(and his dissertation work) in a dozen pages. Studying the lives of rural Mexican
migrants from Aguililla—​a southwest Michoacán Mexican town—​in Redwood
City, on the northern edge of California’s Silicon Valley, Rouse posited that they
were part of new transnational circuits that involved a full transformation of migra-
tion processes and a clear challenge to the ways of studying those processes. These
transformations affected two sociospatial images that dominated the social science
discourse on rural populations in Mexico but also, and more broadly, a good deal
of the social sciences’ distinction between modern and traditional populations
in both the metropolitan centers and the Third World peripheries. Those images
were, first, community as a distinctive way of life, with all the attendant presuppo-
sitions about its uniqueness and internally cohesive structure of values and beliefs;
and then, center/​periphery that, similarly, presupposed a clear separation between
place-​bound cultures with differential levels of development. Aguililans’ migra-
tion had developed into what Rouse called a transnational circuit that had deeply
affected their economic orientation and their sociospatial relations. The lives of
these proudly independent small-​scale farmers had been deeply affected by what
we have come to understand as neoliberal restructuring, which, only a few years
later, would be officially sanctioned by the signing of NAFTA. As a result, many
of them had concluded that their dreams of independent life, based on farming
or small-​scale business in Aguililla, were only possible with the money they could
collect working as immigrant service workers in the expanding and polarized
 35

The Transnational Turn 35

economy of the Silicon Valley. In so doing, Aguililans had managed to carve a

very specific working-​class dream of capital investment in Aguililla—​to fund small
family businesses and build better houses for their families—​that could only be
realized by working as proletarians of the service economy in Redwood City.
Their migration destination would not accept them as permanent residents, much
less citizens, while the labor market in their place of origin, where their actual
legal citizenship was limited by their poverty, would not allow for capital accumu-
lation.This social dream of a better life only existed within and because of the cir-
cuit transnationally connecting these two places: “Indeed, through the continuous
circulation of people, money, goods, and information, the various settlements have
become so closely woven together that, in an important sense, they have come to
constitute a single community spread across a variety of sites, something I refer to
as a ‘transnational migrant circuit’” (Rouse 14).
The transnational circuit, this new form of social life, was not fully bound
by any single spatial location. It actually involved a cultural bifocality, irreduc-
ible to a singular place, and occurred in a new kind of border zone, one that had
become internal to the United States and Mexico, connecting Redwood City
and Aguililla. In the lives of Aguililans, as Rouse put it, “the border is the con-
tinuous confrontation of two or more referential codes” because they “see their
current lives and future possibilities as involving simultaneous engagements in
34
places associated with markedly different forms of experience” (14–​15). In liv-
ing their lives beyond the conceptual dichotomies of assimilation and resistance,
difference and contradiction, that had theretofore organized migration studies,
Aguililans insisted on complementarity and coexistence, lived within a new socio-
spatial configuration that a few years later scholars such as Manuel Castells and
Bruno Latour would call network and assemblage respectively. In so doing, Rouse
also questioned the explanatory power of the assimilation paradigm and described
examples of what, around the same time, Néstor García Canclini called deter-
ritorializing dynamics and hybrid cultural processes and identities affecting Latin
Americans, migrants or not.
In Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and
Deterritorialized Nation-​States (1994), Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina
Szanton Blanc produced what is often considered the first systematic statement on
the emergence of transnationalism and transnational studies. The authors aimed
at producing “a transnational analytical framework” that would help immigration
studies to “come to terms adequately with the experience and consciousness of
this new immigrant population” (Basch et al. 4). As the authors saw it, this popula-
tion was different from traditional conceptions of immigrants, uprooting them-
selves from a country of origin in order to slowly assimilate into their new home
country, gradually losing their social, economic and, eventually, cultural connec-
tions to their place of origin. It was also different from the idea of the transient
migrant who came to a destination as a temporary worker but was never expected
to establish more permanent links in that context. Neither traditionally displaced
36

36 Juan Poblete

immigrant developing full new roots in a new setting nor passing migrant work-
ing there for a single season, the new transnational immigrants or transmigrants—​
which in Basch et al.’s case studies were coming to New York from St Vincent,
Grenada, Haiti, and the Philippines—​were operating within what the authors
called transnational social fields: “We define ‘transnationalism’ as the processes
by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-​stranded social relations that link
together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transna-
tionalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross
geographic, cultural, and political borders” (7).
Like Rouse, Basch et al. were interested in generating a new theoretical lan-
guage to describe and respond to the new realities of human contact, displace-
ment, and complexity on the ground. Such language needed to be capable of
understanding and explaining new forms of social identities, agencies, and actions
that were not predicated on a straightforward belonging to one culture, firmly
placed in one territory, but operated, instead, in the network of social interactions
connecting nation-​states at different scales through multiple technological, eco-
nomic, sociopolitical, and cultural means. Like Rouse’s Aguililans, these new trans-
migrants in New York were trying to forge possible lives that resulted from the
intersection between their dreams and aspirations, on the one hand, and multiple
social constraints in both their places of origin and destination, on the other: “For
Caribbean and Filipino peoples, the ability to live transnationally is an accommo- 36
dation both to the controlling forces of global capitalism, and to their place within
the global racial order. For them, transnationalism is a creative response to these
forces.” (Basch et al. 10).
In analyzing these transnational lives that “create social fields that cross national
boundaries” (22), Basch et al. tried to systematically connect their work to a few
theoretical premises: first, that transnationalism cannot be separated from the
global reorganization of labor and capital; second, that what they called “bounded
social science concepts that conflate physical location, culture, and identity” may
actually hinder the study of transnationalism; and finally, that the transmigrants
moved in a social space doubly conditioned by the forms of hegemony articulat-
ing identities and agency in both the sending and the receiving contexts (22).
As the subtitle of the book indicates, one of the most important contribu-
tions of Nations Unbound was its insistence on the multiplicity and intricacy of
each one of its three terms: there were immigrants’ transnational projects but
there were also nation-​states’ transnational efforts; there were postcolonial pre-
dicaments at both sending and receiving societies, and, finally, nation-​states were
being deterritorialized at both ends. Through their engagement in all kinds of
voluntary associations—​“benefit societies, sports clubs, social and cultural clubs,
vocational and professional associations […] political clubs, […] and churches”
(98)—​transmigrants develop ways of coping and advancing in the class and race-​
based contexts of their societies of origin and destination, but they also lend
themselves to, or actively participate in, the efforts of their home countries to
 37

The Transnational Turn 37

reterritorialize them as emigrated but important participants in hegemonic forms

of nation-​building. Some forms of deterritorializing transnationalism may chal-
lenge the state while others extend the latter’s reach beyond its geopolitical bor-
ders reinforcing “the division of the entire globe into nation-​states” and making
it so that “the nation’s people may live anywhere in the world and still not live
outside of the state” (269). Oftentimes masking with their remittances highly
unequal forms of distribution of resources and capital in their home countries,
transmigrants engaged in efforts to achieve “individual social mobility and secu-
rity” but contributed at the same time “to the maintenance of the larger struc-
tures of exploitation within which they are enmeshed” (262). In sum, the authors
highlighted both the de-​and re-​territorializing dynamics in the United States
and their countries of origin, illuminating some of the most interesting social
challenges to the preeminence of the nation-​state, but also its always-​in-​process
forms of adaptation and reproduction. Transmigrants, themselves the result of
global economic restructuring, used their metropolitan knowledge and experi-
ences to critique their political leaders at home, but they also provided cheap
labor in New York and collectively sent important amounts of money back to
their countries, providing access to foreign currency and goods that “make the
economies of the labor-​exporting countries seem more viable and independent
than it is the case” (278).
36
By 2001, with at least a decade of accumulated transnational studies, Peggy
Levitt’s The Transnational Villagers could study in great detail how transnationalism
affected those who migrated (but would often return) and those who did not
move (but may migrate) in the transnational social field established between the
village of Miraflores, in the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica Plain, a neighbor-
hood in Boston, Massachusetts. By then, reflecting the trajectory of transnational
studies from Rouse on, she could introduce her book by saying “This book is
about everyday life in a transnational village.” Like Rouse’s work on El Aguililla,
Levitt’s was “about how ordinary people are incorporated into the countries that
receive them while remaining active in the places they come from, and about how
life in sending and receiving countries changes as a result. It explores the cost and
benefits of transnational practices” (4).
Like Luis E. Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith in “The Locations of
Transnationalism” (1998), Levitt could insist on the denseness of the local and its
specific forms of manifesting the global. Guarnizo and Smith had distinguished
what they took to be some celebratory humanities-​based accounts of globaliza-
tion processes and postmodern identities as relatively liberated from the nation-​
state, from their own social science approach that highlighted “the actual mooring
and, thus, boundedness of transnationalism by the opportunities and constraints
found in particular localities” (12).The authors spoke of new forms of nationalism
instead of postnationalisms, and of grounded reactions to transnationalism by both
sending and receiving states. Instead of counter-​narratives of the nation, Smith and
Guarnizo emphasized the reinscription of transnational actors and processes in a
38

38 Juan Poblete

dual nation-​state context. In this way, transmigrants “may be doubly empowered

or doubly subordinated, depending on historically specific local circumstances”
(9). Picking up Smith and Guarnizo’s distinction between a globalization from
above (that of global capitalism, global media, and supranational organizations)
and a globalization from below (informal economies, infra-​ethnic nationalisms,
and grassroots actors and processes) and their insistence on the renovated capacity
of the nation-​state to respond creatively to all these challenges, Levitt proposed to
develop in her book the level of community, as an in-​between scale. For her, this
“intermediary level” had three important advantages: communities were “one of
several mechanisms mediating between ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels of transnationalism”;
they “offer migrants a variety of ways in which to distribute their energies and
loyalties between their sending and receiving countries”; and, most importantly for
Levitt’s study, they provided “a constant reminder that the impact of transnational
migration extends far beyond the migrant to the individuals and collectivities
that remain behind” (Levitt 7). What made Miraflores a transnational village were,
indeed, two fundamental characteristics: first, Mirafloreños did not need to travel
to be members of this new transnational entity. Instead, the continuous involve-
ment of their migrated co-​locals in the affairs, economy, and social reproduction
of the village transformed it to such an extent that it generated new positionalities
and opportunities for actors who did not travel. Second, the key factor allowing
for this process of transformation of and adaptation to the local environment was 38
what Levitt called social remittances, i.e. “the ideas, behaviors, and social capital
that flow from receiving to sending communities” (11). The socially transforma-
tive capacity of social remittances to reshape Miraflores for all involved (regardless
of whether they had moved) was made possible and enhanced by the cumulative
action of a thick layer of community “political, religious, and civic organizations
[…] that allow migrants to express and act upon dual allegiances” (12). Miraflores,
Levitt clarified, responding to some of the most common critiques of this very
localized focus in transnational studies, was not unique. In fact, its patterns could
be seen in Mexican, Salvadoran, Jamaican, Trinitarian, and other contexts. It was
not experiencing a short-​lived process either, as outmigration to the Boston area
was at the time at least thirty years old, it had become essential for the life of the
village, and it was happening at a time of increasing official recognition of some
form of dual membership from many countries. A final decisive element, shared
by Miraflores and many other transnational villages in the Americas, was the fact
that its migrants wanted to remain active in their original local contexts because
“they are unable to achieve full social membership in the United States,” that is
to say, because they are oftentimes discriminated against in racialized practices
that directly limit their chances of incorporating more fully in their new contexts.
Transnational involvement in the life of Miraflores offered its migrant villagers
a way “to recoup their sense of purpose and self-​worth. Though they may feel
isolated and unwelcome as immigrants, they are still treated as respected and valu-
able members of their sending communities” (12). Both those processes were new
 39

The Transnational Turn 39

when compared to most prior migration histories to the United States: negatively,
as in the limited or impossible assimilation available to these racialized migrants;
positively, as in the available alternative of finding at home a form of compensa-
tion, legitimation and justification for the sacrifices abroad.
Like the Aguililan dream in Rouse’s study, for the people of Miraflores life as
desired had become inextricably dependent on a simultaneous engagement with
two local contexts spanning two nation-​states. Most striking, perhaps, in relation
to this transnational dream are two important aspects of it: first, the fact that the
experience of being discriminated against in the United States as blacks (some-
thing of a shock for many of them) does not necessarily make these Mirafloreños
less racist against socially constructed Haitian blacks at home: “Rather than mak-
ing them more sympathetic to minorities, their encounters with racism in the
United States prompted some Mirafloreños to assert their racial superiority even
more adamantly than before” (111). Second, the fact that the flow of economic,
social, and cultural remittances has significantly changed Miraflores, both in ways
the migrants intended and some they did not. Migration has made possible a bet-
ter life for many of the migrants’ relatives at home but it has also subverted their
value system (self-​confidence and belief in hard work, for example) and made
them dependent on their departed kin. It has allowed better education for the
oftentimes grandparent-​raised children left behind, but it has also subverted the
38
value of an education itself (since migration to the United States offers itself as the
best and fastest way of getting ahead in life). In creating a class of youth belonging
to what Robert Smith—​in order to describe the effect of remittance dollarization
on the economy and society of Ticuani, another transnational village in Puebla,
Mexico—​has labeled a “remittance bourgeoisie” (50), Mirafloreños in Boston
have also seen what many consider an erosion of “deeply entrenched norms about
respect and authority” (Levitt 83).
Levitt pays particular attention to three types of organizations (the Catholic
Church, a political party, and a nongovernmental Miraflores development com-
mittee) in order to highlight the different capacities of different actors to articulate
a transnational agenda, act transnationally, and generate transnational results.While
they are all operating within the new social reality produced by social remittances
and their projection onto the native place of the lessons and experiences afforded
by the receiving one, not all of them are in the same position or are affected or
effective in the same way.Transnationalism from below is both a pattern spreading
globally, recognizable in many different locations, and a densely local phenom-
enon with a degree of specificity that demands very close focus and attention.

The Promises of Transnationalism

Transnationalism’s early promise was predicated on a number of possible effects
the new field could have on existing social and knowledge configurations. First,
transnationalism could lead to interdisciplinary dialogues and multidisciplinary
40

40 Juan Poblete

research in the social sciences (Morawska). Transnationalism could also specifi-

cally help migration studies go beyond the hegemonic forms of social organiza-
tion based on unequal distribution of economic, human, and social capital in
both sending and receiving countries (a form of social justice); methodological
nationalism, especially US exceptionalism and the theory of assimilation (a form
of post-​nationalism); and the political, cultural and experiential confines of the
nation, thus involving a general broadening of horizons (a transformation of citi-
zenship and a form of cosmopolitanism). Finally, transnationalism could be a way
of potentially disrupting the configuration of US/​Latin American relations, their
borders and hierarchies (a form, perhaps, of post-​imperialism).
In a 2008 evaluation, “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” for example,
three historians—​Laura Brigs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T.Way—​wrote: “In this
article, we argue against writing histories or analysis that take national boundar-
ies as fixed, implicitly timeless, or even always meaningful” (627). They proposed
that: “‘transnationalism’ can do to the nation what gender did for sexed bod-
ies: provide the conceptual acid that denaturalizes all their deployments” (627).
For them, transnationalism could be “a strategy for identifying the ideological
work of the nation” (637) when it comes to understanding, for example, the subtle
structure of race relations in the United States which combines African American
exclusion, historically, with their political deployment as true Americans, against
other minorities demanding civil rights who are perceived as permanently alien, 40
like Asian Americans or Latinos; or, to give another example, the naturalization
of the concept of Guatemalan national economy against the so-​called informal
economy—​which, in fact, may be the true dominant economic activity in the
country—​and its repression, as an excuse for global capitalist and American impe-
rial interventions: “In this sense, the economy is simultaneously bigger (extending
beyond national boundaries) and more local (the informal economy) than the
nation; in this case, the ‘national economy’ emerges as an ideological invention to
construct national ‘underdevelopment’” (638).
This work of deconstructing and overcoming the limitations of the nation-​
state as a naturalized container for the perfect coincidence of territory, culture,
and society was also being developed during the 1990s by Latin American schol-
ars under the influence of their peers from India. One of the clearest forms of
this program and critique can be found in the Latin American Subaltern Studies
Group Manifesto. It highlights the need to distinguish among the state (histori-
cally at the service of the economic interests of the national bourgeoisie), the
nation (which the manifesto sees, in its historically dominant discursive shape,
as the almost exclusive result of the labor of the state and its institutions, them-
selves dominated by the white bourgeoisie), and the people, which defines as the
ensemble of subaltern populations whose participation, ways of cultural, social and
political organization, must be visibilized and de-​invisibilized (Rodríguez).
In the broader social sciences, this effort to de-​naturalize the nation as a
container of the social has taken the name of the critique of methodological
 41

The Transnational Turn 41

nationalism. Transnationalism and transnational researchers (especially Nina Glick

Schiller) have been central participants in the formulation and refinement of this
critique for transnational migration studies or what, more broadly, has been called
“cross border studies” (Amelina et al. 1).
In an influential article on methodological nationalism within the social sci-
ences and, more specifically, in migration studies, Wimmer and Glick Schiller
define the concept as follows: “Methodological nationalism is the naturalization
of the nation-​state by the social sciences. Scholars who share this intellectual ori-
entation assume that countries are the natural units for comparative studies, equate
society with the nation-​state, and conflate national interests with the purposes of
the social sciences” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 576).
They identify three variants of methodological nationalism: “ignoring or dis-
regarding” the key relevance of nationalism as in general sociological theories of
modernity and modern societies; naturalizing the boundaries of the nation-​state
as the undisputed and obvious unit of analysis by, among other things, limiting the
collecting of data to that space; and territorializing most social processes within
the boundaries of a given nation-​state, thus sanitizing the history of the state
as separate from ethnic nationalisms and ignoring or downplaying the imperial,
colonial and “transborder foundations of particular nation-​state building projects”
such as England or France (581).
40
Transnationalism has also deepened a number of research strands in the social
sciences on the transformations of citizenship under global neoliberal conditions.
If following T. H. Marshall the concept of citizenship is understood as in per-
manent expansion historically, moving from civic (the rights of the individual)
to political (the right to vote and representation) to social (guaranteed right to a
certain level of education, health, welfare, social security protection) to cultural
(the right to express one’s culture in public) forms of citizenship, transnationalism
could be said to be a further widening of the concept to include dual and postna-
tional forms of citizenship, but also quasi-​citizenships and noncitizenships (Sassen;
Bosniak; Tonkiss and Bloom).
For example, Saskia Sassen has proposed to study certain cities she named
“global cities” in times of neoliberal globalization as spaces where the emergence
of new subjects and new locations for politics can be detected. Global cities, in
so far as they are the result of partial denationalizing processes, are a particularly
powerful example of that emergence and posit the possibility of a reinvention of
citizenship in the global era. According to Sassen, citizenship, historically strongly
associated to the nation-​state, is crucially tensed by the opposition between its
concept as a legal status and its condition as a normative or ideal project. Located
in the space opened by this opposition are both the frustrated hopes of those
(ethnic, religious, sexual) minorities for whom the formal status as citizens is not
enough to guarantee their effective political agency, as well as the social prac-
tices of those not acknowledged as citizens (the undocumented migrants) who,
nevertheless, have been able to establish an “informal social contract” with the
42

42 Juan Poblete

host societies. Thus, undocumented migrants, through their daily labor, s­ chooling,
religious and cultural practices are in fact grounding the basis of their claims
to citizenship and, perhaps, expanding the meanings of the concept of citizen-
ship itself at a time of transformation of the national. This city in a process of
­denationalization—​due to the combined effect of mass migrations and the emer-
gence of the global market and transnational agents (at the top, the business elite
and the international bureaucracies, at the bottom, migrant workers) which are its
most notable actors—​is part of a new geography of politics and the political. In the
city, the poor, the displaced, and the migrants move in the same urban space as the
powerful and hyperconnected to the global context whom they serve in their res-
taurants, bathrooms, taxies, hotels, and homes. According to Sassen, those migrants
acquire a new visibility, a presence, which, despite not being directly linked to an
increase of their real power, can still be conceptualized as the possibility of a new
form of politics. In the conclusion I propose my own reading of this possibility.
Finally, the category of noncitizenship has been proposed to study the grow-
ing border zones and gray areas in which sizable populations of asylum seekers,
would-​be refugees, and undocumented migrants live for extended periods of time,
without access to citizenship and the rights it provides. In presenting a special
issue of the journal Citizenship Studies, Katherine Tomkiss and Tendayi Bloom
define the concept as follows: “We argue that challenging the foundationalism of
citizenship is necessary in order to conceptualise a situation in which noncitizens 42
have access to rights, not as magnanimous gesture and not through the issuing
of citizenship, but instead through an appreciation of the rights of noncitizens
themselves” (843).

The Critiques of Transnationalism

In what one could call the internal critique of transnationalism, Nina Glick
Schiller—​in a presentation read on her behalf at a panel titled “Transnationalism
at 25: Contributions, Limitations, and Future Prospects” at the Latin American
Studies Association (LASA) in 2016—​said that she and her collaborators in Nations
Unbound had failed to see and much less theorize the rise of neoliberalism. In fact,
the later responses within the field of transnational studies to neoliberalism as a
key factor of analysis for an understanding of international migration and trans-
nationalism can be defined by two different positions also represented at the same
LASA session. On the one hand, Luin Goldring commented how around 2006
she understood transnational studies to no longer be the non plus ultra of migration
theory. Moving to Canada at the time, she discovered how she needed to include
in her analysis the specifics of state policy and deportation, but also Foucauldian
studies about governmentality and the management of migrant populations. Here,
according to Goldring, concepts such as illegalization, deportability, and violence
in the regulation of people’s mobility became crucial and went beyond some of
the early emphasis of transnational studies.1
 43

The Transnational Turn 43

Robert Smith, on the other hand, acknowledged that while transnationalism

brought about important epistemological questions about methodological nation-
alism, it does not produce useful tools when it comes to some practical and urgent
matters in the life of the undocumented in the United States. When people are
increasingly being deported in big numbers or threatened with impending depor-
tation, only the use of nation-​based vernacular American political concepts, such
as civil rights, will enable an appropriate response.
Neoliberalism, then, was responsible for the restructuring of the relations
between power, capital, and labor across the world, and thus for creating the con-
ditions of expulsion that sent the migrants away from their countries, but it also, in
any given concrete political scenario, played out as a politics of generalized precar-
ity, a game of blaming the poor for their lot and immigrants and refugees for their
presence, and permanently excluding vast sectors, especially youth of color, from
employment and economic participation. At the same time, as we will see in the
conclusion, neoliberal globalization could be the differentially shared condition of
workers here and there, and thus a possible ground for a common politics.
In an early and influential critique of transnationalism, “The Study of
Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Alejandro
Portes, Luis Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt proposed to disentangle transnational-
ism, as a new field of study, from a series of internal contradictions and claims gen-
42
erated by both practitioners and its critics. For some, transnationalism was a totally
new phenomenon, while for their critics there was nothing new under a sun that
had seen previous waves of migrants develop thick networks of contact between
sending and receiving country, participate in home country political affairs and
get involved in socially oriented construction and philanthropy. For some, a sub-
group of entrepreneurs was the main actor in the establishment of transnational
social fields; for others, that condition encompassed all migrants. For many, trans-
nationalism was an integral part of the globalization of capital and labor, for oth-
ers, it was mostly a grassroots reaction to those dynamics. In order to avoid these
problems of definition and scope, the authors proposed “to delimit the concept
of transnationalism to occupations and activities that require regular and sustained
social contacts over time across borders for their implementation” (Portes et al.
219). This definition, the authors claimed, had the advantage of separating true
transnationalism from activities that did not involve a significant number of the
migrant population, were of an exceptional or occasional nature, or could be
explained better by an already existing scientific concept. It also allowed a clear
distinction between three types of transnationalism: economic (as engaged by
entrepreneurs), political (as developed by “party officials, government function-
aries, or community leaders” [221]), and cultural (as carried out by those seeking
to reinforce national or local identities through the organization and enjoyment
of cultural activities). Finally, choosing a second axis of distinction, Portes et al.
suggested that because transnationalisms from above were well known and stud-
ied by political economy and globalization studies, the true new field was that of
4

44 Juan Poblete

migrant transnationalisms from below or grassroots transnationalism. In this way,

Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt turned what in Rouse, Levitt, Basch et al., had been
as much a scientific endeavor as a progressive stance in solidarity with subaltern
populations and their forms of world-​making, into a more neutral or objective
preference justified mostly on the grounds of object definition, method, and epis-
temology. By the same token, they partially moved the field from the hands of
anthropologists working with ethnography-​based methods to those of economists,
sociologists, and political scientists working with large-​scale surveys.
In Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald’s “Transnationalism in Question”
(2004), the authors credit transnationalism with illuminating something the soci-
ology of assimilation, with its emphasis on the gradual and naturalized loss of links
connecting the ethnic migrant with their place of origin, had worked hard at
obscuring: that “connections between here and there are an inherent and endur-
ing component of the long distance migrations of the modern world” (1193),
i.e. that twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century migrants have always been involved
in a complex process combining, simultaneously, some form of assimilation and
some way of transnational attachment. At the same time, Waldinger and Fitzgerald
criticize transnational studies because, like assimilation sociology, they make two
mistakes: first, they forget how the nation-​state as container of society, with all
its attendant inclusions and exclusions, is actively made and remade in politics
through the agency of state and non-​state actors; second, they take sides instead of 4
remaining impartial scientific analysts. For Waldinger and Fitzgerald, assimilation
scholars naturalize the nation-​state within which they operate and thus the assimi-
lation process itself, while the transnationalists side with the migrants as if the latter
were always part of forms of subversion of the hegemony of the nation-​state here
and there. In so doing, both assimilation and transnational theorists turn the pro-
cesses they study into theories of or models for society, without ever acknowledg-
ing the power of the state to shape the specific outcomes, the plurality of possible
outcomes, and the negative reactions and consequences their efforts elicit.
Instead of what they see as the limitations of both the sociology of immigration
and transnationalism, Waldinger and Fitzgerald propose “an alternative approach
that emphasizes the interactions of migrants with states and civil society actors in
both sending and receiving countries” (1179). For their approach to what they call
“trans-​state politics” and their variations, they propose to develop a comparative
and historical framework capable of going beyond the single case in the here and
now. In that, they echo previous important migration history-​based critiques of
transnational studies such as Morawska and Foner.
In 2011, on his way to producing a book on what he eventually called The Cross
Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants and Their Homelands (2015), in order to
distinguish his emphasis from that of committed transnationalists (such as Rouse,
Levitt, and Glick Schiller), Waldinger returned to the critique of transnational
studies from the viewpoint of political studies of migration. First, he charged the
term transnationalism itself and the field of studies it originated with conflating
45

The Transnational Turn 45

state and nation. While the state was a form of territorialization, the nation was
a form of social collectivity. This conflation produced all kinds of difficulties for
the transnationalists, since “Connectivity does not [necessarily] imply collectivity.”
While some so-​called transnational migrations did produce transnational social
fields, most did not, i.e. they did not involve the recreation of a collectivity in
diaspora. They remain instead “two-​way ties, linking place of origin with place of
destination, but leaving the scattered populations abroad unconnected” (4). This is
what Waldinger and Fitzgerald had already called, in counter-​distinction to true
transnational practices, highly localistic contacts that are not necessarily represen-
tative of broader social dynamics (1178).

Conclusion
As we saw, Waldinger and Fitzgerald insisted on including the reactions of both
the two states and the two civil societies involved at both ends as an integral
component of transnationalism: “The prevalence of transnationalism gives those
already thinking that the national community is under threat additional reason to
worry […] those reactions fully belong to the phenomenon” (1186). It does seem
possible, now, to think that those who saw transnational migration and sociocul-
tural processes of globalization as forms of escape from the claws of the nation-​
4
state, may have both overestimated the capacity of those phenomena to radically
alter the nation-​based political status quo and underestimated the capacity of
at least some nation-​states to recreate a politics of enmity within which those
migrants, now constructed as adversaries endangering the future of the nation,
are center stage actors.
One of those negative reactions to transnationalism in the American context
was that of Samuel Huntington’s in what now reads like the program for and the
preview to the Donald Trump show. In his 2004 book Who Are we? The Challenges
to American National Identity, Huntington saw the United States under a dual pres-
sure exerted by two globalizing agents: the denationalized business elite of trans-
national corporations; and the growing Hispanic, and more specifically, Mexican
migration to the United States (what Guarnizo and Smith called transnationalism
from above and below, respectively). According to Huntington, these dual pres-
sures entailed a serious geopolitical danger with deep cultural consequences for
what he perceived as the historical core of the nation: the English-​language-​based
culture of the Anglo-​Protestant settlers in which religious values and political lib-
eralism became one national ideological imaginary.
Huntington’s 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World
Order had already posited that a new form of historical conflict had emerged to
replace the end of the Cold War and its constitutive antinomies. Instead of the per-
petual peace and ever-​expanding global capitalism imagined by Frances Fukuyama
after the demise of socialism, the world-​historical struggle was now to be between
conflicting civilizations, and especially between Islamic fundamentalism and
46

46 Juan Poblete

Western civilization. Who Are we? The Challenges to American National Identity
applied this polarities-​based model to the US national context, which Huntington
saw as threatened by the dual diasporic nationalities and the transnational nature of
both Hispanic immigrants, especially Mexicans, and globally oriented American
business elites. Using an old authoritarian populist tactic, Huntington distin-
guished between the denationalized elite and a vast patriotic majority:The former
was integrated by the business, academic, and analytical services elites who con-
stituted a new emerging global class. For these cosmocrats national identification
had become secondary. Nevertheless, and very significantly, Huntington resisted
any temptation to suggest a practical way of dealing with this “danger” or reedu-
cating those unpatriotic citizens. Latino immigrants and Mexicans were less for-
tunate. Obviously, between those elites and these Mexicans there was a direct
and inextricable relationship. They were two sides of the same coin produced
globally by an ever-​expanding neoliberal capitalism. Occluding this connection,
Huntington granted the honor only to Mexicans: “Contiguity, numbers, illegal-
ity, regional concentration, persistence, and historical presence combine to make
Mexican immigration different from other immigration and to pose problems
for the assimilation of people of Mexican origin into American society” (230).
For them there was definitely an answer: stop immigration and force/​stimulate
legal US-​based Mexican residents to lose their Spanish and learn English: “There
is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-​ 46
Protestant society. Mexican-​Americans will share in that dream and in that society
only if they dream in English” (256). Culture was being used here to support a
nationalist answer to transnationalism. In fact, thinking of the future of the United
States, Huntington discarded what he called the cosmopolitan variant (dilute the
United States into the universal) and the imperial variant (Americanize the rest of
the world) in favor of a third way which he called, national:

America cannot become the world and still be America. Other peoples
cannot become American and still be themselves. America is different, and
that difference is defined in large part by its Anglo-​Protestant culture and its
religiosity. The alternative to cosmopolitanism and imperialism is national-
ism devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that
have defined America since its founding.
(365)

Now, Donald Trump has used this Huntington-​based dual program of blaming
the transnational ethnic others, Muslims and Mexicans, and what he sees as the
transnational business and intellectual liberal elite, to get to the White House and
govern in the name of making America great again, for the “true patriots.”
There are at least two other, alternative responses to a diagnosis of the new
globalized condition of life in the United States under the aegis of neoliberal-
ism. One is to insist, internally, on the virtues of democratic republicanism and
 47

The Transnational Turn 47

social liberalism and, externally, on the benefits of a cosmopolitan outlook and the
Washington consensus way of spreading neoliberal restructuring and so-​called free
trade around the world.The second, one I have advocated for some time now, is to
pay attention to the points of commonality and thus spaces for politics shared by
those who find themselves living here in the United States and elsewhere in what
I have termed internalized border zones. This would be a transnationalism of the
local, as itself transnational in nature, in ways that are distinct from but also expand
and complement transnational studies’ emphasis on the points of contact of two
societies and two nation-​states. This could be seen as my own take on follow-
ing Waldinger and Fitzgerald’s dictum that the receiving (and sending) country’s
reactions to migrants’ grassroots transnationalism are a constitutive part of trans-
national phenomena. For me, an interesting way out of the opposition transna-
tional/​national frames of reference for an understanding of the dynamics of Latino
migration to the United States is to think the processes and categories that affect
both immigrants and native citizens and point, instead of radical dichotomies, to
zones of contact, friction, and interdependence. After all, blue-​collar white male
Americans, like Dominicans or Mexicans in their respective countries, have had to
imagine themselves as connected to and affected by dynamics elsewhere, in China,
Mexico, India, Brazil, and the rest of the developing world. Globalization and the
precarization of their jobs and working conditions have added a transnational
46
dimension to lives, futures and investments (economic and libidinal) that used to
be thought exclusively within national frameworks of reference. I have called this
common framework differentially shared by Americans and US-​based migrants,
the postsocial condition.
While I cannot give more details here (see Poblete, 50), suffice to say that
the postsocial condition is both a diagnostic of the friction at the contact zones
inside the United States in which migrants (transnationalists from below) and
Americans (always the structural result of transnationalisms from above) meet in
the midst of their codependence and mutual fear and suspicion, creating, how-
ever, the space of a possible politics of mutual benefits. In these contact zones,
if there is, potentially, an expansive, democratic, boundary-​pushing transnational
imaginary that is binational, bicultural, and often transnational and transcultural,
there is also, effectively, a constricting, boundary-​enforcing national one that is
tendentially monocultural and heavily authoritarian. Contact zones inside the
United States are thus a space for the transformation of the concepts, practices
and forms of experience of the national form of citizenship beyond their tra-
ditional limits. But this transformation can as easily take the form of expansions
of citizenship as it may devolve into newly nationalistic and xenophobic restric-
tions, here and everywhere.

Note
1 On this see De Genova and Golash-​Boza.
48

48 Juan Poblete

References
Amelina, Anna, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist, and Nina Glick Schiller, edi-
tors. Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross Border Studies,
Routledge, 2012.
Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects,
Postcolonial predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-​States, Gordon & Breach, 1994.
Bosniak, Linda. The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership, Princeton
UP, 2006.
Briggs, Laura, Gladys McCormick, and T. J.Way,“Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis.”
American Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 3, 2008, pp. 625–​648.
De Genova, Nicholas. “Migrants ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual
Review of Anthropology, vol. 31, 2002, pp. 419–​447.
Foner, Nancy. “What’s New about Transnationalism? New York Immigrants Today and at
the Turn of the Century.” Diaspora, vol. 6, no. 3, 1997, pp. 355–​375.
Glick Schiller, Nina and Ayse Çaglar. Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants.
Cornell UP, 2011.
Golash-​Boza, Tania. Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions, and Deportations in Post 9/​11
America. Paradigm Publishers, 2012.
Guarnizo, Luis and Michael Peter Smith.“The Locations of Transnationalism.” Transnationalism
from Below, edited by Luis Guarnizo and Michael Peter Smith. Transaction Publishers,
1998, pp. 3–​34.
Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. Simon &
Schuster, 2004.
48
Levitt, Peggy. The Transnational Villagers. U of California P, 2001.
Morawska, Ewa. “Disciplinary Agendas and Analytic Strategies of Research on Immigrant
Transnationalism: Challenges of Interdisciplinary Knowledge.” IMR, vol. 37, no. 3, 2003,
pp. 611–​640.
Poblete, Juan. “Americanism/​o: Intercultural Border Zones in Post-​social Times.” Critical
Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories, edited
by Ben Sifuentes-​Jáuregui,Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel and Marisa Belausteguigoitia.
Palgrave, 2016, pp. 45–​59.
Portes, Alejandro, Luis Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt. “The Study of Transnationalism:
Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 22, no.
2, 1999, pp. 217–​237.
Rathod, Sarah. “Here Are the Sanctuary Cities Ready to Resist Trump’s Deportation
Threats.” Mother Jones, December 2, 2016.
Rodríguez, Ileana. “Reading Subalterns across Texts, Disciplines, and Theories: From
Representation to Recognition.” The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by
Ileana Rodríguez. Duke UP, 2001, pp. 1–​33.
Rouse, Roger. “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism.” Diaspora, vol.
1, no. 1, 1991, pp. 8–​23.
Sassen, Saskia. “The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for
Politics.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 46, 2002, pp. 4–​25.
Smith, Robert Courtney. Mexican New York. Transnational Lives of New Immigrants. U of
California P, 2006.
Tonkiss, Katherine and Tendayi Bloom, “Theorising Noncitizenship: Concepts, Debates,
and Challenges.” Citizenship Studies, vol. 19, no. 8, pp. 837–​852.
United Nations. International Migration Report, 2015, United Nations, 2016.
 49

The Transnational Turn 49

Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. Routledge, 2009.

Waldinger, Roger. “Immigrant Transnationalism.” Sociopedia.isa, 2011, pp. 1–​13.
—​—​—​. The Cross Border Connection. Immigrants, Emigrants and Their Homelands. Harvard
UP, 2015.
—​—​—​and David Fitzgerald. “Transnationalism in Question.” AJS, vol. 109, no. 5, 2004,
pp. 1177–​1195.
Wimmer, Andres and Nina Glick Schiller. “Methodological Nationalism, the Social
Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Sociology.” IMR, vol. 37,
no. 3, 2003, pp. 576–​610.

48
50

3
THE POPULAR CULTURE TURN
Pablo Alabarces

Translated by Joanna Meadvin

Introduction
In various works (Alabarces “Nueve proposiciones en torno a lo popular”;
“Introducción: Un itinerario y algunas apuestas”; “Transculturas pospopulares”), I
have claimed that the study of popular culture in Latin America closed down dur- 50

ing the 1990s, at the apogee of neoliberalism on the continent. Despite its central-
ity to discussions of the previous decade, the study of popular culture seemed to
disappear from research agendas for more than ten years: a disappearance verified
by conference panels, books, and articles published during the period. However,
twenty years later, we are witnessing both the reopening of these agendas and
the reappearance of displaced categories and subjects: the new political success of
national-​popular narratives, despite the criticism that they deserve, speaks of con-
tinuity and, more recently, return, rather than of dissolution and closure. Popular
cultures always signaled—​and continue to signal—​the dimension in which the
possibility of a democratic culture is discussed, negotiated, and disputed—​and by
extension, the possibility of fully a radical democratic society.
This essay will interrogate these processes, marking distinct turns and shifts
in their analytic and research perspectives. I will present four arguments. The
first argument concerns a specific feature of the category in Latin America that
distinguishes it from the Anglo-​Saxon tradition, a difference that has determined
the meaning of the category in our field and has influenced the development of
its research methods.The second argument will be an introduction to what I call
the “initial state” of the field that, while it recuperates older traditions, princi-
pally established itself in the 1980s in the midst of the democratic transition on
the subcontinent. The third argument focuses on what might be called the popu-
lar culture “neoliberal turn” in popular culture research agendas and perspectives,
 51

The Popular Culture Turn 51

principally in the 1990s. Finally, the fourth movement proposes a new turn that
has its origins at the end of the twentieth century and came to the fore at the
beginning of the current century, which we might call, in the spirit of recent
trends in the use of neologisms and terms invented around old categories, neo-
populist perspectives.

Latin American Difference

Given the range of uses of the category across time, and breadth of the publics
and voices involved, it would be impossible to put forth my arguments without
suggesting first, who speaks about popular cultures, saying what and how. The first
assertion should be declarative: I speak of and from the Latin American field, as
an Argentine researcher, fully formed—​and tributary, in part—​by that field and its
traditions and languages. I understand that the texts and authors that I will discuss
are well known in the English-​based field of Latin American studies; this renders
the argument more fluid. But to affirm this locus of enunciation is to simulta-
neously claim a more intimate knowledge, and also a series of specific meanings
that are different in the strong sense of difference.
Because, in Latin America, to speak of popular culture has always been—​or
almost always (definitely, from the 1980s until today)—​to speak of something more:
to speak of practices and representations that are, or could be, outside of mass
50
media, outside of the simple reference to mass culture understood as the multiple
modes in which symbolic goods are produced, circulate and are consumed with
the mediation of the—​especially electronic—​cultural industry. On the contrary,
Laura Grindstaff ’s recent text (“Culture and Popular Culture”) includes a brilliant
and productive map of the field of North American research on popular culture
where it is impossible to find any reference to practices or phenomena outside
of mass communication—​included among them new technologies of circulation
and consumption of images and text.
The reasons for this difference—​a mode that is broadly popular, versus a mode
that is simultaneously broad and restricted to mass culture—​are extensive and
complicated: briefly, some of the differences can be located as much in traditions
of reading as in the particular characteristics of the Latin American societies and
cultures that gave rise to distinct processes and categories. Among these differ-
ences, the following four are the most important:

1. Ruralisms: Long into the twentieth century, the rural population was more
important in Latin America than in the Anglo-​Saxon world. Following
Peter Burke’s unparalleled study (La cultura popular en la Europa Moderna), the
importance of the rural was critical to the construction of the very category
popular culture. This continued to be true in a much of Latin America. And it
continues to be true today, albeit with the now indisputable presence of mass
media.
52

52 Pablo Alabarces

2. Indigenisms: The presence of enormous populations of native or indigenous

peoples—​a central characteristic of the subcontinent—​has always required
special treatment of its cultural configurations with respect to Anglo-​Saxon
traditions. With the exception of countries with high levels of European
immigration, subjected to the harshest whitening, Europeanizing, and de-​
indigenizing practices—​Argentina and Uruguay among them—​the indige-
nous presence was crucial to debates over the question of the popular: it
would be impossible to construct its conceptual field without taking into
account the everyday presence of indigenous customs, traditions, memories,
and even languages—​many countries finally adopted native languages as offi-
cial languages along with Spanish, the language of the conquest. Among these
differences, we might note the question of African American populations,
but their presence in Latin American popular culture debates is distinct from
earlier forms, and at the same time, more similar to the Anglo-​Saxon debate.
Although there was discussion in earlier periods—​especially in Fernando
Ortiz’s key text, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940, 2002), a foun-
dational work in the cultural theory of the subcontinent—​the reappearance
of debates over the relationship between Afro-​American cultures and pop-
ular culture is contemporaneous with its treatment in Britain and North
America.1
3. Politicizations: In contrast with the British and North American landscape, the 52
question of popular culture on the subcontinent is tightly linked to its enact-
ment in political debates. From the beginning of the twentieth century, it first
appeared with anarchism and later with specific Marxisms, including those
signaled diacritically as American—​the work of Juan Carlos Mariátegui is key
to these. Certainly, until the end of the twentieth century, the question of the
popular was indivisible from its relationship to political debates that reached
their climax in the 1960s, after the Cuban Revolution. Debating popular cul-
ture is always something more than the mere description of mass culture as a
space of alienation—​although it may be that as well.
4. Populisms: By now, an entire library has been written on Latin American pop-
ulisms, I will not summarize it here. I will limit myself to pointing out that the
presence of populisms in Latin America in the twentieth century was critical
to the question of popular culture. Populisms—​I am thinking specifically
of Argentine Peronism, the most successful populism of the Latin American
twentieth century—​find their favorite textual expressions in mass culture;
there is no successful populism without radio and mass press (and later, tele-
vision). Nevertheless, they inevitably require an excess that happens outside
of mass culture: in traditionalist and folkloric recovery projects, at the site of
street mobilization, in the state’s celebratory rituals, that belong to mass cul-
ture, but also in protests and carnivalesque riots that exceed it, or in the field
of languages and popular customs that populist discourse must capture and
exhibit as the horizon of possibility of its own practice and “ideology.”
 53

The Popular Culture Turn 53

A Point of Departure
I have proposed a kind of initial state of the art of popular culture studies begin-
ning in the 1980s. This choice is not arbitrary. It is a response to the field of
study itself, rather than any external pressures. Although, in this moment, the
treatment of the question of popular culture takes on features rooted in earlier
forms—​be they gauchesca, or Mariátegui or Gramsci—​and, as I will elaborate,
such features will endure until at least 1994. The 1980s produced an explosion
of discussion on the topic as well as key texts for such rendering of the field
of study. Key to the intense, renewed preoccupation with the question of the
popular is the fact that this decade is contemporaneous with Latin America’s
democratic transitions.
This scene is organized—​ or could be organized—​ by five texts. The first,
and last to be published, was Comunicación y Culturas Populares en Latinoamérica
(CLACSO, 1987). The volume was jointly published by the Catalan publishing
house, Gustavo Gili and FELAFACS. FELAFACS is the Latin American Federation
of Departments of Social Communication, at the time, an emerging organization
that linked newly formed departments and schools of communication that were
spreading across the subcontinent. The volume compiled work presented during
a conference of the same name organized four years earlier (in 1983, at the exact
moment of transition) by CLACSO (Latin American Council of Social Sciences)
52
in Buenos Aires, a conference at the intersection of various critical vectors.
First, Jesús Martín-​Barbero and Néstor García Canclini took the lead in the
organization, coordination, and editing of the volume.They were clearly presented,
as Bourdieu would say, as guiding intellectuals of the field and topic. Second, the
presence of CLACSO, an organization that played a crucial role across the con-
tinent in supporting and protecting intellectuals exiled for political reasons, was
vital. CLACSO had organized an entire research arm on the theme of communi-
cation and popular culture—​although symptomatic of the displacement to which
I’ve alluded, and which to which I will return—​it would not do so again until the
current day. Third, the presence of a Catalan publishing house represented by its
Mexican branch revealed that the center of the Latin American publishing world
had been displaced to the Aztec axis. And finally, the presence of FELAFACS indi-
cated the new role for departments of communication, which, displacing sociol-
ogy and anthropology, would go on to dominate these debates.
The second book was local. Despite its importance to the populist study of
popular culture, it barely circulated across the continent. This was the collection
Medios de comunicaci ó n y cultura popular (Media and Popular Culture), a collection
of texts by the Argentines, Aníbal Ford, Jorge Rivera, and Eduardo Romano, who
had themselves participated in the 1983 CLACSO meeting. The text was pub-
lished in Buenos Aires in 1985, just as the three returned to the University of
Argentina after the dictatorship. As I have argued elsewhere (Alabarces “Un des-
tino sudamericano”), the volume is a comprehensive synthesis of the Argentine
54

54 Pablo Alabarces

populist tradition, which was the foundation of the study of popular culture in
the late 1960s.
The culmination of these perspectives was a 1987 book, co-​published by
FELAFACS and Gustavo Gili in Barcelona, the celebrated, De los medios a las
mediaciones (Communication, Culture and Hegemony), by the Spanish-​Colombian,
Jesús Martín-​Barbero. Parts of the book had already been published as articles as
early as 1982; its publication as a book confirmed an intellectual trajectory that
had already placed him, as noted earlier, right at the center of the field of research.
Each of these texts makes clear the now familiar notion that popular culture is
something more, an excess that escapes the network of mass media.The books’ titles
themselves imply as much: communication or mass media and popular culture,
mass media and mediation.This insight was emphasized by the other two key texts
of the period. Culturas Populares en el Capitalismo (Transforming Modernity: Popular
Culture in Mexico) by Néstor García Canclini, was published by Nueva Imagen in
Mexico in 1982, and recently reissued in 2002 by Grijalbo, with a prologue to
the new edition. Both contrary to and also in line with my argument, the mass
media barely appears in Canclini’s book. The focus is handicrafts produced by
indigenous peoples and peasants in contemporary Mexico. García Canclini was
able to perfectly formulate popular culture as merely that excess of which we have
been speaking: from an anthropological perspective—​simultaneously shaped by
Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu—​the popular is the mode in which the subaltern 54
understand, elaborate, and transform the world from their particular way of life.
And finally, outside of the Spanish-​speaking mainstream but introducing the—​at
this point, intense—​Brazilian debate, Marilena Chauí’s book Chauí’s Conformismo
e Resistência. Aspectos da cultura popular no Brasil, published by Brasiliense in São
Paulo in 1985. Chauí defines popular culture as culture made by the people rather
than for the people, and consequently, her study traces the ways in which the
Brazilian popular classes—​especially the working class—​engage in practices resis-
tant to the hegemonic classes and against their repressive strategies.
As various authors have indicated (especially the inescapable Grimson and
Varela), the dominant preoccupation during this time period was with democracy
in the wake of dictatorship. It was impossible to think about democracy without
thinking about the common people and their “culture,” and the organization of a
conference concerned with popular culture in Buenos Aires in 1983 is only proof
of this preoccupation.
Martín-​Barbero’s 1987 text, De los medios a las mediaciones, makes this argument
at length. We might read the book as a perfect summary of old traditions and new
readings: popular culture’s populist foundation forged by Peronist intellectuals like
Ford, Rivera, and Romano; the decisive influence of Gramscian perspectives; the
new insights provided by British cultural studies and related fields—​I’m referring
not only to Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, but also to Raymond Williams and
E. P. Thompson; the definitive discovery of Pierre Bourdieu and Mikhail Bakhtin;
Carlo Ginzburg’s novel work. This new library forms the foundation on which
 5

The Popular Culture Turn 55

Martín-​Barbero constructs his famous triangle: from popular culture to mass cul-
ture; from mass culture to popular culture; popular uses of mass culture. The tri-
angle proposes a reading that shifts constantly between mass culture and popular
culture in an endless game of appropriation, resignification, depoliticization, and
the use of one by the other.
At the same time, it seems that the Barberian material poses some risks. Martín-​
Barbero set forth his argument along two lines that lend themselves to conservative
readings. The first was militantly anti-​Adorno; it made the “Adorno–​Horkheimer
branch” of the Frankfurt School responsible for all evils of Latin American cultural
criticism. Adornian Frankfurtism was held responsible for elitist negation of popu-
lar culture, and given a hegemonic position in cultural criticism that was far from
proven. The argument seemed to be based on an extended elitist common sense
rather than on theoretical or intellectual positions that no important author at the
time seemed to have proposed. Against Adornian Frankfurtism, Martín-​Barbero
proposed a total recuperation of Benjamin, conceived of as the bold anti-​Adorno,
reading “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” as a sort of proclamation
of the popular experience of consumption of mass culture. The second line of
argumentation was an anti-​Marxism, paradoxically organized around four great
Marxists, Benjamin, Gramsci, Raymond Williams and Edward P. Thompson. This
inevitably led to Guillermo Sunkel’s analysis of the representation of the popular
54
in the Chilean popular press (Razón y pasión en la prensa popular). Sunkel found that
the popular press, using a dramatic-​symbolic matrix, managed to depict the popular
world in a more powerful and comprehensive manner than the leftist press which,
organized along a rational-​enlightened matrix, displaced all that wasn’t strictly and
explicitly political from its representation.
Another remarkable aspect of the period is the emergence and consolida-
tion of perspectives on the popular public reception of mass communication; this
announced a shift to an interest in consumerism that would dominate the 1990s.
The active reception of mass culture had been first proposed by the Argentine popu-
lists who posited it in order to understand the relationship between the popular
classes and the Peronist state propaganda, but also the reasons for which Peronism
had survived as a hegemonic nucleus in the popular experience despite eigh-
teen years of bans, banishment, and exclusion from mass media (especially Ford
et al.). These proposals, formulated as intuitions, rather than empirical conclu-
sions, were enriched by the Birmingham School—​especially Stuart Hall’s foun-
dational “Encoding/​Decoding” (1980)—​and became dominant during the long
1980s. At CLACSO’s 1983 conference, Beatriz Sarlo was the only participant who
raised the possibility that receptive activity could be understood: in addition to
the Birmingham perspective—​Sarlo had introduced Hoggart and Williams in
Argentina at the end of the 1970s—​Sarlo came to know the Konstanz School’s
work on the esthetics of reception based in the literary theory of reading response.
As a result, Sarlo proposed to focus simultaneously on the abilities and possibili-
ties of the popular classes’ readings of mass cultural texts, and, at the same time,
56

56 Pablo Alabarces

interrogate the formal and rhetorical characteristics of those texts.With this work,
Sarlo (“Lo popular como dimensión tóica”) anticipated her own analysis of the
serial novel, which would be published in El Imperio de los sentimientos in 1985.

The Neoliberal Turn

By the end of the 1980s, Renato Ortiz had already published his first books,
which analyzed with creative lucidity phenomena from popular religious syncre-
tism (1980) to the relationship between popular and national culture (1985). In
1988, he published A moderna tradição brasileira. Cultura Brasileira e Indústria Cultural,
which introduced two novelties into the landscape I have been describing. The
first was the use of the formula tradition-​modernity which spoke of a new preoc-
cupation with the relationship between the traditional and the modern during
a time in which an intense debate over postmodernity was unfolding. The final
chapter, entitled “An International-​Popular Culture?” points toward the second
novelty, and the end of decade’s other major topic: globalization and its relation-
ship to old and new concerns with the nation-​state.
This work of Ortiz’s might be characterized as a transition toward the great
book that constitutes what I call “the neoliberal turn” of Latin American cul-
tural studies: García Canclini’s Culturas Híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la
Modernidad, published by Grijalbo in Mexico in 1990. A paradoxical turn: a turn 56
that led to the closure of the discussion on this topic.
Why do I speak of closure? Because García Canclini explicitly asserted the
impossibility of continuing to speak of “high culture,” “traditional culture,” “popu-
lar culture,” or “mass culture” in the wake of transformations produced by post-
modernity and globalization. What remained was hybridity and hybridization, as
much a state of being as a process in which all previously categorized goods mixed
and presented themselves in a new guise. Of course, I am simplifying a com-
plicated, powerful, intelligent, often contradictory text that I have attempted to
analyze in greater detail elsewhere (Alabarces “Transculturas pospopulares”); but
in general terms, and for the purposes of my argument, in balance, after Culturas
Híbridas, no one in the field of Latin American studies could return to the study
of popular culture.
Antifundamentalist panic is one of the excuses invoked by Canclini in the
2001 preface to the new edition of Culturas híbridas: “it is possible that the polemic
against folk purism and traditionalism has led me to give priority to the prosper-
ous and innovative cases of hybridization” (19). Here we find the first problem.
García Canclini chose his adversaries badly. He fought ghosts. On the one hand,
he fought a populism in retreat—​or better put, a populism displaced by a neo-​
conservatism wearing neopopulist clothing and speaking a neopopulist language;
on the other hand, he fought a fundamentalism of which only vague and distant
traces remained in Latin America. Nevertheless, he did not realize that the year
in which Culturas Híbridas started its brilliant career was the beginning of the
 57

The Popular Culture Turn 57

neoliberal decade for which strategies such as those of hybridity were perfectly
functional. The struggle against fundamentalism—​useless and already won—​was
waged in neoliberal garb.
Likewise, García Canclini assigned novelty to a condition that had always
existed: the transactions and negotiations that all cultural and social actors carry
out from the moment any society is structured as a hierarchy of classes in order
to dominate by means of coercion—​coercion also demands negotiation—​or to
create hegemonies by means of infinitely produced consensus, but also to resist,
accommodate, suffer, or thrive in the interstices. (Class struggle was always more
complicated than a simple struggle between classes: classes also rest, negotiate, for-
get the struggle, and later take it up again.) Mass culture and modernity only add
complexity and new scenarios; they don’t change the basic terms of the exchange.
The phenomena of interculturality—​also as old as the exploratory impulse and
the conquest of societies that imperialisms brought to light—​weren’t new either.
They had led more than three generations of Latin American intellectuals to think
about them, analyze them, and debate them along the lines of mestizaje, fusion,
transculturation, creolization, and syncretism.These concepts do not lack explana-
tory power, although the analysis and debate demonstrate limitations or specifici-
ties.The category hybridization was proposed as “a term of translation,” but in the
very same movement, was revealed as a fetish.
56
To demand a choice between populist and fundamentalist points of view is to
suggest a false decision that involves—​as do all intellectual operations—​political
assumptions. The end of Culturas híbridas, “how to be radical without being fun-
damentalist,” is exemplary in this regard. There never was such radical possibility
that dissipated in the face of antifundamentalist fears; there was a new funda-
mentalism, that of the market and civil society, the two traps of a triumphant
neoliberalism. As Beasley-​Murray has pointed out, all that was left was a civil
society based in the market and allied with the state to protect some cultural
specificity, a cultural and consumerist regression to a civil society that holds out
“the hope of reform by returning a sense of rationality and agency to subaltern
subjects” (121), a depoliticizing and acculturative operation. In this model, sub-
altern resistance was definitively expelled and transformed into performance
or ritual: “the only options that remain for the dominated are negotiation or
obedience” (78).
In García Canclini’s perspective, the old paradigm of “active reception” of mass
media definitively transforms into the consumption of mass culture and other mar-
ket goods, which should be understood, at the same time, as a creator of citizenship.
Although the word neoliberal almost never appears in these texts, its success across
the continent in dictating the organization of societies and their cultures was the
organizing principle of these new essays. This reached its climax in Consumidores y
ciudadanos (1995), where, as Gareth Williams claims, “the ultimate purpose […] is
simply to recognize that the novelty of postmodern hybridity is essentially that of
the market and mass consumption” (126). Confronted with this, Williams asserts,
58

58 Pablo Alabarces

“it is no longer possible to think about such ideals as citizenship and democracy
(indeed, politics itself) in the absence of reflection on misery, and on its relation
to the truth regimes of the neoliberal geo-​economic state and marketplace” (135).
All of that was missing. What dominated the argument, on the contrary, was a
brand of citizenship created by consumption that replaced any other symbolic or
experiential affiliation: social classes were transformed into imaginary communities
of consumers.2
Of course, this was combined with other elements. On the one hand, cultural
consumption based on the autonomy of the receptor, heralded since the mid 1980s,
became essential in the 1990s, transforming the activities of every reader/​consumer
into heartfelt creative practices. This was indisputable. However, it was new and
different to understand these practices as unavoidably challenging and contestatory,
intensifying the interpretations proposed by Michel de Certeau (La Invención de
lo cotidiano) with a new neoliberal meaning: de Certeau’s users transform into free
actors under the auspices of a semiotic market. The subtitle of Oscar Landi’s suc-
cessful 1992 book (Devórame otra vez: qué hizo la televisión con la gente, qué hace la gente
con la televisión [Devour Me Again: What Television Did to People, and What People Do
with Television]) reveals these tendencies.
On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, the debate had abandoned the prob-
lems of the democratic and the popular, replacing them with both the relationship
between modernity and postmodernity and also with the sudden apparition of the 58
thesis on globalization. Renato Ortiz was headed in the same direction when he
transformed a question from 1988 (“An international-​popular culture?”) into an
affirmation. In that year his book, Mundialización y Cultura affirmed the existence
of an international-​popular memory associated with the new worlding of culture,
which differs from globalization as a totalizing process.
Beatriz’s Sarlo’s Escenas de la vida posmoderna (1994) (Scenes from Postmodern Life,
2001), which appeared in at the same time, was the only Latin American text of
the decade in which an explicit discussion of García Canclini’s assertions appeared.
Sarlo maintains that everything might have changed and seemed blended and
hybrid, but that what remained was inequality: “Nevertheless, some issues continue
to be unyielding. To start with, unequal access to symbolic goods” (117). Faced
with this new landscape, Sarlo encountered the appearance of a new category of
intellectual, the market neopopulist.
Here everything has been permanently turned upside down: Neopopulists rec-
ognize only one mode of legitimation, that of the cultures formed at the cross-
roads of experience and media discourse. They consider the limits placed on high
culture to constitute a symbolic revolution, in which those who were once down-
trodden can make themselves masters of their own fate by means of a craftsman-
like use of zapping and other technological resources taken from media culture
(Sarlo 97).
Therefore, “postmodern” and “neoliberal” transformations could not be pre-
sented, optimistically, as homogenizing and even less, as democratizing. They were
 59

The Popular Culture Turn 59

quite far from common culture, as proposed by Raymond Williams (Culture and
Society, 1780–​1950), which could not be in any way realized by the market.

The Neo-​post-​popular Turn

Is it possible to speak of new perspectives a quarter century after Hybrid Cultures?
At the turn of the century, Chávez’s rise to power in Venezuela in 1998, along
with the great Argentine crisis of 2001–​2002, marks the moment of crisis in the
neoliberal model. This is not the place to settle the debate whether it really was
a final shattering or simply a simulation of the model’s crisis—​the 2009 world
financial crisis revealed the global continuity of the model—​what is certain is that
from this moment on, we spoke—​with a certain performative thrill—​of the crisis
of the neoliberal model in Latin America. The crisis presented us with a scenario
in which the agendas of the 1980s could reappear, because we had begun to speak
again of the necessity of democratizing, although this democratization was not
postdictatorial but rather postneoliberal. The end of neoliberalism meant that we
must, once again, map out a democratizing agenda for wealth, culture, and power.
This scenario made the reappearance of old problems and categories possible.
Among them, the debates over popular cultures. In this context, I will attempt to
describe two major trends on the contemporary map.
58
First, subaltern studies. Some of this was forecast by Jean Franco in 1997 in
an article published in the magazine, Nueva Sociedad (at the time published in
Venezuela), in a special issue specifically dedicated to thinking about the then
evanescent question of the popular. Amidst of the reign of hybrids and deterrito-
rialization, when the popular had been displaced by the idea of citizenship or civil
society, Franco affirmed that “the popular” did not correspond with any stable
group but rather with a general problem of representation in neoliberal societies.
For this reason, she proposed that the continuity of topics such as resistance and
the limits of hegemony should be explored through Spivak’s category of the sub-
altern (1988). This proposal had already appeared, at the same time, as the agenda
of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, founded in 1993—​dissolved in
2001—​although its circulation was limited to the field of Latin Americanism in
the North American academy. In addition to Spivak’s work, Franco found inspi-
ration in the original constitution of the Indian Subaltern Studies Group—​led
from the early 1980s by Ranajit Guha—​the Latin American circulation of which
was initially limited to the Andean field, due to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s leader-
ship in translation and distribution (Rivera Cusicanqui y Barragán 1997). In the
broader field of Latin American studies, subaltern studies would be recovered at
the turn of the twenty-​first century and linked to post-​and decolonial debates. By
contrast, in the North American academy, the discussion appears to have closed,
especially since the appearance of the (already cited) work of Williams (The Other
Side of the Popular) and Beasley-​Murray (Poshegemonía). However, we can still see
a certain persistence of the debate in the recent interventions of John Beverley
60

60 Pablo Alabarces

(Latinamericanism after 9⁄11 and “El ultraizquierdismo”), one of the central fig-
ures working from this perspective, and in the latest book of another prominent
member of the group, Ileana Rodríguez. Although there are some provocative
proposals, especially those elaborated in Beverley’s classic text, Subalternidad y
representación, the possibilities for discussion of popular culture seem relatively
exhausted.
A second tendency is more closely aligned with my own work, and I believe
that its beginnings can be dated to the North American-​Brazilian anthropolo-
gist, Claudia Fonseca’s book, Familia, fofoca e honra: Etnografia de relações de gênero
e violência em grupos populares [Family, Gossip and Honor: An Ethnography of the
Relationships Gender and Violence in Popular Groups] (2000), an ethnography on
working-​class gaúcha families, published in Porto Alegre. This line of inquiry leads
Fonseca to conclude the book by wondering what happened to the study of
the popular culture. She asserts that, “Today, the ‘popular’ is decidedly not on the
agenda. Academic interests followed other paths. The term no longer appears in
books, theses and research projects” (108, my translation). But it seems that what
was fundamentally in crisis was the words with which we spoke about the popular:

An examination of the academic jargon used to describe people who do

not participate in the dominant culture reveals the stages of that evolu-
tion. From one “anonymous mass,” “amorphous mass” or simply “those 60
who serve as the anti-​norm” in the 1960s, they became “class” protagonists
(working or popular) in the 1980s, only to return to the status of “poor”
in the 1990s. The risk of this nomenclature is a return to the image of the
cultural void, of a victimized population—​when not ignorant or alien-
ated—​waiting passively for the forces of modernity to elevate them to the
human condition.
(108)

And if the critique of these notions was warranted, Fonseca wondered, perhaps
this would mean the disappearance of the object that these categories describe.
That which is assumed to be a simple discussion of nomenclature is actually a
central political-​theoretical debate. Does this mean that as long as these concepts
fail to adequately describe reality, the object disappears? Claudia Fonseca acutely
notes:

The question becomes: what do we do with those who, once the classifica-
tions have been redone, find themselves in the classifications that are the
common lot of the “poor”? […] Where are the debates capable of deepen-
ing our understanding alterities inscribed into the game of social stratifi-
cation? Where are the new terms that take into account the negotiation of
symbolic frontiers within the class society?
(109)
 61

The Popular Culture Turn 61

Later, she concludes:

To accompany “modern times,” it would be necessary for the social sciences

to look closely at precisely those phenomena that were, at first, too quickly
relegated to the margins our concerns. That which appeared to be a vestige
of the past now manifests itself as a signal of the future. To avoid loosing
notions such as “citizenship” and “plural society” in the chatter of political
platitudes, we must step back enough to scrutinize the different systems of
symbolization within modern society and recognize that among these, the
aspect of class is not of minor importance.
(113)

Starting from this text—​ although we cannot assert “because of this text,”
but rather that the text described a state of the field that organized new lines of
research—​we find a great number of new perspectives on popular practices and
representations, especially from an anthropological—​but also sociological—​point
of view. They all focus on that “something more” beyond media studies and mass
culture studies, in the field of religion, customs, political practice, and especially,
dance and popular music. The sub-​field of the study of popular music in Latin
America is possibly a central place from which to elaborate these new debates: the
60
sub-​field is at the height, perhaps even the apogee, of its development. It is also
transdisciplinary as it combines older socioanthropological perspectives with eth-
nomusicology and studies of media and communication. Also, music has become a
key space in the cultural consumption of the popular classes, where hybrid tenden-
cies combine with the permanency of old class borders—​for example in the case
of Latin American cumbia, which we have discussed elsewhere (Alabarces and Silba).
Unlike popular music studies, studies of mass culture have tended to abandon
the question of “differences inscribed in the social hierarchy” as Fonseca puts it
(113), and take refuge in the seduction of the cultural gourmet or the curatorial me,
as proposed by Laura Grindstaff (2008) (the idea that each person is a curator of
her cultural experience—​an idea that appeared phantasmally in Canclini’s work
in the 1990s). But, at the same time, this tendency toward individualization in the
face of a great quantity of stimuli and enormous possibilities coincides with, as
Grindstaff maintains, the convergence and growing monopolization of mass cul-
ture, and the continuity of a great cultural division: on the one hand, those who,
due to their educational or economic strata can practice their own personal cura-
tion, and those who, by contrast, with less education and fewer resources, remain
bound to limited and homogenized forms of culture determined by huge media
conglomerations and their websites. The allure of new North American televi-
sion series—​especially those produced by HBO and Netflix—​is a good example
of this: in Latin America, they continue to involve forms of consumption from
which popular publics, in the old class sense of the expression, are systematically
excluded.
62

62 Pablo Alabarces

In the past few years then, we have seen and also hope to see, a resurgence of
the category and its old problems. The popular world is recuperating its visibil-
ity in academic circles. This is the result of new research that avoids that which
Fonseca denounced, the cliché of poverty studies that obscures more than it elu-
cidates, and insists on placing the popular world in a place of passivity ready to be
rescued by some compensatory policy. Rather, this new research looks to recuper-
ate the complexity of this world: its daily life, its sexuality, its territorial, social and
political organizations, its novel relationship to work and its absence, to school, to
violence—​r igorously avoiding stereotypes that tell a tale of the naturalized struc-
turing of quotidian popular violence. And also in connection to their forms of
consumption or symbolic production and all that we have insisted on calling pop-
ular culture. And many other topics for which I have no space for here. Certainly
this reappearance should be thought of in terms of national-​popular narratives: the
remarked upon “turn to the left” of the majority of Latin American societies; the
so-​called pink tide which might be critiqued as the new hegemony of the new
populism. Progressive, but populist—​populist, but progressive. In this context, the
reappearance of these themes could be as much the product of a democratizing
and emancipatory impetus as simple concessions to a national-​popular mode. It is
noteworthy that some of the works that subscribe to this move to recuperate the
popular limit themselves to taking responsibility for lists of objectives, but per-
sist in an orthodox neo-​Canclinism that questions conflict and subalternization 62
as organizing features, or proposes to dissolve the notion of resistance, instead,
reinforcing the “capacidad de agenciamiento” (the capacity for agency) (Rodriquez
“Mi pie izquierdo”). In this way, populism falls into its old customs: celebrating an
autonomous production in the popular sense that cannot overcome its subaltern
condition because the populist project neither provides for it nor permits it.
No one knows if we are living in postneoliberal times, but I wager that we are
not. However, we might declare these neo-​post-​populist times, times when new
discussions of popular culture flower and are disseminated across the subconti-
nent. It is highly probable that this flagrant reappearance can be explained by this
context, and consequently inscribed into the legitimacy of old and new perspec-
tives of the popular as the subject of a kind of re-​democratization process—​not,
now, as part of the dictatorial process, but through neoliberal processes themselves. It
remains clear that this is still not enough: we need new empirical research and
new theoretical debates in the wide field of topics open to exploration: dance
and popular music, sexuality, space, work, parties, religiosity, creativity, popular
conservatism, and last but not least, popular politics—​including practices and
representations that sometimes seem to be pre-​political or not political at all.
All of these items should be explored in a—​schematic—​research program with
the old, permanent horizon that allowed for the creation and foundation of this
field of studies: out of concern for the radical democratization of our societies,
we should, to paraphrase Stuart Hall (“Notas sobre la deconstrucción de lo pop-
ular”), continue to give a damn.
 63

The Popular Culture Turn 63

Notes
1 A decisive text on the intersection between rural popular culture (Gauchesca, for
example), indigenous popular culture, and African American popular culture is
the prologue written by Josefina Ludmer for the new edition of El género gauchesco
(Ludmer).
2 A category coined by Stanley Fish (Fish), whom García Canclini neglects to quote.

References
Alabarces, Pablo.“Nueve proposiciones en torno a lo popular: La leyenda continúa.” Tram(p)
as de la comunicación y la cultura, vol. 3, no. 23, 2004, pp. 27–​38.
—​—​—​. “Introducción: Un itinerario y algunas apuestas.” Resistencias y mediaciones. Estudios
sobre cultura popular, edited by Pablo Alabarces and María Graciela Rodríguez. Paidós,
Colección Estudios de comunicación/​28, 2008, pp. 15–​28.
—​—​—​. “Un destino sudamericano: La invención de los estudios sobre cultura popular
en la Argentina.” Resistencias y mediaciones. Estudios sobre cultura popular, edited by Pablo
Alabarces and María Graciela Rodríguez. Paidós, Colección Estudios de comunicación/​
28, 2008, pp. 261–​280.
—​—​—​. “Transculturas pospopulares: El retorno de las culturas populares en las ciencias
sociales latinoamericanas.” Cultura y Representaciones sociales, vol. 7, no. 13, 2012, pp. 7–​38.
Alabarces, Pablo and Malvina Silba. “‘Las manos de todos los negros, arriba’: Género, etnia
y clase en la cumbia argentina.” Cultura y Representaciones sociales, vol. 7, no. 16, 2014,
pp. 52–​74.
62
Beasley-​Murray, Jon. Poshegemonía: Teoría política y América Latina. Paidós, 2010.
Beverley, John. Subalternidad y representación. Iberoamericana, 2004.
—​—​—​. Latinamericanism after 9⁄11. Duke UP, 2011.
—​—​—​. “El ultraizquierdismo: enfermedad infantil de la academia.” Alter/​nativas, vol. 1,
no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–​9.
Burke, Peter. La cultura popular en la Europa Moderna. Alianza, 1978.
Chauí, Marilena. Conformismo e Resistência: Aspectos da cultura popular no Brasil. Brasiliense,
1985.
CLACSO. Comunicación y culturas populares en Latinoamérica. Gustavo Gili/​FELAFACS, 1987.
De Certeau, Michel. La Invención de lo cotidiano, vol. I: Artes de hacer. Universidad
Iberoamericana, 1996.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard
UP, 1980.
Fonseca, Claudia. Familia, fofoca e honra: Etnografia de relações de gênero e violência em grupos
populares. Porto Alegre: Editora da UFRGS, 2000.
Ford, Aníbal, Jorge B. Rivera, and Eduardo Romano. Medios de comunicación y cultura popular.
Legasa, 1985.
Franco, Jean. “La globalización y la crisis de lo popular.” Nueva Sociedad, vol. 149, 1997,
pp. 62–​73.
García Canclini, Néstor. Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la Modernidad.
Grijalbo, 1990.
—​—​—​. Consumidores y Ciudadanos: Conflictos multiculturales de la globalización. Grijalbo, 1995.
—​—​—​. Culturas populares en el capitalismo. Grijalbo, 2002.
—​—​—​. Imagined Globalization. Translated by George Yúdice. Duke UP, 2014.
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64 Pablo Alabarces

Grimson, Alejandro and Mirta Varela. Audiencias, cultura y poder: Estudios sobre televisión.
Eudeba, 1999.
Grindstaff Laura. “Culture and Popular Culture: A Case for Sociology.” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 619, 2008, pp. 206–​222.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/​Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural
Studies, 1972–​1979, edited by Stuart Hall. Hutchinson-​ Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, 1980, pp. 129–​139.
—​—​—​. “Notas sobre la deconstrucción de lo popular.” Historia popular y teoría socialista,
edited by Raphael Samuels. Crítica, 1984, pp. 93–​110.
Landi, Oscar. Devórame otra vez: qué hizo la televisión con la gente, qué hace la gente con la tele-
visión. Planeta, 1992.
Ludmer, Josefina. El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria. Perfil, 1994.
Martín-​Barbero, Jesús. De los medios a las mediaciones: Comunicación, cultura y hegemonía.
Gustavo Gili, 1987.
Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, 1940, 2002.
Ortiz, Renato. A Consciência Fragmentada: Ensaios de Cultura Popular e Religião. Paz e
Terra, 1980.
—​—​—​. Cultura brasileira & identidade nacional. Editorial Brasiliense, 1985.
—​—​—​. Mundialización y cultura. Alianza, 1988, 1997.
—​—​—​. A Moderna tradição brasileira: Cultura Brasileira e Indústria Cultural. Brasiliense, 1999.
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia and Rossana Barragán. Debates postcoloniales: Una introducción a los
Estudios de la Subalternidad. Sephis, 1997.
Rodríguez, Ileana. Debates culturales y agendas de campo: Estudios culturales, postcoloniales, subal-
ternos, transatlánticos, transoceánicos. Cuarto Propio, 2011. 64
Rodríguez, María Graciela. “Mi pie izquierdo.” Oficios Terrestres, no. 26, 2011, pp. 93–​104.
Sarlo, Beatriz. El imperio de los sentimientos: Narraciones de circulación periódica en Argentina
(1917–​1927). Catálogos Editora, 1985.
—​—​—​. “Lo popular como dimensión tóica, retórica y problemática de la recepción.”
Comunicación y culturas populares en Latinoamérica, 1987, pp. 181–​205.
—​—​—​. Scenes from Postmodern Life. Translated by Jon Beasley-​Murray. U of Minnesota
P, 2001.
Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited
by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago UP, 1988, pp. 271–​313.
Sunkel Guillermo. Razón y pasión en la prensa popular: Un estudio sobre cultura popular, cultura
de masas y cultura política. ILET, 1985.
Williams, Gareth. The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America.
Duke UP, 2002.
Williams, Raymond. Cultura y Sociedad, 1780–​ 1950: De Coleridge a Orwell. Nueva
Visión, 2001.
 65

4
THE ETHICAL TURN
Erin Graff Zivin

When did we, as a field, turn “toward” ethics—​if we can say that we did—​and
from what did we turn away? The so-​called “turn to ethics” has itself become a
trope, a turning, and a symptomatic trope at that. It is a trope that reveals a pro-
64
found anxiety with what has been a pervasive disciplinary obsession over the
relation between politics and literature, and between politics and intellectual and
artistic production more broadly: the question of the committed intellectual, el
intelectual comprometido. The turn to ethics tends to presuppose—​both within and
outside of Latin American studies1—​a turn away from politics or a substitution of
one for the other, a diagnosis that is grounded in the historical, ideological, geo-
political shifts of the 1980s (the Central American civil wars, the Southern Cone
dictatorships, the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent crisis of the left). In what
follows, I argue that a diagnosis based in substitution results in an overly narrow
understanding of both ethics and politics, the opposition between which ends up
limiting the possibilities of each.2
In this essay, I focus upon four types of readings of ethical philosophy in Latin
American and Latin Americanist thought, which I characterize, loosely, as theologi-
cal, literary, political, and deconstructive. In the first section, I evaluate Enrique Dussel’s
assimilation of the work of Emmanuel Levinas into his own philosophy of Latin
American liberation. I then, in the second section, juxtapose Dussel’s Levinasianism
with Doris Sommer’s ostensibly very different Levinasian approach to literary
studies, focusing upon her analysis of Mario Vargas Llosa’s El hablador.While on the
surface these two approaches to ethics—​one by a liberation theologian, the other
by a literary scholar—​seem to be quite distinct, if not contradictory, I argue that
both turn on the identitary logic that has structured Latin Americanism histori-
cally, and that has framed our discussions of both subjectivity and alterity. In the
third section of this chapter, I unpack the debate over the relation between ethics
6

66 Erin Graff Zivin

and political militancy that surfaces in Argentina following the publication of phi-
losopher Oscar del Barco’s letter “No Matarás.” Here, following Patrick Dove,
I suggest that the opposition between ethics and politics obscures or overlooks
that which could be most promising in ethical and political thinking. In the final
section I turn to several recent, more deconstructive approaches to ethics in Latin
American studies that refuse the logic of recognition-​identification on which one
paradigm of substitution turns, and which provide new, unfamiliar concepts of
ethics, politics, and the relation between the two.

Ethics of Liberation
In his 1975 Liberación latinoamericana y Emmanuel Levinas, philosopher Enrique
Dussel attempted to import and translate the ethical philosophy of Levinas to
the geopolitical context of Latin America. The Lithuanian-​French philosopher,
many of whose family members were murdered by the Nazis, represented, met-
onymically, the “other” of European modernity for Dussel so that, in Liberación
latinoamericana and the work that followed, the liberation theologian conflated
Levinas’s traumatic biography with his theory of ethical subjectivity, which is
constituted in its relation to the other. Levinas’s “other” (a philosophical con-
cept, rather than an identitary category) became imbued, in Dussel’s hands, with
the ethnic-​religious particularity of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Dussel then 6
“converted” his version of Levinasian ethics to a Latin American framework:
substituting “Europe” for “same” and “Latin America” for “other” (and modify-
ing the latter to include the subaltern, the poor, the woman), Dussel read Levinas
literally, imposing a narrowly identitarian logic on a concept of otherness that
the early Levinas (of Totality and Infinity) conveyed through the anthropomor-
phic figure of the face of the other but that, by Otherwise than Being, he charac-
terized as an other within the same: “There is a claim laid on the same by the
other in the core of myself, the extreme tension of the command exercised by
the other in me over me, a traumatic hold of the other on the same” (Otherwise
than Being 141).
Dussel found Levinas’s ethical philosophy formally useful, but was anxious to
fill in what he perceived as a void of meaning in Levinas’s account of the relation
to the other. While the “great philosopher from Nanterre” described beautifully
the face-​to-​face encounter between self and other, “[el Otro] no logra terminar su
discurso”: “El Otro interpela, provoca, clama,” Dussel acknowledged, “pero nada
se dice, no sólo de las condiciones empíricas (sociales, económicas concretas) del
saber oír la voz del Otro, sino sobre todo del saber responder por medio de una
praxis liberadora.”3 The great limitation of the ethical philosopher, according to
Dussel, was his inability to take the step from ethics to politics, specifically to a
politics of liberation, which—​on Dussel’s account—​would entail a full recogni-
tion of the other, the comprehension of the other’s particular social and economic
conditions and, finally, the concrete demands of the other.
67

The Ethical Turn 67

Such a politics of recognition has been the object of critique by political think-
ers such as Patchen Markell. In his lucid and careful Bound by Recognition, Markell
argues that the ideal of recognition—​“for all its democratic good intentions”—​is
compelling for many reasons, but that it is ultimately “impossible, even incoherent;
and that in pursuing it we misunderstand certain crucial conditions of social and
political life” (4). He proposes that, rather than remaining tied to the fantasy of
knowledge of oneself or of the other, we turn our attention to of a different kind
of justice: a politics of acknowledgment rather than recognition. Such a democratic
justice would not depend on our knowing and respecting who the other truly is,
but would rather require “that no one be reduced to any characterization of his or
her identity for the sake of someone else’s achievement of a sense of sovereignty
or invulnerability” (7).
I have argued, in previous work, that for Dussel recognition of the other, and
comprehension of the other’s demand, requires the assignation of a particular iden-
tity to the other (Graff Zivin 205–​207).This means, first of all, that the other must
become the concrete other person, as opposed to Lacan’s big other, or Levinas’s
other within the same, or Derrida’s other that arrives from an unpredictable future
as l’avenir and, as such, catches us unaware, off guard. But if on Derrida’s (or
Levinas’s account) the other is precisely that which we cannot anticipate, that for
which we cannot prepare, we can, in contrast, anticipate Dussel’s other, that other
6
person that we can—​indeed, must—​define as a victim (the Indian, the woman,
the subaltern). For Dussel, the recognition of the other (in her particular identity
as other) serves as the condition of possibility for the “correct” articulation and
interpretation of the demand of the other: the demand of the other becomes the
concrete demand of a concrete other. Dussel calls this recognition-​comprehension
pair the passage from ethics to politics. While he concedes to Levinas his likening
of politics to war, or war as the true face of politics, in which self and other are
always necessarily in a relation of enmity, he calls for a second step, in which a
new totality is constructed that takes into account the demand of the other: “su
crítica a la política como la estrategia del estado de guerra es correcta, valiente,
clarividente, pero esto no evita las dificultades que tiene el gran pensador judío
para reconstruir el sentido positivo y crítico liberador de una nueva política” (“Lo
político en Levinas” 115). In effect, Dussel identifies two different political theolo-
gies: one “good” and one “bad,” bridged by the ethical experience of the face of
the other. Here, ethics comes to interrupt “bad” politics (and therefore is not quite
“first philosophy”) and then replace it with a new, “good” totality, “una nueva
totalidad al servicio del Otro” (119).
This new, benevolent totality, a totality “in the service of the other,” becomes
the basis for Dussel’s politics of Latin American liberation. The liberation theolo-
gian, like the well-​intentioned democrats mentioned by Markell, pursues the route
of justice grounded in the recognition-​comprehension pair I’ve been describing.
The blind spot of Dussel’s argument lies in the fact that the philosophy or theol-
ogy of liberation that aims to offer an alternative to European or Eurocentric
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68 Erin Graff Zivin

models, does so—​counterintuitively—​by grounding itself in the ideals of recogni-

tion and sovereignty at the heart of European modernity.4

The Talker Turns: The Ethical Turn in Literary Studies

At first glance, Doris Sommer appears to move beyond Dussel’s ethics of recogni-
tion in favor of a more deconstructive approach in her essay, “About-​Face: The
Talker Turns” (1996), in which she uses a loosely Levinasian framework to analyze
the encounter between same and other in Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1987 novel El
hablador. The essay forms part of a larger trend of the ethical turn in literary criti-
cism in the 1990s, during which time the rise of ethnic studies and subaltern stud-
ies accompanied, in more hegemonic literary criticism, a new way of reading the
“other.” Sommer’s mode of critique relies not only upon an implicitly identifiable
privileged reader who may allow herself to be transformed by minority writing,
but also on an overdetermined understanding of what minority writing is (see her
1999 book Proceed with Caution, which includes a version of the Vargas Llosa essay).
In the case of El hablador, the critic assumes the task of evaluating whether or not
the subject (here, the privileged protagonist) properly responds to the (equally
fictional) Indian other. Both models of reading—​Dussel’s and Sommer’s—​turn on
the interrelated concepts of recognition and comprehension.
Sommer begins by analyzing the opening scene of Vargas Llosa’s novel, in which 68
the semi-​autobiographical limeño protagonist and primary narrator—​whose nar-
rative is interwoven with that of a secondary narrator, a machiguenga storyteller—​
describes his frustrated attempt to escape his troubled homeland during a stint in
Italy. “Vine a Firenze para olvidarme por un tiempo del Perú y de los peruanos y
he aquí que el malhadado país me salió al encuentro esta mañana de la manera más
inesperada,” the primary narrator explains,“fueron tres o cuatro fotografías que me
devolvieron, de golpe, el sabor de la selva peruana […] Naturalmente, entré” (7).
Sommer offers up this scene as a model of a Levinasian, asymmetrical encounter
between self and other, in which the other “demands recognition” by the irre-
sponsible writer who has abandoned his country but who now, having been taken
hostage by the photographs, must “acknowledge” the other of his homeland. The
foundational call of the other slips between a loosely Levinasian concept of the
demand and the well-​known Althusserian scene of ideological interpellation, the
call of the police toward whom we cannot help but turn. Sommer leaves the vast
divide between ethical responsibility to the other and interpellation by an ideo-
logical state apparatus largely unthought: the Levinas-​Althusser coupling stands
as a flimsy rhetorical gesture upon which an argument about ethics and politics
(not-​quite ethics and not-​quite politics) will be based.
Even if Vargas Llosa’s narrator can be said to properly acknowledge the other
who has assaulted him in his ex-​pat reverie, Sommer worries that “acknowledging
difference […] would not be the final word but a first step toward enabling ethi-
cal negotiations” (108). The idea of acknowledgment (a synonym, here, for what
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The Ethical Turn 69

Sommer calls elsewhere “respect” for the other), linked to the equally problematic
concept of recognition (of the other as other), is limiting not only if we are to
take this moment as the “final word.” For even if we are to acknowledge differ-
ence as a “first step” toward a second, one would assume, more ethical moment
(which Sommer curiously terms “negotiations,” an activity that would more often
be associated with politics in its crudest form), we are caught within the logic of
identitarianism, in which otherness is a mere reflection of the same, where identity
and difference are two sides of the same coin: a logic Sommer ostensibly seeks
to abandon. While the initial “promise of recognition” takes sudden hold of the
reader, the problem, as Sommer sees it, is that the subject has only two choices fac-
ing the traumatic “grip” of the other: succumbing to radical alterity, which would
translate into a death of the self, or a complete dismissal of the agonist. Sommer
goes on to claim, turning to none other than Dussel himself, that “absolute alterity
[…] leaves no room, philosopher Enrique Dussel worries, for the social dynamism
that Latin America desperately needs” (95). Why this turn to Dussel, especially
since the liberation theologian never, to my knowledge, calls for social dynamism,
but rather for justice?
Sommer makes a second reference to Dussel—​again, in an odd gloss of his early
work on Levinas—​when she describes a primary “turn” toward the other through
speech. “The visions that rush at the halting narrator would soon conjure memo-
68
ries of talk,” Sommer writes, with a footnote to Dussel’s Liberación latinoamericana
y Emmanuel Levinas: “what makes a sound is the voice and the eruption of the
other in us; it does not erupt as “the seen,” but as “the heard.”We should no longer
privilege the seen, but the heard” (Dussel and Guillot 25, quoted in Sommer 96).
Yet the turn to a speech-​centered ethics (not quite Levinasian, in any case: Levinas
employs the synesthetic figure of the “listening eye” to describe an experience
of the other than is not restricted to any one sense, or interrupts the economy
of sensing more broadly) does not hold in Sommer’s argument. If anything, she
undermines the claim on the very next page, describing the violent misplacement
of the Quechua-​inflected Spanish in Vargas Llosa’s fictional jungle.
Why does Sommer rely upon Dussel, then, in order to carry out a quasi-​
Levinasian reading of Vargas Llosa’s novel? What do the philosopher of liberation
and literary critic share? On both Dussel’s and Sommer’s accounts, the appearance
of the face of the other is an ideal but partial instance of—​a necessary but insuf-
ficient condition for—​an ethical relation to the other. What Dussel’s argument
states explicitly, but Sommer’s deconstructive veneer eclipses, is the need for and
possibility of full recognition: if, for Dussel, the subject (who is this subject?) must
identify the other and understand her demand, Sommer is interested in an other
that interrupts the self. Yet Sommer’s work ultimately fetishizes the other as well
as, in other work, the secret of the other. This is perhaps most pronounced in
her dangerous conflation of all minority writing, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved
to Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio. Menchú’s and Sethe’s (Beloved’s protagonist)
secrets, while never revealed, nevertheless possess positive content: their secrets are
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70 Erin Graff Zivin

confessable, translatable, but intentionally withheld (“It was not a story to pass on,”
Morrison’s nameless narrator says, at the end of the novel and about the novel).
Likewise, Menchú and Morrison’s protagonist (and Morrison herself) remain rel-
egated to the realm of an identifiable “otherness” that remains beyond the reach of
the reader, here presumed to be privileged, white, hailing from the first world, as if
the subaltern, or everyone else, not only don’t speak but also can’t read.5
Vargas Llosa—​both the author and his semi-​autobiographical narrator—​fail to
respond to the call of the indigenous other (who, in any case, turns out not to be
an ethnic machiguenga at all, but rather half-​Jewish limeño Saúl Zuratas).Yet because
of the novel’s turning to and away from this other, which mimics the narrator’s
schizophrenic relation to Peru’s Indian population, Sommer argues that El hablador
can be “a source of both concern and hope”: Vargas Llosa’s narrator turns away
from but loves the Indians, “an endless, intimate standoff ” (132). Literary criticism,
for Sommer, thus becomes a practice of assessing ethical correctness, which treads
dangerously in the terrain of moralism. The task of the work’s “ethical” reader,
here, is to judge whether the narrator or author has properly recognized and
responded to the other: the “ethical” reader can be judged to have succeeded, or
failed, in herself judging whether the work’s author or narrator has indeed prop-
erly responded to the other. Caught in a double logic of recognition-​identification,
the “ethical” critic ends up measured against an other she has created for judging
the response of the author or narrator. The reader thereby constitutes her own 70
authority as ethical reading subject by both placing herself in the position of the
other, creating that other, and allowing herself to judge the success, or failure, of
literary responses to the other/​herself. Levinas’s description of the traumatic hold
of the other on the same through the demand “Thou shalt not kill” is annihilated
in such a gesture, a gesture of sovereign judgment or decision that forecloses any
possibility of understanding reading as event even as it warns against such foreclosure.

Ethics vs. Politics: Oscar del Barco’s Letter

Levinas’s allegorical “Thou shalt not kill”—​the demand of ethical responsibil-
ity in the same by the other, the demand that captures the imagination of both
Dussel and Sommer—​resurfaces in the 2000s as the Argentinean left debates the
relationship between ethics and political militancy following the publication of
a letter by Oscar del Barco in the psychoanalytic journal Intemperie.6 The let-
ter, which he titles “No Matarás,” is a response to a 2007 interview with former
Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo militant Héctor Jouvé—​also published in Intemperie—​
in which Jouvé recounts the assassination of two comrades from the EGP, Adolfo
Rotblat and Bernardo Groswald, two young recruits whose physical and psycho-
logical decline caused their leaders to view them as a threat to the morale of the
group. Del Barco describes the sense he had, reading the interview with Jouvé,
that he was reading about the murder of his own son, that it was as if he were
the one posing the questions. Reflecting upon his unexpected response to the
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The Ethical Turn 71

confession, del Barco realizes that he, too, must assume responsibility for the deaths
that took place at the hands of the militant groups he supported, and goes on to
state that everyone who supported these groups must share responsibility for the
murders. The ensuing debate—​in which colleagues and comrades rush to attack
or defend the letter—​revolves principally around the Levinasian “Thou shalt not
kill,” and engages with the memory of armed struggle while reevaluating the rela-
tion between ethics and politics in post-​2001 Argentina.
Del Barco’s letter, which critic Alejandro Kaufman describes not as “argued
presentation” but as a gesture or provocation, turns to Levinas in order to assume
responsibility for the killings (Kaufman 145). “No attempt at justification will
make us innocent again,” del Barco asserts:

There are no “causes” or “ideals” that will let us off the hook. We have to
take on that essentially irredeemable act, the unprecedented responsibility
of having intentionally caused the death of a human being. Responsibility
before our loved ones, responsibility before other human beings, responsi-
bility without meaning or concept before what we could hesitatingly call
“the absolutely other.” But beyond everything and everybody, including
whatever God there might be, there is the Thou shalt not kill. Faced with
a society that kills millions of human beings in wars, genocides, famines,
70
illness and every kind of torture, at the base of each of us can be heard
weakly or imperiously the Thou shalt not kill. A commandment that can-
not be founded or explained but that nevertheless is there, in me and in
everyone, as a presence without presence, as a force without force, as being
without being. Not a commandment that comes from outside, from some
other place, but which constitutes our inconceivable and unprecedented
immanence.
(del Barco 115)

The letter serves as both confession and indictment and, as such, causes an uproar
among the Argentinean left, particularly for those who, like del Barco, were (and
still are) committed to the causes represented by those groups.
Several of del Barco’s readers, who continue to be committed, retrospectively,
to the resistance to the fascist government against which these groups fought,
worry that the letter places the atrocities committed by the government in a
relation of equivalence with militant acts of resistance. Jorge Jinkis, psychoanalyst
and founding editor of Conjetural, detects in del Barco’s letter an ethical univer-
salism in which “the person who took up arms would be as guilty as the person
who sympathized with the ideas that were in vogue,” arguing that, taken to its
ultimate consequences, “this chain of guilt would go back to the insurrectional
organizations being complicit with the transnational arms manufacturers” (121).
A second member of the Conjetural editorial board, Juan Ritvo, is also troubled by
the notion that del Barco’s letter “is based on perfectly reciprocal reversals” (127).
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72 Erin Graff Zivin

What does it mean for del Barco to establish, rhetorically, a relation of equivalence
between acts of murder, to insist upon the prohibition of murder as a universal
principle (and, subsequently, upon ethics as “first philosophy”)? Is there room in
del Barco’s provocation—​if we are to agree with Kaufman that it is more “gesture”
than “argument”—​for a politics that is not opposed to or substitutable by ethics?
While it is possible to identify a central debate in the impassioned responses
to the letter, there are also a number of reactions that seem to misunderstand del
Barco’s gesture. Philosopher Diego Tatián points out that this may have to do
with the strange presentation of the letter itself, likening del Barco’s claim that
the letter “is not a reasoned argument” to Marcel Duchamp’s famous statement
that his revolutionary inverted urinal was “not a urinal,” that is, not meant to be a
receptacle for urine. Tatián suggests that del Barco’s letter can be read as a sort of
inverted, aestheticized urinal “in which, disconcertingly, all one can see is a place
to urinate” (141). Kaufman, too, cites a general “misunderstanding” of del Barco’s
letter, which he views not as a political or ideological statement but rather as a cry,
“un grito.” He sees, in the situation described by del Barco, Levinas’s opposition of
politics as war (Schmitt, speaking for a very long tradition that includes Hobbes)
to ethics: “War could be defined as that collective situation, which is dual since
it is constituted by two opposing masses, in which there are only two existential
possibilities: kill or be killed” (148). What is unique about the murder in question
is that it was committed not against the military, but against two other participants 72
in the armed struggle. “Del Barco’s letter,” Kaufman reminds his readers, “was
provoked by a sordid event in which a friend rather than an enemy was killed”
(151). Can we say that a turn to ethics (whether an ethics based on recognition
or mis-​recognition, understanding or misunderstanding) is a turn away from this
(Schmittian, bellicose) notion of politics, but perhaps an opening to a different
conception of politics?
It is in Ritvo’s response, curiously, that we can begin to imagine some pos-
sible avenues forward: “there is no ethical norm that can avoid the equivocations
of interpretation,” he writes (129). Are such equivocations obstacles or open-
ings to alternative conceptualizations of ethics and, by extension, politics? Tatián
suggests that phrases such as “Thou shalt not kill” (as well as “Bring them back
alive” or “Out with the lot of them”) should not be understood literally, social-​
scientifically, but rather as literary expressions of the impossible. He asks whether
the accusations launched at del Barco from members of the traditional left—​many
of whom, understandably, want to preserve the legacy of their struggle—​open up
or foreclose the possibility for thought and proposes, as a mode of conclusion, that
we consider a more extensive and expansive idea of “what we call politics” (142).
“Perhaps, we can begin to pose new sets of questions,” he writes:

Is it possible to withdraw from the war of interpretations, which is poten-

tially infinite, even though as in any war there are victors and vanquished?
Is there a way out of war? On the answer to this question—​which is not an
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The Ethical Turn 73

epistemological one, or even a solely theoretical one—​hangs the possibility

of an understanding, both more extensive and more intensive, of the ways
in which we act with and against, others—​of what we call politics. Perhaps
this transition has already begun to take place, if only very slowly. If I am not
mistaken, Oscar Del Barco’s letter, whether or not we agree with it, points
in this direction.
(142)

Del Barco himself echoes this idea in his “Comments on the Articles by Jorge
Jinkis, Juan Ritvo and Eduardo Grüner in Conjetural”: “it might be thought that
the letter is not strung ‘on high’ but laid out on the ‘ground’, in ‘politics’, con-
tradicting what you say about my abandonment of politics, which in reality is
an abandonment of what you mean by politics” (155). What is at stake in del
Barco’s letter (as well as the reactions to it), then, is the question of what we mean
by politics—​and therefore, also, of what we mean by ethics, and, finally, what we
might mean by the “turn” from one to the other, or the “substitution” of one for
the other.
We see, in both Tatián’s and del Barco’s remarks, that what is being debated,
misunderstood, is not (only) ethics, and not (only) politics, but the question of
mésentente in the Rancièrian sense: the question of misunderstanding (a disagree-
72
ment, dissensus over “what we mean by politics”) as constitutive of both ethics and
politics, and of the relation, if there can be one, between ethics and politics.This is a
conclusion, or a proposition, that can only be reached, or offered, not only “after”
(post-​in both its historical and critical, deconstructive senses) the peak of armed
resistance in the 1960s and 1970s, but also “after” the so-​called “ethical turn” if we
are to understand this turn as a turn away from politics. If, on the other hand, we
are to conceive of the turn to ethics as internal to politics, thus erasing the “away
from” as well as any kind of exteriority, we can begin to think about ethics and
politics—​that is, an ethics not grounded in recognition and a politics not based on
enmity—​as either mutually dependent or mutually suspensive: of ethics as the
condition of possibility and impossibility of politics and vice versa.

Undecidable Ethics: Deconstruction, Infrapolitics

Now that we have examined three responses by Latin American and Latin
Americanist philosophers and critics to a Levinasian ethics, we shall turn to three
recent writings on ethics that pass through—​implicitly, obliquely, or explicitly—​
the work of Jacques Derrida (Dove, Biset, Moreiras). For this more deconstructive
approach, the other is not identifiable as such, and the other’s demand is untranslat-
able: this does not mean, of course that it is not translated, that the other’s demand
does not solicit and require, but rather that it does so without end, without con-
veying its sense entirely, or satisfactorily. “Translation,” the “secret,” and “misun-
derstanding” are the conceptual levers the deconstructive approach relies on in
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74 Erin Graff Zivin

order to sketch out what I have called a marrano ethics, and its relation to a marrano
politics. Such an ethics does not rely on recognition or comprehension—​it neither
grounds itself in the identity of the other, nor in the (knowable or unknowable)
secret of the other, nor in the identity of the concept of ethics itself—​but rather
guards the possibility of misunderstanding itself as a ground for ethics and, as such,
opens a way to a yet-​to-​be-​determined politics to come.
Responding to the opposition between ethics and politics that emerges in the
debate over Oscar del Barco’s letter, Patrick Dove underscores the cost of viewing
ethics as a substitute for or alternative to politics:

For many, this antagonism takes the form of an either/​or: either politics or
ethics (either Marx or Freud, Badiou or Levinas, for instance) but not both.
The translation of this antagonism into the logic of choice comes with a
price: it happens at the expense of thinking what these two spheres might
have in common, either despite the antagonism or precisely because of it.
By the same token, the either/​or has the effect of imputing to each “sphere”
a sense of stability and self-​consistency that may in fact blind us to what is
really at stake in ethical and political thinking.
(280)

By identifying the antagonism present not only in the del Barco debate (he notes 74
an “obligation to take sides”), but also in Latin American studies and philosophy
more generally, Dove makes a persuasive case for a thinking of ethics and poli-
tics that would neither oppose nor conflate the two. He points out that while
del Barco appears to privilege an idea of ethics understood as responsibility for
the other over a politics understood as war, his rehearsal of the ethical scene—​
however unexpectedly—​ends up reproducing the sacrificial logic of his version of
politics: “the foundational role played by ethics in del Barco’s critique of political
violence turns out to mirror […] the sovereign status of the political in militant
reason” (289).7 Del Barco, Dove claims, merely replaces the Schmittian enemy
with the Levinasian figure of the absolutely other, in a rhetorical gesture that does
nothing to unsettle politics, ethics, or their relation.
Yet Dove is not content to take del Barco at his word. Like Tatián—​who, as
we recall, opts to pursue the “misunderstood” phrases in del Barco’s letter—​Dove
deconstructs the ethics/​politics antagonism through an alternative reading of the
controversial letter. If we read, together with Dove, the Levinasian “Thou shalt not
kill” in and through its impossibility, as a Kantian regulative ideal, “something we
aim at [while] knowing full well that we must fall short of it,” it becomes a kind
of “ethical fiction” (Dove 293). This fiction is doubly productive: it becomes a
structural demand to which we respond “as if ” it were true, and it becomes—​as
fiction—​an opening to the possibility of reading. This reading would be neces-
sarily grounded in—​allowed, invited by—​the demand’s fictionality, but also by its
constitutive misunderstandability, its untranslatability. Dove concludes by pointing
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The Ethical Turn 75

to a blind spot in the del Barco debate that acquires a fascinating afterlife only in
and through its reading, Dove’s reading. Turning to Otherwise than Being, Dove
reminds us that for Levinas, politics, or justice, always arrives in the figure of the
third, a figure that interrupts the face-​to-​face encounter between same and other.
On this reading, ethics always-​already implies the arrival of politics so that ethics
cannot do without politics (and, conversely, politics cannot do without ethics).
Politics simultaneously “establishes the urgency of ” and “ruins” ethics in a kind of
Derridean undecidability: each serves as the condition of possibility and impos-
sibility for the other.8
In his 2012 book El signo y la hiedra: Escritos sobre Jacques Derrida, Argentinean
philosopher Emmanuel Biset pursues a reading of the “political” Derrida (that
is also always-​already the ethical Derrida) through a discussion of the interre-
lated tropes of undecidability, institutions, and hospitality. Biset reads Derrida’s
implicit Levinasianism—​his treatment of ethics as unconditional hospitality fac-
ing the arrival of the other, or of the event—​as the core upon which he develops
his idea of politics. Justice, for Derrida, is not equated with politics, as it is for
Levinas, but rather with ethics, with the undeconstructible: it is the principle
(or beginning, foundation) of deconstruction (“es el principio de su deconstruc-
ción” [37]). “La justicia es hospitalidad, una hospitalidad hacia el acontecimiento
y hacia los otros singulares” Biset writes, “el problema es cómo traducir esta
74
ética de la hospitalidad en una política de la hospitalidad” (39).Yet, according to
Biset, this is an unsettled, flawed translation: “Una política de la hospitalidad es
la traducción siempre imperfecta en leyes puntuales de una hospitalidad radical
que nunca se identifica con sus leyes” (39). It is in these last words that we see
a break with the Levinas of Dussel or Sommer: politics, here, is not understood
as opposed to ethics as war would be opposed to responsibility for the other.
Rather than a relation of opposition, we find, in Biset’s Derrida, a constitu-
tive flaw, a point of disidentification between the demand for justice and the
institutions that might attempt to guarantee or guard the possibility of justice,
una hospitalidad que nunca se identifica con sus leyes. So we are no longer speak-
ing of politics understood as war, nor of ethics as recognition of the other’s
demand, as Dussel and Sommer would have it. We are, instead, pursuing what
is now appearing to be an alternative genealogy of the ethicopolitical in Latin
American and Latin Americanist thought: an ethics and politics grounded in
misunderstanding, disidentification.
This recast relation between quite estranged versions of ethics and politics
will be taken to an aporetic climax in Alberto Moreiras’s writing on infrapolitics.
I want to conclude in an infrapolitical key, not so much in order to privilege
this reading of the ethicopolitical relation, but because I believe that its negative
radicality sheds light—​or perhaps shadows—​upon the other readings we’ve just
finished. In “Infrapolitical Derrida,” Moreiras returns to Levinas via Derrida in
order to outline a theory of infrapolitics—​or shadow politics, as a concept that
would stand in opposition to what he calls heliopolitics—​by turning to Derrida’s
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76 Erin Graff Zivin

“Violence and Metaphysics,” the philosopher’s first published engagement with

the work of Levinas.
Moreiras opens “Infrapolitical Derrida” with an epigraph from Martin
Hägglund’s book Radical Atheism: “The spacing of time,” Hägglund writes, “entails
that alterity is undecidable. The other can be anything whatsoever or anyone
whosoever.The relation to the other is thus the nonethical opening of ethics.This
opening is violent because it entails that everything is exposed to what may cor-
rupt and extinguish it” (88). Although Moreiras does not mention it, Hägglund
borrows, here, from Derrida’s early essay “Violence of the Letter,” in which he
defines arche-​writing as “the origin of morality as of immorality. The nonethical
opening to ethics. A violent opening” (140).9
The nonethical opening to ethics: what could this be? In previous work,
Moreiras has already offered a loose definition of infrapolitics as a kind of mutual
suspension of ethics and politics: “What if, before ethics, there were another prac-
tice that makes of the double suspension of the ethical by the political and of the
political by the ethical its very possibility? This practice, which finds its expression
in literature, but is not limited to literature, is infrapolitical practice” (186). I do
not have time, here, to dwell upon Moreiras’s use of “before” (by “before ethics”
does he mean “in the face of ethics,” or prior to, perhaps a philosophy prior to
ethics as first philosophy?). I want, instead, to reflect upon Moreiras’s understand-
ing of “suspension.” In “Infrapolitical Derrida” (written about a decade later), he 76
will phrase this somewhat differently: here, infrapolitics “is the double solicitation
of the political by the ethical and of the ethical by the political.” Suspension,
solicitation: are we to understand that ethics is the condition of possibility for
politics and vice versa, or the condition of impossibility? Or rather, might we
read, in the slippage between suspension and solicitation, a negativity that prom-
ises, that opens?
The nonethical opening to ethics: on the one hand, Moreiras refers to the
(largely overlooked) sense that ethics takes place, for Levinas, precisely at the
moment of extreme violence: it could be no other way. Imagine the other side
to the command “Thou shalt not kill”: to whom is such a command directed?
Why, to a murderer, of course! Or a potential murderer: which is what we all are,
however ethically we may respond to such a command. Ethics and violence tread
upon the very same ground, not as opposites, but as perverse partners, inseparable.
For Moreiras, then, the nonethical is not to be understood as opposed to ethics,
but as its very possibility (and impossibility). The grammar that allows for such an
aporetic relation is a negative grammar, a grammar of nonidentity: Moreiras, by
advancing the concept of infrapolitics in this way, is in effect engaging with an
ethics that is not identical to itself (nonethical) in order to imagine a politics that
is not identical to itself (infrapolitics). Both, he claims, are implicit in both Derrida
and Levinas, or in Levinas read through Derrida, where it becomes possible to
identify a “Levinasian infrapolitical perspective, that is, not just of his well-​known
suspension of the political in the name of ethics, but also, perhaps surprisingly, in
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The Ethical Turn 77

the understanding of the necessary suspension of ethics in the name of a certain

politicity which will have become no less fundamental, that is, no lesser aspect of
first philosophy.”
I want to suggest, as a mode of conclusion, that it is through reading that such a
perspective becomes possible: Kaufman’s or Tatián’s or Dove’s reading of del Barco,
Biset’s reading of Derrida, Moreiras’s reading of Derrida reading Levinas, our
reading of them all. But this is not a reading that promises comprehension: what
Moreiras calls infrapolitics, but what we could also call the deconstruction of
ethics and politics, a marrano ethics, or a marrano politics, “would be the region
of theoretical practice that solicits the constitutive opacity of the ethicopolitical
relation—​hence admits, for every practical decision, of no preceding political or
ethical light to mark the path.” This is a reading that takes place not in spite of but,
rather, precisely because of the opacity of the ethicopolitical relation, the secret, mar-
rano quality of the ethicopolitical relation, the impossibility of properly recogniz-
ing and identifying the other, of translating the other’s demand into concrete and
correct political action: reading as misunderstanding, a kind of reading that, finally,
stands as the only possibility of an impossible, undeconstructible justice.

Notes
1 Garber et al.; Davis and Womack.
76 2 Substitution can point in two directions, ostensibly opposed: in the first, the substitution
of politics by ethics implies an either/​or, while in the second politics and ethics are con-
flated, confused, as we see in the prevalent modifier “ethicopolitical,” which often elides
this decision between ethics and politics by obscuring their differences.
3 Written in 1973 and published in Dussel and Guillot, Liberación latinoamericana y
Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 8–​9. (Cited in “Lo político en Levinas” 115.)
4 See Castro Arellana, “Foucault y la post-​hegemonía,” in which he argues that “la teoría
decolonial reproduce el mismo error epistemológico que denuncia” (228).
5 Alberto Moreiras has called this almost-​ but-​not-​quite deconstructive approach an
“auratic practice of the postauratic” (The Exhaustion of Difference 222).
6 These interventions have been published in a two-​ volume collection called No
Matar: Sobre la responsabilidad, and a selection has been translated and published in the
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. I am using the English translations here.
7 “While the debate between del Barco and his opponents has been characterized as a
polemic between mutually exclusive points of view, […] militant reason and its critique
in fact resemble one another in a way that neither position is prepared to acknowledge”
(Dove 289).
8 The del Barco debate thus becomes, for Dove, a pretext: a case study though which it is
possible to rethink the opposition between ethics and politics. Of course, this dynamic is
already at work in del Barco and his respondents: for if they are sparring over the poli-
tics of memory, over past “decisions” between ethics and politics, they are also speaking
above all about the present: “If the Left is to reconstitute itself as a viable social force in
a contemporary setting—​in which ideological conflict has been thoroughly stigmatized
and the reigning assumption for some time has been that the end of history as progres-
sion and development is now in sight—​this Left must first learn to reckon with its own
past, not by judging the past as past but rather by interrogating the ways in which the
past appears in the present, or how the historical present has been shaped by the past and
its decisions” (292).
78

78 Erin Graff Zivin

9 Moreiras has since revised this paper, and now includes the reference to Derrida’s
“Violence of the Letter.” The essay will be published as “Infrapolitical Derrida” in The
Marrano Specter: Derrida and Hispanism (forthcoming).

References
Belzagui, Pablo René, editor. No Matar: Sobre la Responsabilidad, vol. I. Ediciones del
Ciclope/​Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, 2007.
Biset, Emmanuel. El signo y la hiedra: Escritos sobre Jacques Derrida. Alción Editora, 2012.
Castro Arellana, Rodrigo. “Foucault y la post-​hegemonía: Tres episodios de una recep-
ción: Said, Spivak y Mignolo.” Post-​hegemonía: El final de un paradigma de la filosofía política
contemporánea en América Latina, edited by Rodrigo Castro Orellana. Biblioteca Nueva,
2015, pp. 217–​232.
Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack, editors. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics,
Culture, and Literary Theory. UP of Virginia, 2001.
Del Barco, Oscar.“No matarás: Thou shalt not kill.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies,
vol. 16, no. 2, 2007, pp. 115–​117.
Derrida, Jacques. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel
Levinas.” Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass. U of Chicago P, 1978, pp. 97–​192.
—​—​—​. “Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-​Strauss to Rousseau.” Of Grammatology, trans-
lated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997, pp. 101–​140.
Dove, Patrick. “Memory between Politics and Ethics: Del Barco’s Letter.” Journal of Latin
American Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, 2008, pp. 179–​197.
Dussel, Enrique. Liberación latinoamericana y Emmanuel Levinas. Edited by Enrique Dussel 78
and Daniel E. Guillot. Editorial Bonum, 1975.
—​—​—​. “Lo político en Levinas: Hacia una filosofía política crítica.” Signos filosóficos, vol. 9,
2003, pp. 111–​132.
Garber, Marjorie, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, editors. The Turn to Ethics.
Routledge, 2000.
Graff Zivin, Erin. “Beyond Inquisitional Logic, or, Toward an An-​archaeological Latin
Americanism.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 2014, pp. 195–​211.
Hägglund, Martin. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford UP, 2008.
Jinkis, Jorge. “A Reply to Oscar del Barco.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, vol. 16,
no. 2, 2007, pp. 119–​125.
Kaufman, Alejandro. “The Paradoxical Legacy of a Lost Treasure.” Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 2007, pp. 145–​153.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso
Lingis. Duquesne UP, 1969.
—​—​—​. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne
UP, 1998.
Markell, Patchen. Bound by Recognition. Princeton UP, 2003.
Moreiras, Alberto. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies.
Duke UP, 2001.
—​—​—​. “Infrapolitical Literature: Hispanism and the Border.” CR: The New Centennial
Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 2010, pp. 183–​203.
—​—​—​. “Infrapolitical Derrida: The Ontic Determination of Politics beyond Empiricism.”
Paper delivered at the American Comparative Literature Association meeting, New York,
March 21–​23, 2014.
 79

The Ethical Turn 79

—​—​—​. “Infrapolitical Derrida: The Ontic Determination of Politics beyond Empiricism.”

The Marrano Specter: Derrida and Hispanism, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. Fordham UP,
forthcoming 2017, pp. 116–​137.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf, 1987.
Sommer, Doris.“About-​Face: The Talker Turns.” Boundary 2, vol. 23, no. 1, 1996, pp. 91–​133.
—​—​—​. Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas. Harvard
UP, 1999.
Tatián, Diego. “Letter from Diego Tatián.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, vol. 16,
no. 2, 2007, pp. 141–​143.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. El hablador. Editorial Seix Barral, 1987.

78
80

5
THE SUBALTERNIST TURN
Gareth Williams

The publication in recent years of John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/​11

(2011) and Abraham Acosta’s Thresholds of Illiteracy (2014) places the legacies of the
subalternist turn in Latin American postcolonial studies once again at the center of
interest.These are, however, very different books. Latinamericanism after 9/​11 forges 80
a rationality of expedience and instrumentality that is guided exclusively by a pre-​
ordained desire to bring the theoretical register of the subalternist turn to closure
under the banner of “post-​subalternism,” or “real politics,” which, for the author,
means the opposite of “theory,” or “deconstruction.”1 In contrast, Thresholds of
Illiteracy posits a vital re-​visitation of the critical-​theoretical spirit of the subalter-
nist turn in order to clarify, re-​state and advance reading strategies with a view
to furthering debate on the double register of knowing and transforming. The
underlying logic of the first book is that of the passive acceptance of the laws of
the given, conceiving of the political as reformist shifts in preexisting social policy
and systems of representation. The second book strives to turn its back on, and to
detour away from, what I will define as positive reflection in the name of an alter-
native interpretative regime for the thinking of the political in Latin American
postcolonial discourse, and, of course, in Latin America itself. Latinamericanism after
9/​11 articulates the need for oblivion—​for the concealment of prior debates and
critical energies in the name of re-​suturing thought to the history of the cultural-​
nationalist state—​while Thresholds of Illiteracy assumes the responsibility of a turn-
ing back toward unfinished, insufficient, and erroneous readings of the relation
between theory and the political, with a view to re-​orienting the possibility of a
return to the practice of thinking itself.
In the wake of the publication of these two works, the purpose of the current
essay is to shed light on what can still be recuperated and thought through as a result
of a subalternist turn that first began in the early 1990s, when the Latin American
 81

The Subalternist Turn 81

Subaltern Studies Group was formed by a small group of Latin Americanists that
was striving to grapple with the realities of an emergent post-​Soviet order, and
with the difficulty of understanding the consequences for intellectual work on
Latin America of an emerging transformation of the planetary nomos. In its first
phase (spanning roughly 1992–​1996) the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group
was a small affinity-​based reading group that would meet informally once a year,
in a private conclave, to share readings and discuss previously circulated scholarly
work. This phase produced the group’s “Founding Statement” (1993).2 In its sec-
ond phase (1996–​1998) the group began to acquire the potential for broader prac-
tical and theoretical engagements. However, a number of members of the original
group refused to allow that potential to coalesce, and, as a consequence, the group
split and never re-​formed.3
In the wake of the group’s definitive demise in 1998, we can now see that the
“subalternist turn” in Latin American postcolonial studies produced three dis-
cursive, methodological, and conceptual variants, which I will examine in more
detail in the pages that follow. I will state from the outset, however, that it is my
estimation that of the three variants, only one can be considered to be a “turn”
in anything even approximating a true sense, that is, as the mark of a departure
offering the possibility of a detour, a deviation, or a divergence toward a difference
from the nihilist world of the technologically given and the all-​encompassing will
80
to power of the modern subject. In contrast, the other two variants in question
stage and reinstall entirely conformist conceptual and political relations to the
creole laws of the post-​Independence cultural and political traditions of modern
and postmodern Latin America. Paraphrasing Acosta (5), two of the three variants
thwart thought in advance, and are as such entirely counterproductive as either
a cultural politics or as a path for thinking and addressing the question of the
political that lies at the heart of the contemporary, post-​Cold War nomos. They
are, essentially, nihilism in process.

The Decolonial Variant; or, Coloniality at Large

In the wake of the subalternist turn of the 1990s the so-​called “decolonial option,”
coordinated and extended around the figure and writings of Walter Mignolo and
others, has installed itself as the ubiquitous mode of postcolonial Latin Americanist
thought in recent decades. On the cultural and historical levels this paradigm
restages the basic logics of three foundational identitarian traditions from Latin
America.The traditions in question are: (1) José Martí-​inspired Nuestroamericanismo;
(2) the identitarian legacies of Andean indigenismo, which, historically speaking, is
a conceptual extension of the aforementioned creole nuestroamericanismo but in
inverted form; (3) the philosophy of liberation that emerged from within the
heterogeneous political forces of Argentine Peronism in the early 1970s.The latter
sub-​variant within the “decolonial option” is overtly Christian in its intentions
and modalities, and was first promoted in 1970 by the Jesuit journal Stromata
82

82 Gareth Williams

around the essentializing modernista question, “What Is Latin American?” (Schutte

177).This line of thought was subsequently championed by the Franciscan journal
Nuevo mundo beginning in 1973. In their reaccommodation into the contemporary
“decolonial option,” the heterogeneities, inconsistencies, and basic incompatibili-
ties underlying these historically and geographically distinct identitarian-​Christian
paradigms are systematically erased. As a result, while the intellectual trajectories
and writings of Osvaldo Ardiles, Horacio Cerutti Guldberg and Arturo Roig are
ignored, Enrique Dussel becomes the sole philosopher of liberation and “decolo-
niality,” though it must also be pointed out that in this fully decisionist reconver-
sion Dussel’s work on Marxism is largely ignored (perhaps because Marx was not
Latin American).4
The second gesture of the “decolonial option” is to articulate the three afore-
mentioned creole-​ Christian identitarian (or, ontotheological) traditions from
Latin America with US university-​style identity politics, or US academic “liberal-
ism,” which is built exclusively on discourses of identitarian exclusion and inclu-
sion in the name of diversity. The third gesture is to then scaffold all of the above
onto the legacy of dependency theory and Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-​systems
analysis, even though under current conditions it is clear that the division of the
world into core countries, semi-​peripheral countries and peripheral countries has
already succumbed to a spatial complexity for which world-​systems analysis can
no longer account.5 Given its clearly Christian and creole identitarian underpin- 82
nings, decolonial thinking is little more than an ontotheological response to the
contemporary crisis of ontotheology.
Within this initial overall context, the “decolonial option” also presents itself
as an extension of Anibal Quijano’s observation from a 2000 essay published in
the now defunct journal Nepantla: Views from South that post-​Independence Latin
America reveals a sustained “coloniality of power.” Quijano’s insight regarding
the “coloniality of power” in Latin America is clearly significant, but not ground-
breaking or field defining. After all, such an idea has been a mainstay of twen-
tieth century Marxist-​indigenista thought in Latin America since the 1920s. For
example, José Carlos Mariátegui was already clear about the duration of the colo-
nial metaphysics of the post-​Independence state form in his 1928 essay on the
religious factor in the Andean post-​Independence period: “Amamantado por la
catolicidad española, el Estado peruano [independiente] tenía que constituirse
como Estado semifeudal y católico” (189). In other words, the colonial roots of the
Latin American modern state form are not, and have never really been, in dispute.
The question, then, is how to establish a way of thinking that is capable of prepar-
ing the way for an alternative telos, or for a turn that is not always-​already acqui-
escent before the history of the ontotheological (i.e. the imperial) itself. Quijano’s
essay, which is so frequently cited in the context of the vitality and originality of
contemporary decolonial thought, does not prepare for a turn since it reinstalls
the basic conditions of an Andean Marxist tradition built for the best part of a
century on the critique of racial capitalism. I am not saying Quijano’s diagnosis is
 83

The Subalternist Turn 83

mistaken. I am saying that to the extent that it reproduces one of the basic tenets
of the creole-​indigenista tradition forged by José Carlos Mariátegui in the 1920s, it
does not provide us with anything we did not know already.
Despite ending the essay with the warning that democratization under global
conditions might no longer hinge on the broadening of modern subject-​based
rights, citizenship, and representation (that is, it might no longer depend on the
deepening of the relation between cultural identity and the political), Quijano
concludes with a return to a previous avatar of post-​Independence thought that
is grounded essentially in creole notions of citizenship, identity, difference, and
representation. In the end, it is the modern notion of “the People” that hovers
above the entire political life of what Quijano calls “the coloniality of power”: “It
is time to learn to free ourselves from the Eurocentric mirror where our image
is always, necessarily, distorted. It is time, finally, to cease being what we are not”
(222). Quijano’s recourse to a Latin American “We”—​a “People” yet to be deliv-
ered up from historical alienation and yet to be born unto “our” true, and truly
independent, metaphysical structure—​is obviously an echo of José Martí’s famous
Nuestroamericanismo: “A lo que es, allí donde se gobierna, hay que atender para
gobernar bien; y el buen gobierno en América no es el que sabe cómo se gobierna
el alemán o el francés, sino el que sabe con qué elementos está hecho su país” (27–​
28). But that is not all we can hear, for we can also hear echoes of Andrés Bello’s
82
“Autonomía cultural de América” of 1848, as Quijano restages Bello’s admoni-
tion to the youth of Chile to aspire to the independence of thought by avoiding
excessive servility to the science of civilized Europe. We could even go further
back, however, to Simón Bolívar in 1819: “¿No dice el Espíritu de las leyes que éstas
deben ser propias para el pueblo que las hace?, ¿que es una gran casualidad que las
de una nación puedan convertir a otra?, ¿que las leyes deben ser relativas a lo físico
del país, al clima, a la calidad del terreno, a su situación, a su extension, al género
de vida de los pueblos? … ¡He aquí el código que debíamos consultar y no el de
Washington!” (quoted in Gómez-​Martínez 2). The end of Quijano’s essay, which
has become one of the principle gateways into the thought of the so-​called “deco-
lonial option,” turns toward a centuries-old tradition of creole Latin American
thought that is grounded in lo nuestro, that can only be measured from within the
imperial nomos of criollismo, and that remains subject at all times to its Christian
anthropological ontology.
In the wake of the subalternist turn, the genealogies of the Latin American crio-
llista tradition restage cultural identity as a form of salvation from the imperial nomos
and from the time of unfettered capital. Given the continuity of its essentially crio-
llista ground, there can be no actual “turn,” detour or deviance—​no turning our
backs on post-​Independence regimes of representation—​from within the decolo-
nial variant of the subalternist turn. The decolonial option as a thought of the law
of the subject and of the subject alone, and therefore as Latin-​Romanic thought
grafted onto European Enlightenment thought in its most rudimentary form, is
more a hindrance to decolonization than a help, for until there is a decolonization
84

84 Gareth Williams

of the law of the subject (that is, of identity thinking) there can be no decoloni-
zation at all. Until then, the entire history of Western phallo-​logocentrism (that
is, the legacies of identity and difference; of the paternal, the familial, the frater-
nal, the law, the Christian community, the hearth, the nation, the homo-​philial,
lo nuestro, etc.) remains firmly in place in, and thanks to, the decolonial option,
despite its perennial accusations of Eurocentrism and its claims of a political and
cultural alternative to the reigning nomos. As Abraham Acosta puts it in a reading
strategy that is nevertheless distinct from the one presented in these pages, decolo-
nial thought (as exemplified in the over 600-​page tome, Coloniality at Large, edited
by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel and Carlos Jáuregui) “ultimately provides an
unreliable mapping of the stakes and terms of postcolonial critique and its rela-
tionship to Latin America” (39).

The Popular Front Variant; or, “Real Politics”

Setting aside the inconsistencies and limitations inherent to the development of
decolonial metaphysics allows us to approach the remaining two variants that have
also developed as a result of the subalternist turn in postcolonial thinking on and
in Latin America since the 1990s. The second variant is that of a Popular Front-​
style cultural-​nationalist humanism that defines itself primarily in its rejection of
what it calls “deconstruction,” and in its positive valorization of hegemony, under- 84
standing the latter as the fabrication of a positive power, common sense, or form
of social rationalization that is built on, and that is only made possible through, its
relation to a subaltern “other,” which is the exclusion or negation of that power
and of its ideological presuppositions.
For this second populist-​ humanist variant of subalternism, for which the
work of John Beverley has been perhaps the prime referent, the question is only
ever how the subaltern subject can become a hegemonic subject (a process that
Beverley refers to as “real politics”). As Abraham Acosta shows with utmost clar-
ity in Thresholds of Illiteracy, the populist variant of the subalternist turn grounds
itself repeatedly in a symptomatic misreading of Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay,
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” This is a misreading that allows nevertheless for the
unconditioned assertion of subjectivist positivity over and above all other modali-
ties of political thinking. Thanks to Acosta’s argument, we can see how the field
of Latin American postcolonial thought has responded to Spivak’s essay almost
overwhelmingly, and insufficiently, by saying “yes (the subaltern can speak) and no
(we just don’t listen)” (52). But, as Acosta warns us, something quite fundamental
is lost in this limited, and limiting, response:

By and large, the terms by which this essay has been appropriated or dis-
missed in the field stems from a fundamentally (and doubly) metaleptic
reading, for while “Can the Subaltern Speak?” persists as the only question
that elicits a response, the more critical intervention the essay invokes (“Are
 85

The Subalternist Turn 85

we [intellectuals] assuming a pure form of consciousness?”) continues to

go overlooked and dis-​acknowledged. In many ways, the response [yes/​no]
… grants the subaltern an identity within the Latin American scene of
cultural intelligibility, but as a positive entity completely devoid of its rela-
tional, structural, and ultimately heterogeneous critical import. As such, this
reply signals not only an adherence to ontological assumptions vis-​à-​vis the
subaltern (understood in positive terms: i.e. “flesh and blood”) but also a
certain unproblematic expectation of a direct, unmediated political relation
of solidarity with or through them … “Can the subaltern speak?” is not the
primary question Spivak’s essay ultimately poses.
(52)

What is erased in the positive metaphysics of populist subjectivism is the

real question: “Are we [intellectuals] assuming a pure form of consciousness?”
Indeed, it was this very question that grounded my critique of the Latin American
Subaltern Studies Group’s “Founding Statement” in 1996, though the practitio-
ners of the populist and decolonial variants of subaltern studies have never pro-
vided a response to a question that essentially challenges the relation between
postcolonial thinking and the intellectual will to power. In 2011 the author of
Latinamericanism after 9/​11 systematically avoids the question in order to give voice
84
to his overall frustration with what he calls “deconstruction,” and in order to prop
up his declarations of solidarity with the so-​called marea rosada of Latin American
progressive states (a number of whom have since ceased to exist, in the process
shedding light on the limited efficacy of book-​length declarations of subjective
solidarity emitted from the universities of the north).
In the past two decades, the populist-​humanist variant of the subalternist turn
has not varied its script. In his 1999 book Subalternity and Representation Beverley
thought that what was at stake in the relation between hegemony and subalternity
was “the pertinence of deconstruction as a model for new forms of political imag-
ination and practice” (97–​98). More importantly, what was at stake was his view of
the inappropriateness of deconstruction for subaltern studies. He reproduced those
same views over a decade later in Latinamericanism after 9/​11 (2011). Both times,
however, the author misses the point of what is really at stake, because deconstruc-
tion can never be a model for, and it is certainly never pertinent to, anything in
particular. As Acosta points out, “deconstruction does not inhabit any discursive
sphere of its own; it refers to a condition (and process) of meaning always-​already
at work within discursivity itself, one that makes visible the contradictions of
signification and referentiality inscribed at the core of any pronouncement of
knowledge or authority” (22). As such, it is nothing more than conceptual prepa-
ration for thinking through the enigmas or aporias of the political, the conceptual
work that can be done in order to consider the limitations and promise of the
critique of the political and its modern legacies. Beverley reproduced Román de la
Campa’s opinion that deconstruction is little more than a melancholy attachment
86

86 Gareth Williams

that cannot detach itself from its conditions of possibility (Latinamericanism after 9/​
11, 55). Both opinions, however, are erroneous.
Deconstruction prepares the terrain for the singular disruption of the given
not from within melancholy attachments that it cannot exceed but in the name
of rendering inoperative the everyday walls of sameness and difference, the lega-
cies of the metaphysics of closure, and the political and cultural traditions built
on centuries of ontotheological subsumption (hegemony, in other words). As
such, there is no melancholy attachment in or through deconstruction. It would
be safe to say that it is in fact the precise opposite. Deconstruction binds us to
the immanent un-​work of the alter and obliges that we face the question of
responsibility that is uncovered in its wake. John Beverley, however, criticizes
deconstruction because it “is always bound to interrupt the constitution of the
subaltern as a subject of history” (Subalternity and Representation 102). But again
this misses the point, because in order to become a “subject of history” the sub-
altern, who is so because she is positioned as such by hegemony, has to internal-
ize the interpellation of, and thereby enter, or become, hegemony. She has to
internalize hegemony as the location and essence of her own being in the same
way the heart of the factory worker is forced to beat from within the chest of the
capitalist, as Marx put it. By definition, the subaltern cannot be a subject of his-
tory understood in the sense suggested by Beverley. That is, she can never be an
autonomous plenitude. As Spivak put it, “the subaltern is necessarily the absolute 86
limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic” (16) (a formulation that
was explored extensively in my 2002 book, The Other Side of the Popular, which
I will return to below).
Deep down, what is really at stake is that the populist-​humanist variant of
subaltern studies views the political exclusively as the positive closure of thought
and action around the hegemony-​subalternity dyad: “The question is … whether
subaltern studies can contribute to organizing a new form of hegemony from
below—​what Guha calls a ‘politics of the people’” (Beverley Subalternity and
Representation 104). In such positivity there is no possible exteriority to, and no
substantive transfiguration of, a political power/​knowledge relation that is always-​
already established by hegemony. As a result, within this positive closure of thought
and action around hegemony there is no possibility of “a radical negativity within
academic disciplinarity,” which is what this variant purportedly seeks (Beverley,
“Interview,” 355). The latter—​radical negativity—​is utterly incompatible with the
former—​the closure of thought around hegemony—​because hegemony only ever
organizes the repression.
Here we see that in the populist-​humanist variant of subaltern studies there is
a fundamental distinction between affirmation and positivity. Hegemonic politics
(which Beverley now refers to “post-​subalternism”) is a politics of the positive, over
and above what it negates (which is subalternity). In this sense “post-​subalternism,”
which is the logical consequence of twenty years of Popular Front-​style human-
ism, is not subaltern studies—​not the critical reconsideration of the mere fact of
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The Subalternist Turn 87

political reason itself—​because it is actually and only ever the thought of, and for,
hegemonic positivity.
Obviously, what we see is that there is a fundamental contradiction lying at
the heart of an instrumentalist politics of hegemonic positivity that is forged
in the name of a politics of subalternity. After all, this kind of politics is only
ever grounded, in spite of its claims to “real politics,” in a politics predicated on
acquiescence before an “always-​already internalized agreement to the rules of the
hegemonic game” (Moreiras, Exhaustion of Difference, 283). As a result, by logi-
cal definition, there is no “turn” available to us in the populist-​humanist variant
of subalternist postcolonial studies, or “post-​subalternism,” because this variant
installs entirely conformist conceptual and political relations to the laws of popu-
list hegemony, and, therefore, to the laws of the organization and administration
of mediated subordination itself. It is, in this sense, nihilism in its basic form,
since it refuses to question, never mind strive to de-​suture, the originary intimacy
between violence, immunity, communitas and the reproduction of the political via
subjective fidelity, the extension of norms, and the positive administration of wills.
The populist-​humanist variant of subalternist postcolonial studies conforms to the
understanding of the political as the positive administration of force, and there is
nothing less subalternist than that because subaltern studies was the critique and
dismantling of the will to power of the modern history of political subjectivity in
86
Latin America.
If the political model of the hegemonic “chain of equivalences” can no longer
be de-​sutured from the absolute domination of global financialized capital and
consumption, and is in fact subsumed a priori by that domination (as has been
seen recently not only in reference to the marea rosada states of Latin America, the
Greek fiasco of 2015, and the US presidential elections of 2016), then it would
appear that another path—​a third variant—​needs to be considered in order to
conceptualize the possibility of a turn in the relation between thinking the politi-
cal and acting politically.

The Posthegemonic Variant or Turn

The following question affords us the opportunity to begin to delineate a funda-
mental distinction between the populist-​humanist, the decolonial, and the third
and final variant in the subalternist of the 1990s turn to be addressed in these pages,
which refers to the question of posthegemony: “Is it possible to salvage some kind of
anti-​systemic productivity in our transitional times for a mode of knowledge that
would seem to depend almost entirely on epistemological models bequeathed by
modernity at the very moment in which modernity becomes a thing of the past?”
(Moreiras, Exhaustion of Difference, 76).
Under current conditions, can there be such as thing as a viable preparation for
something other than the vociferous, nihilist conformism of the decolonial option
and Popular Front-​ style humanism in Latin American postcolonial thinking?
8

88 Gareth Williams

In contrast to the two variants already outlined in these pages, and as already
seen in the question cited from Alberto Moreiras’s 2001 book, The Exhaustion of
Difference, posthegemony is predicated on raising the question of epochality. Quite
literally, posthegemony is the question of time, of the times, and of our time. More
specifically, it is predicated on the understanding of the end of the Cold War and
the closure of metaphysics as the end of epochality itself, which is obviously a dif-
ferent register of reflection from that of Francis Fukuyama’s early 1990s gospel of
the “end of history’.
Given its title, it is perhaps natural that for many readers posthegemony is
connected primarily to the publication in 2010 of Jon Beasley-​Murray’s book
Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America.6 However, the concept was
first addressed in the field of Latin American postcolonial thought in Alberto
Moreiras’s The Exhaustion of Difference (2001) and my own The Other Side of
the Popular (2002). They are three very different books, working in distinct
ways around a shared set of concerns and issues regarding globalization and
the question of the political. The Other Side of the Popular and The Exhaustion
of Difference came directly out of the moment and intellectual experience of
the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group in its 1996–​1998 phase, with a
more or less common conceptual genealogy and destructive register that could
be summed up in general terms as an engagement with Latin America’s main
post-​Independence cultural and political traditions, the genealogies of Marx-​ 8
Nietzsche-​Heidegger-​Derrida, the postcolonial legacy of South Asian subaltern
studies, and psychoanalysis. On the other hand, Beasley-​Murray’s Posthegemony
displaces the majority of these critical genealogies (in particular the Nietzsche-​
Heidegger-​Derrida legacy) stating that he is “not content with deconstruction”
(5). The author of Posthegemony begins by refusing the existence of hegemony
and its historical efficacy (for instance, its ability to orient and depoliticize). It
could be said, of course, that this initial gesture understates the central question
of the “hegemonic apparatus” in Gramsci and overstates the idea that hegemony
is inherently and only ever incomplete; a mere fiction. Nevertheless, Beasley-​
Murray’s book displaces questions of ideology, consciousness, and subjectivity
in favor of prioritizing affect, habitus and the multitude as the positive figures for
posthegemonic thinking, voicing his discomfort with what he calls “the labor
of the negative” in previous articulations of posthegemonic thinking. In con-
trast to the positions developed in Posthegemony, of course, in The Exhaustion
of Difference and The Other Side of the Popular real politics is understood as the
positive (that is, biopolitical) administration of power and, therefore, of violence.
Therefore, to the extent that posthegemony in the early 2000s is the critique of
the biopolitical understanding of power—​of a power that does not saturate the
realm and experience of the political—​the reader can see that within the general
framework of posthegemonic thinking there remains a tendency that remains
convinced that it cannot be advanced without addressing the negative in one
way or another.
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The Subalternist Turn 89

Beasley-​Murray, in contrast, strives to give a positive valence to affect, habitus

and the multitude. However, the question of the relation of affect to will to power,
of habitus to ethos or doxa, and, as such, to notions of custom, duty, and unitary
or common law, and of the multitude to the anthropo-​logocentric—​toward the
gathering of the human as the sole determination of the political—​still suggest
the possibility of a lingering subjectivist metaphysics that remains to be worked
through and fully deconstructed in this approach to political theory and posthe-
gemonic thinking in Latin America. Indeed, it is precisely for this reason that
I strive in The Other Side of the Popular to distance posthegemony from anthropo-​
logocentrism by adopting Gayatri Spivak’s definition of subalternity not as “the
subaltern subject” (as in the decolonial and Popular Front subalternist variants) but
as “the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic.” The
definition of subalternity as the limit of the place where history is narrativized into
logic helps us bring the question of posthegemony back to the fundamental issue
of historicity, epochality, and the contemporary question of the political.
In his 2001 book Alberto Moreiras produced a fundamental and systematic
deconstruction of the very configuration of an entire field, or regional ontology
(“Latin Americanism”), at the time of an emergent interregnum that only a very
few were referring to as globalization back then. The Exhaustion of Difference was
a work of destruction that sought nothing other than the de-​narrativization of the
8
metaphysical fantasies and fatal conceptual conceits of all identity thinking in rela-
tion to modern and contemporary Latin America and Latin Americanist reflec-
tion, while also insisting on the ways to guarantee the conceptual regeneration
of that same field of reflection. Moreiras referred to this possibility as the labor
of “second-​order Latinamericanism.” The term posthegemony was mentioned by
Moreiras only on the most rare of occasions in this book, and was generally under-
stood as that which lies beyond all possible capture by hegemony and hegemonic
thought. It is clear, however, that the book in its entirety, and, in particular, in its
opening to “second-​order Latinamericanism,” is a sustained engagement with a
specifically posthegemonic intellectual practice. Posthegemony in The Exhaustion
of Difference is a thought that questions the limits of any given hegemonic relation
(for example, the hegemony-​subalternity relation in a given moment, text, event
or historical constellation). It does so as a means of shedding light on the incom-
patibility between the cultural politics of hegemony and the site of subaltern
exclusion. Since hegemonic politics “can always abolish some subalternities but
can never abolish them all—​it needs them as that on which it constitutes itself ”
(Moreiras 285), the idea was to convert the inevitable incompleteness and imper-
fection of hegemonic interpellation into the basic code for an opening, within
theory and practice, to alternative articulations (“worldings” or experiences) of the
political. Posthegemony in this work was therefore a wager for the transfiguration
of the relation between the political and the articulation of the university’s (and
therefore the field’s) inherited power/​knowledge configuration. The whole point
of second-​order Latin Americanism at that time was to interrupt the constitution
90

90 Gareth Williams

of hegemony (not that of the subaltern) in the name of a politics other than that of
a hegemony-​subalternity relation built for the sole purpose of subordination. In
other words, the problem was and still is “hegemony,” when it is taken to be the
sole ground of the political. Second-​order Latin Americanism was a wager that
politics does not have to exhaust itself within a hegemony-​subalternity relation
that always works against the subaltern. In this sense, posthegemony emerged as
active solidarity with subalternity as a result of the negative work, or deconstruc-
tion, it carries out in relation to hegemony. This was posthegemony’s affirmation
and insistence at that time, as well as being the ground of its double aim of know-
ing the world and transforming it. Posthegemony, if considered in all its possibili-
ties, marked the site for a preparatory clearing of the disciplinary way, a clearing to
push “the institutional limits of disciplinary thinking, as much as we are able to do,
in order to see what happens then” (Moreiras, Exhaustion of Difference, 300). The
field of Latin American postcolonial thinking, however, either blocked or ignored
the underlying potential of such a preparatory clearing, and did so generally in
favor of decolonial metaphysics.
Similarly, in my development of specific case studies throughout the second
half of The Other Side of the Popular, posthegemony came to be defined as the theo-
retical and practical—​that is, the experiential—​site at which both hegemonic and
counterhegemonic discourses cease to make sense. The Nietzschean-​Derridean
perhaps that was developed in the second part of that book was defined as “the 90
greatest gift posthegemony has to offer,” meaning that posthegemony uncovers
meanings other than those that are immediately handed over to the history, meta-
phors and reproduction of instrumental reason (historicism, humanism, or the
modern philosophy of history). Posthegemony in this work remains extraneous
to the interests of hegemony and of hegemonic thought (so-​called “real politics”),
thereby challenging the forging of chains of equivalence between subject posi-
tions, and always striving to do so without necessarily replacing them with other
master narratives. In other words posthegemony was, in the second half of The
Other Side, both an epochal diagnosis and a deconstruction of the genealogical (of the
inheritance of the ideology of the subject, for example) in the name of a hetero-
geneous, democratic, uncontainable, often underlying or infra-​hegemonic force.
Posthegemony, in this sense, emerged in the early 2000s as a democratic thought
and practice that sought to deconstruct the determinations of the political in the
name of freedom. That is, I think, what posthegemony still promises, in spite of
what might still be referred to as its “labor of the negative.”
But what of posthegemony’s relation to epochality? Moreiras’s The Exhaustion
of Difference was the first book in the tradition to try to identify the constitutive
symptoms of the time of the interregnum we now refer to as globalization, and to
reorient, or turn, those symptoms systematically toward a new understanding of
intellectual responsibility. Through the concept of “operational whitewash,” The
Other Side of the Popular was the first book in the tradition to try to understand
the peculiar question of the temporal de-​structuration of the modern apparatus of
 91

The Subalternist Turn 91

development that the interregnum was opening up before us, just a decade after the
fall of the Berlin Wall. It was also the first book in the subalternist turn to charac-
terize globalization as an emergent war of all against all, within an overall context
characterized by the de-​structuration of modern political space (173–​213), which
is what Carlo Galli would later characterize as “global war.”
As a result of the apparently limitless violence unleashed in the wake of 9/​11,
it has become clear that the end of the Cold War and the subsequent globalization
of unfettered, financialized capital has initiated much more than it was possible
to account for in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The modern nomos has entered
into a state of collapse and we are living times of total economic mobilization and
spatial de-​structuration characterized by the ultra-​violence of narco-​accumulation
and the rampant extraction of resources not only in Latin America—​in which
the so-​called leftist governments of the marea rosada have been key players too, of
course—​but in any space virtually anywhere on the planet deemed available for
the extraction of value. This is the time of spatial and political de-​containment,
and posthegemony is the sign and diagnosis of its peculiar, post-​developmentalist
epochality. Within this context, the very terms of debate on the possible pathway
toward a conceptual and practical turn, detour, deviation, or divergence have had
to shift.
The conceptual and practical weight we assign to the closure of metaphysics—​
90
or not, as the case may be—​is central to this discussion. With the death of God
(Nietzsche) and the destruction of the metaphysical-​ontotheological ground for
thought (Heidegger), we confront the closure of metaphysics hand in hand with
the advent of absolute technological en-​framing (techne) on a planetary scale.
Reiner Schürmann offers the fundamental diagnosis in Broken Hegemonies that in
the current epoch—​that of the closure of metaphysics, which is the closure of epoch-
ality itself—​we are witnessing the gradual and unforgiving breakdown of any arche
previously capable of grounding thought and action. In this sense, the time of the
closure of metaphysics is an-​archic (in which case, neoliberalism is merely a symp-
tom of, and the attempt to further conceal, a far deeper conceptual-​existential
conundrum). The closure of metaphysics does not indicate a transition to other
forms—​for here there is no Hegelian Aufhebung available—​unless the sovereign
decisionism of so-​called “real politics” intervenes to over-​simplify matters for us.
Within this context, the infrapolitical—​the difference or distance from the
political that always flows beneath the political (Moreiras, “Infrapolítica”)—​
remains inextricably linked at all times to posthegemony, and is essential to any
formulation of a posthegemonic democratic thought and practice, since together
they exist like a partition of sorts; a partition that divides while joining and
separates while combining. This is, let’s say, the condition of the co-​implication
between the infrapolitical and posthegemonic democratic thought and practice.
One of the most concise formulations of the stakes of a specifically infrapolitical-​
posthegemonic proposition in specific relation to the question of epochality can
be found in Jorge Álvarez Yágüez’s “Crisis epocal: la política en el límite.” Here
92

92 Gareth Williams

Álvarez Yágüez notes that the inheritance of the koinon—​which is the originary
principle or foundation (arche) that determines our understanding of the com-
mon, the public, the res publica, nomos, the commonwealth, the people, and
the modern structure of sovereignty, of course—​is such that the political is, in
conceptual terms, consolidated and instituted in order to guarantee the possibil-
ity of a relation to the One (the Aristotelian pros hen). What we understand to
be the common has only ever been, in all its historical variants, the fully deter-
mined, principial relation to the One. This is the principle that organizes and
gives specific body to the daily existence and experience of the political. For
example, Hegel’s Romanic-​imperial instantiation of the One is evident in his
1806 correspondence with Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, which Carlo Galli
also references in Global War: “I saw the Emperor—​this world-​soul—​r iding out
of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an
individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out
over the world and masters it” (Hegel, quoted in Galli 141–​142). Hegel is clearly
intoxicated by the auratic imperial power of the One. It is not by chance, then,
that Jean-​Luc Nancy has posited that freedom has been thoroughly subordinated
to the determination of an ontology of subjectivity, in which Being is understood
as the subjectum of representation, and freedom is the act of appearing to oneself.
Obviously the emergence of the nation-​state as the principle foundation of the
post-​1648 Westphalian world order, or the ascension of individual consciousness 92
as the arche of the bourgeois Enlightenment subject in post-​Renaissance phi-
losophy and politics, are refortifications of an originary concept—​the One, the
subject, consciousness etc.—​that has been waning and forcefully reinstating itself
for millennia. Communitarianism, the commons, neo-​communism, decolonial
thought and the theories of the multitude are all theories of a subjectivist will to
power grounded not in the closure of metaphysics but in the decisionist/​subjec-
tivist closure of the closure of metaphysics extended in the name of the Aristotelian
pros hen. All these theoretical political formulations are themselves deeply invested
in the ontological politics inherent in Hegel’s Romanic imagination. By this I
mean to suggest that they do not offer an alternative solution, or a turn of any
kind. They are, quite simply, more of the same (domination, or mediated subor-
dination, experienced as a “wonderful sensation”).
The infrapolitical, on the other hand, bears witness to the fact that these posi-
tions are the embodiment of the nihilism that already possesses us (techne, the
will to power, or the calculations of the relation between means and ends). The
infrapolitical inhabits the very problem of the political from within the closure of
epochality, from within the existential analytic (the ontological difference between
Being and beings), and strives to advance a thought that remains at a distance
from the nihilist legacies of subjectivist decisionism that we have inherited from
the modern, together with its Latin-​Romanic humanist antecedents. To strive to
reduce our nihilist subjectivist legacies to rubble, to a point of suspension or inop-
erativity, is to think and write in preparation for a renovation and potential turn
 93

The Subalternist Turn 93

in our thinking of the post-​Cold War interregnum, or, as Carlo Galli calls it, the
time of “global war.” To my mind, and here we come full circle, infrapolitical-​
posthegemonic democracy is epochal diagnosis and destruction grounded in the
clearing away (the de-​metaphorization) of the subordination of freedom to the
ontology of subjectivity. It is the clearing away of the subjectum of representa-
tion not in order to get rid of representation, but in order to rethink the relation
between the impossible and the possible in reference to the political. This is still
the work of the perhaps that takes us simultaneously back to the subalternist turn
of the 1990s and forward toward the infrapolitical excess or difference from the
political that is the endless, a-​principial, nonsubjectivist repertoire through which
posthegemonic democracy can be discussed and traversed in both thought and
practice, in the epoch of the closure of epochality that traverses everything we do
and think today.

Notes
1 For further critical readings of this work, see the collection of essays in Steinberg et al.
See also see Moreiras, Marranismo 77–​102.
2 For a critical reading of the Group’s “Founding Statement,” see Williams “The Fantasies
of Cultural Exchange”.
3 For the most significant work related directly to the lifespan of the Latin American
92
Subaltern Studies Group, see Beverley (Subalternity and Representation), Moreiras (The
Exhaustion of Difference), Williams (The Other Side of the Popular), plus the edited volumes
by Rabasa et al. and Rodríguez.
4 For a lucid explanation of the differences between Osvaldo Ardiles, Horacio Cerutti
Guldberg and Arturo Roig, see Schutte (175–​205).
5 See Marramao and Galli.
6 For a recent collective approximation to some of the questions raised in reference to
posthegemony, see Castro Orellana.

References
Acosta, Abraham. Thresholds of Illiteracy: Theory, Latin America, and the Crisis of Resistance.
Fordham UP, 2014.
Álvarez Yágüez, Jorge. “Crisis epocal: la política en el límite.” Debats, vol. 128, no. 3, 2015,
pp. 9–​28.
Beasley-​Murray, Jon. Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. U of Minnesota P,
2010.
Beverley, John. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Duke UP, 1999.
—​—​—​. “Interview about the Subaltern and Other Things. A Conversation with John
Beverley.” With Fernando Gómez. Dispositio/​n, vol. 52, no. 25, 2005, pp. 343–​372.
—​—​—​. Latinamericanism after 9/​11. Duke UP, 2011.
Castro Orellana, Rodrigo, editor. Poshegemonía: El final de un paradigma de la filosofía política
en América Latina. Biblioteca Nueva, 2015.
Galli, Carlo. Political Spaces and Global War. Edited by Adam Sitze. U of Minnesota P, 2010.
Gómez-​Martínez, José Luis. “El krausismo en Iberoamérica.” El krausismo y su influencia en
América Latina. Fundación Friedrich Ebert/​Instituto Fe y Secularidad, 1989, pp. 47–​82.
94

94 Gareth Williams

Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. “Founding Statement.” Boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 3,
1993, pp. 110–​121.
Mariátegui, José Carlos. “El factor religioso.” Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peru-
ana. Biblioteca Amauta, 1976, pp. 162–​193.
Marramao, Giacomo. The Passage West: Philosophy after the Age of the Nation-​State. Verso, 2012.
Martí, José. “Nuestra América.” Nuestra América. Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985, pp. 26–​33.
Moraña, Mabel, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui, editors. Coloniality at Large: Latin
America and the Postcolonial Debate. Duke UP, 2008.
Moreiras, Alberto. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies.
Duke UP, 2001.
—​—​—​. “Infrapolítica y política de la infrapolítica.” Debats, vol. 128, no. 3, 2015, pp. 53–​72.
—​—​—​. Marrananismo e inscripción, o el abandono de la conciencia desdichada. Escolar y mayo
editores, 2016.
—​—​—​. “Sobre populismo y política: Hacia un populismo marrano.” Política común, 10,
2016, 15.
Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Coloniality at
Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel,
and Carlos Jáuregui. Duke UP, 2008, pp. 181–​224.
Rabasa, José, Javier Sanjinés, and Robert Carr, editors. Subaltern Studies in the Americas.
Dispositio, vol. 19, no. 46, 1994/​6.
Rodríguez, Ileana, editor. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Duke UP, 2001.
Schürmann, Reiner. Broken Hegemonies. Translated by Reginald Lilly. Indiana UP, 2003.
Schutte, Ofelia. Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought. State U of
New York P, 1993. 94
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” Selected
Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Oxford UP,
1998, pp. 3–​32.
Steinberg, Samuel, Jon Beasley-​ Murray, Adriana Michele Campos Johnson, Patrick
Dove, Erin Graff Zivin, Kate Jenckes, Horacio Legrás, and Sergio Rojas. “My Only
Latinamericanism.” Política común, vol. 4, 2013.
Williams, Gareth.“The Fantasies of Cultural Exchange in Latin American Subaltern Studies.”
The Real Thing:Testimonial Discourse in Latin America, edited by Georg Gugelberger. Duke
UP, 1996, pp. 225–​253.
—​—​—​. The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America. Duke
UP, 2002.
 95

6
THE CULTURAL STUDIES TURN
Mabel Moraña

Translated by Robert Cavooris

Notes for a Genealogy of Cultural Studies

Since the end of the twentieth century, cultural studies has spread in the Americas,
first via the Atlantic and then radiating north to south, announcing a series of epi-
94 stemic and methodological transformations in the study of culture. However, the
process had begun decades earlier, when the dust was just beginning to settle from
the cataclysm of World War II, with its 70 million deaths, its incalculable economic
ruin, and its even more profound civilizational disaster. Humanity had reached an
unthinkable limit that would forever alter the perception of the world and the
historical imagination.1
New events increased the uncertainty of the postwar climate. Continuing the
sequence of military interventions in Latin America, which in the first half of the
twentieth century were concentrated in the Caribbean and Central America,
the United States reaffirmed its political, military, and economic hegemony
throughout the South in the second half of the century. Political actions, either
direct or mediated by national military units trained at the infamous School of
the Americas, founded in Panama in 1946, were accompanied by the strengthen-
ing of economic and financial dependence. The progressive weakening of the
welfare state and of traditional Latin American political forms (partyism, union-
ism, electoralism, etc.) was succeeded, in different contexts, by a recrudescence
of social struggle. Processes like La Violencia in Colombia (1948–​1958), or like
those unleashed by the actions of the Shining Path in Peru in the 1980s, exem-
plify the excessive exercise of state force used to counterbalance movements that
ultimately responded to dramatic contradictions and inequalities at the continen-
tal level. The proliferation of authoritarian regimes that constituted themselves
in Latin America in the 1970s and the correlative activation of resistance and
96

96 Mabel Moraña

national liberation movements polarized the political scene of late capitalism in

the periphery.2 Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, these liberation movements
explored the path toward socialism as an alternative project to capitalist modernity.
Political exile, economic diasporas, internal displacements, and the deterioration of
the democratic habitus blur the map of the nation-​state. The pillars on which lib-
eral thought had been settled since the nineteenth century—​citizenship, identity,
consensus—​continued a process of erosion due to the lack of social and political
referents.
The political and historical transformations that were radicalized in the
last decades of the twentieth century strongly affected knowledge produc-
tion and models of representation. At the level of intellectual and academic
work, the Cold War had promoted the geo-​cultural compartmentalization of
knowledge since the middle of the century, thus affecting the restructuring of
the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in the formation of Latin
Americanism as a transnationalized field.3 The economicism that dominated
the interpretation of the social during the twentieth century was displaced by
a centering of culture in the attempt to grasp the logics of social change and
its connections to the formation of collective subjectivities and the develop-
ment of intercultural relations. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the
unstable equilibrium of the previous period gave way to a profound crisis of
the modernizing model and of the legitimation discourses that supported it. 96
With the breakup of the left, many intellectual projects faced the end of the
Cold War with a sense of bewilderment. The turn of the century was infused
with high-​ intensity conflicts and changes: the growth of urban violence;
intensification of narcotrafficking and crime; terrorism; the increase of migra-
tion; the resurgence of fundamentalisms; indigenous uprisings; and economic-​
financial crises. None of these phenomena can be fully apprehended through
traditional disciplinary protocols, created during and for a social order foreign
to the complexities and specificities of late capitalism. At the same time, the
revolution in digital technology and the proliferation of virtual worlds accel-
erated. The modern coordinates of space/​time suffered a radical transformation.
Notions of identity, reality, communication, entertainment, intimacy, free time,
friendship, etc. initiated a process of profound transformation The terms frag-
mentation, disillusionment, grief, and melancholy recur, not coincidentally, in post-
modernity and reappear almost obsessively in the study of culture. According
to García Canclini:

In this explosive expansion of technologies and economies, of cultural rep-

ertories and consumer offers, in this outbreak of markets and cities, projects
and public spaces have been lost, but fragments and splinters remain, picked
up by social and cultural movements […] Cultural studies is the attempt to
find the sense of the traces inscribed by those surviving fragments.
(“Cultural Studies and Revolving Doors” 22–​23)
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The Cultural Studies Turn 97

The proliferation of “posts” is the symptom of the prevailing sentiment: the sensa-
tion that Western culture is passing a point of inflection after which the known
world will have changed forever. Postnational, postmodern, postcolonial, posti-
dentitarian, posthistoric, postpolitical—​these do not indicate, nonetheless, an over-
coming of the prior state but rather a hybrid instance in which continuities and
ruptures, transformations and adherences, coexist. All that is solid melts into air,
but the residues of past projects that have not made peace with history remain
suspended in that rarefied atmosphere.
For some, this kaleidoscopic panorama indicates, at least in the case of Latin
America, both the end of the emancipatory projects that emerged in the 1960s
and 1970s and the triumph of globalized capital. For many, it opens the possibility
of discharging commitments, loyalties and convictions, permitting a faster pace on
the way to nowhere. Finally, for others, here begins an arduous process of indis-
pensable criticisms and self-​criticisms to determine what should be saved from the
wreck. In the fluid landscape of the end of the millennium, how can one name the
chaos? From what discursive models and with what representational strategies can
one capture the feelings from the loss and failure of collective projects? What can
replace the myths of political commitment, of intellectual heroism, of socialist uto-
pia, of the interminable harvest, of the new man? Likewise, how can the challenges
of globalization be faced from peripheral societies? By what parameters can local
96
agendas be articulated in the midst of changes that continue to affect all aspects of
life at a planetary level? The prevailing paradigms for the analysis of social conflict,
the grand narratives of modernity (Marxism, psychoanalysis, liberalism), and the
known models of representation appear obsolete. As Bolívar Echeverría indicated,
the concept of revolution must itself be revolutionized.

Birmingham, the United States, and Latin America: Legacies

and Transformations
This atmosphere that we have been describing prepares, and even makes possible
and necessary, the penetration of culturalist proposals in the field of humanities
and social sciences. If we take the pioneering publications of the Birmingham
School as a point of departure, we have to turn back to the 1950s to see, already
at work in that group of cutting-​edge researchers, the concrete project of defining
the political subject of culture starting with a new interpretation of the interrelations
between symbolic forms, civil society, and critical thought.
As a reaction to elitist conceptions of art and culture, the Birmingham research-
ers locate the popular classes—​and in particular the English proletariat—​at the
center of their field of analysis. The study of daily life, of popular tastes, of the
ways in which art affects political-​economic thought, of the relationship between
popular sectors and institutions, of the function of entertainment and of the cul-
tural industry in the formation of collective subjectivities—​these all form part of
an agenda that starts by radically redefining the categories of culture and intellectual
98

98 Mabel Moraña

labor. Such a redefinition will be characterized by transdisciplinary intersections,

a materialist perspective, and a critical methodology firmly founded in empiri-
cal work. Additionally, intellectual work begins to open itself to more pragmatic
forms of knowledge linked to the organization of everyday life, to forms of resis-
tance and expression of civil society, to trade unionism, to the aesthetic preferences
of the popular sectors, to immigration, and to the relation between culture, educa-
tion and the market, among other things.
Incorporating perspectives from structuralism, poststructuralism, and decon-
struction, the notion of culture will be expanded in order to cover a wide domain
of practices, discourses, and models of symbolic representation. The boundaries
between “high” culture, popular culture, and mass culture dissolve. The notion
of culture thus comes to include an enlarged spectrum that goes from industrial
culture to communications; from art, politics, literature, publicity, and consump-
tion to sports, ethics, social movements, philosophy and folklore. It is clear that the
centrality of reading and writing is besieged by the aggressive rise of audiovisual
communication, which brings with it radical modifications in how one can per-
ceive and interpret the world.
With this considerable baggage of problems and proposals, cultural studies
crossed the Atlantic, retooling itself in the sheltered space of the North American
university, and undergoing during this process decisive transformations. In the
first place, it should be said that although it originally emerged from the fields 98
of politics, history, and social sciences, cultural studies was adopted in the United
States, at least at the beginning, in the academic domain of the Humanities, whose
exhausted canonicity could not resist the impact of different social groups strug-
gling for representational power.The liberalization of the literary canon, the ques-
tioning of Enlightenment rationality, and the critique of modernity’s aesthetic and
historiographical impact were some of the issues in the culturalist agenda. This
new approach to critical analysis was also instrumental in the field of anthropol-
ogy, a discipline that underwent deep processes of transformation. It also affected
cultural criticism’s internal debates, certain areas of philosophy and linguistics, and
some directions in political science.4
Work on ethnicity, gender, popular culture, sexuality, feminism, queer stud-
ies, performance, etc. was rapidly permeated by the heterodox and diverse offer-
ings of this new criticism. Indeed, cultural studies favors thematic intersections
and new interrogations of topics that appeared to have already been exhausted.
In other cases, it contributed to the launching of themes which had until then
been absent from the intellectual scene. In convergence with processes internal
to North American society, including identity politics, multiculturalism, and the
expansion of markets, cultural studies opens, in effect, a wide analytical scope of
themes and problems, which span from film culture, technological revolution, and
racial discrimination to gastronomy, testimonial and political discourses, violence,
organ trafficking, melodrama, youth culture, terrorism, social networks, politics,
and the “society of the spectacle.”
 9

The Cultural Studies Turn 99

The second transformation that cultural studies underwent in its American

variant has to do with the heavily self-​referential tendency that developed above
all in the United States. This was a response, in part, to the need to legitimize
itself as an alternative to the traditional academic organization of knowledge as
evidenced in university curricula, in research orientations, and in the workings of
cultural institutions. In fact, from the beginning cultural studies dedicated a good
part of its intellectual energy to self-​reflection about aspects of its own genealogy
and methodology, as well as to the principles, objectives, and delimitations that
both link it to and distinguish it from adjoining tendencies in the production of
knowledge.
The third change that took place in the Americanization of cultural studies is
related to its political-​ideological aspects. In the North American academy, as a
result of this critical orientation’s wide register of adoption and application, the
political objectives and principles that had originally oriented the work of the
Birmingham School were diluted in a more diffuse and widespread culturalism.
Although the work carried out in this field integrates political-​ideological facets
in diverse and variable measures, it does not respond to an organic program of
intellectual action, nor is it supported by any stable ideological platform. Rather,
its sudden appearance registered all at once an ideological deliquescence with
the fall of grand narratives, attempting eclectic strategies and innovative proposals
98
to compensate for the totalizing impulse of modern critical thought, which had
settled on concepts that were becoming ever-​less valid as primary categories of
analysis: economic base, class struggle, humanism, universalism, essentialism, etc.
As cultural studies asserted itself intellectually and academically, feeding off dia-
logue with critics from different disciplines and cultures, the political definition of
its critical work acquired sharper contours, permitting the identification of vari-
ous theoretical tendencies, projects, and ideological positions.5 As is well known,
the field of cultural studies insists on the analysis of discourses’ place of enunciation,
understanding place as a geo-​cultural or institutional location, but also as ideo-
logical position. Indeed, such localizations—​material or symbolic—​undoubtedly
influence the analytical perspective, thematic choices, investigative resources, and
discursive form through which the social is studied.
Owing to the intensified intellectual activity generated by this new critical
orientation in the academy, cultural studies progressively absorbed the disperse and
erratic ideological energy among leftist intellectuals, who had been attempting to
reformulate programs of intellectual action, solidarity, and political activism after
the fall of the socialist bloc and the weakening of liberation movements.
Thus, the theme of politics comes to constitute one of the strong thematic
axes in at least some of the more salient projects of cultural studies. In the field
of Latin American studies, some of the most popular topics include analyses on
the themes of sovereignty; on hegemony; on the formation, consolidation, and
debilitation of the nation-​state; debates about the notions of the people, the
masses, and citizenry; on the relations between local, regional, and global levels;
01

100 Mabel Moraña

on the emergence of new agendas, subjects, and social movements; and on the
coexistence of multiple political forms like democratic regimes, postdictatorial
transitions, populism, etc.
According to some critics, cultural studies consolidated precisely as a project of
counterhegemonic rearticulation in which leftist thought attempts new forms of
conceptualization of historical experience. From this perspective, capitalizing on
the political crisis at the end of the century, cultural studies is at once a symptom
and a diagnostic tool of the period, which began, iconically, with the fall of the
socialist world. As an articulated strategy for the production and reproduction of
knowledge, cultural studies deals with the transformation of collective subjects, the
progressive emptying-​out of the state, the process of acceleration and simultaneity
driven by the digital revolution, the disappearance of the proletariat as the agent
of political change, and the presence of cultural difference as a new form of post-
modern identity. It could be alleged that cultural studies’ basis and modus operandi
might themselves be interpreted as an expression of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction and of the forms assumed by symbolic elaboration and dissemination of
knowledge in the globalized world. At the same time, in its expansive and con-
cretizing development, cultural studies might thus illustrate the dangers of the
­cooptation of knowledge by the neoliberal economy, which submits the produc-
tion processes of knowledge to the pressures and impositions of the cultural market.
01

Cultural Studies and the Reorganization of

Knowledge: A Critical Turn
At least in its early stages, the irreverent expansion of cultural studies clearly
imposed upon disciplinary fields, whose already blurred boundaries were open-
ing in order to give way to new phenomena that were impossible to take on
within the protocols of knowledge established in the nineteenth century. If some
reacted with enthusiasm to this iconoclastic transformation, others pointed out
the dangers, verified so many times, of Euro-​and Anglo-​centric cultural penetra-
tion into the periphery, of a disregard for critical and canonical legacies, and of a
loss of known intellectual territories. Many were alarmed in the face of a supposed
methodological chaos, which cultural studies preferred to call, with sometimes too
much levity, disciplinary emancipation.
At the level of a general analysis of culture and social processes, it could be said
that cultural studies transgresses previously defined critical fields to incorporate an
unprecedented epistemic and methodological dialogism between disciplines and
fields of study. Its practice traverses academic compartmentalization and motivates
an open, fruitful, and at times disconcerting debate between members of diverse
intellectual communities and areas of specialization.
This new critical direction required above all a profound revision of the con-
cept of the political itself and of the forms assumed by it in postmodernity, when
repressed social actors, projects, and discourses begin to surface. The modern
 10

The Cultural Studies Turn 101

structures of the state, political parties, labor unions, etc., continue to be replaced
with new collective agendas, new forms of leadership and popular representation,
as well as unseen modalities of negotiation between the state and civil society.
The end of the century is traversed by the mobilization of ethnic groups, gender
and sexuality claims, ecological defense organizations, and groups concerned with
issues of historical memory and the defense of human rights. This new setting
requires a substantial reorganization of knowledge, as much at the epistemological
as at the methodological level, both in the humanities and in the social sciences. In
arts and literature, the fall of universalisms linked to liberal humanism, identitarian
essentialism, and Eurocentrism was already registered in the last decades of the
twentieth century.
Regarding the social sciences, Michel Foucault had already noted in the
1970s the complicity between these disciplines and bourgeois rule—​a complicity
which contributed to the consolidation of legitimating discourses and forms of
social consciousness around the processes of capital accumulation, exploitation,
and social hierarchy. As Santiago Castro-​Gómez notes, the social sciences never
underwent an “epistemological break” with the dominant ideology in modernity.
Rather, they strengthened capitalist social organization and the various forms of
rationality—​the “regimes of truth,” as Foucault indicated—​that support it. These
concerns, which are generalized in distinct fields of knowledge, crystallized in the
01
final decade of the twentieth century with the project of “opening the social sci-
ences,” a phrase that alludes to the debates spurred by the Gulbenkian Commission
and taken up by researchers around the world in works that develop its initiatives
and point to its local significance. The debates of the Gulbenkian Commission
took place in 1994 and 1995 and resulted in the report Open the Social Sciences
(1996), written by US sociologist and historian Immanuel Wallerstein, founder
of world-​systems theory and director of the Commission. Comprising special-
ists in social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences, this organization had as
its goal the reorganization of knowledge and the surpassing of the disciplinary
arrangement that had reigned since 1850. In addition to promoting dialogue and
the exchange of ideas, analyses and methodologies between the aforementioned
areas of knowledge, the Commission proposed to incorporate the so-​called new
sciences, linked to technological advancements, and to struggle for inclusive ways
of knowing that would be open to the nondominant knowledge that modernity
had displaced, delegitimized, or invisibilized in favor of epistemologies that repre-
sented “superior” civilizations, whose supremacy was reinforced through colonial-
ist practices.6 Immanuel Wallerstein recognizes the contributions of intellectuals
such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, as well as the Mexican thinker Pablo
González Casanova in their analyses of colonialism and the impact of capitalism
in the global periphery. Wallerstein brings together world-​systems theory with
the analyses of Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, who, beginning with the
concept of coloniality, offers fundamental tools for studying of the continuity of
structures of domination that originated in colonial times and continue to reign
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102 Mabel Moraña

in modernity, calling special attention to race as a fundamental category of analysis,

especially in postcolonial contexts.7
Along with the above-​mentioned features, it should also be made clear that the
critical current of cultural studies converges with other trajectories of knowledge
in many of its objectives, practices, and guiding principles. The origins and above
all the problems and politico-​ideological orientations nonetheless differ to some
degree. Postcolonial studies, for example, begins with premises that are bound to
the social, economic, and historical developments of colonialism and of decolo-
nizing processes. Its orientation, however, is less culturalist than that of cultural
studies, and its field of analysis is much more delimited, informed primarily by the
philosophy and history of culture, and including a frequently comparative slant.
Additionally, cultural studies assimilates other theoretical turns, like those cen-
tered on the concepts of biopolitics, affect, material culture, trauma, disability,
ecology, etc. Together with concrete themes referring to practices, processes, and
strategies of symbolic representation, cultural studies integrates a series of political,
ethical, and philosophical issues into the interpretation of culture. It offers, in this
sense, a propitious space from which to elaborate key notions for the compre-
hension of our time, like those of catastrophe, border, ruin, and cyborg. It integrates
concepts like the Deleuzian idea of the fold, the concept of the event in Badiou,
the ideas of deterritorialization, post-​identity, infrapolitics, the notions of multitude and
common re-​elaborated by Hardt and Negri, of post-​sovereignty, governmentality, and 012
biopolitics. It permits, furthermore, the redefinition of concepts like corporality, his-
toricity, affectivity, governability, and resistance.8
In the case of Latin America, both the humanities and the social sciences have
been receptive, after an initial resistance, to an activation of knowledge in the afore-
mentioned directions, realizing different degrees of change with regard to evident
regional differences in the study of culture and social processes. To give some
thematic examples, topics like the nation, democracy, populism, interculturality,
social movements, etc. have occupied the front lines of the debate. In particular,
the controversial theme of the nation integrates almost all of the debates on con-
temporary culture. It is almost impossible to draw unanimous conclusions without
taking into account regional variation and case specificity, since sociocultural vari-
ables linked to degrees of institutional density, as well as to economic and ethnic
issues, intervene in the past and present of the national question. Nonetheless, it is
undeniable that the equilibrium between global, regional, and national dynamics
noticeably alters national culture, which is always encompassed within a distinct
context: regional, continental, transatlantic, hemispheric, American, etc.9 As Eric
Hobsbawm notes,

[World history] can no longer be contained within the limits of “nations”

and “nation-​states” as these used to be defined, either politically, or econom-
ically, or culturally, or even linguistically … It will see “nation-​states” and
“nations” or ethnic/​linguistic groups primarily as retreating before, resisting,
 103

The Cultural Studies Turn 103

adapting to, being absorbed or dislocated by the new supranational restruc-

turing of the globe. Nations and nationalism will be present in this history,
but in subordinate, and often rather minor roles.
(191)

Topics centered on the problem of multi/​interculturality constitute another of

cultural studies’ axes of reflection, since they articulate the topics of difference and
inequality, two complementary facets with respect to marginalized sectors, the first
pointing toward culture, and the second toward economic unevenness and politi-
cal nonrecognition.10 In this field, identitarian politics and the politics of language
are intensively discussed, above all in contexts of cultural diversity like the Andean
zone, Central America, the Caribbean, etc. New theoretical turns like those toward
material culture, affect, and biopolitics, as well as studies on trauma, memory, dis-
ability, ecology, gastronomy, etc. are beginning to create critical-​theoretical con-
centrations that analyze the construction of collective subjectivities from precise
angles. The issues of cultural policy have acquired a particular notoriety, as they
point to a substantial shift in the role of the intellectual, where the messianic
position of the nineteenth-​century intellectual, derived from the practice of the
colonial lettered classes, ends up replaced with the notion of expertise (high special-
ization, generally associated with technology) emphasizing the modern function
012
of the intellectual/​expert as a consultant on public policy.11

Cultural Studies and the Critique of Culture in Latin

America: Continuities and Ruptures
As is well known, the dissemination and reception of cultural studies occurred
also in Canada, England, and Australia. In Latin America, the adoption of this
critical orientation would have to wait several decades and face distinctive degrees
of resistance in academia. Inhibiting factors included the experience of various
and repeated forms of cultural penetration that had marked the history of Latin
America since its beginnings, as well as an awareness of the fact that the region’s
post-​or neo​colonial position often meant the imposition of dominant episte-
mologies and the exclusion and delegitimization of other forms of knowledge and
representation. Ideologically, the under-​analyzed connection between this new
intellectual orientation and the cultural effects of neoliberalism aroused distrust
around the uses of cultural interpretation in a context marked by renewed forms
of hegemony and epistemic marginalization. Nor should one underestimate the
cultural and ideological weight of historical legacies, critical traditions, catego-
ries, themes, and methodologies that had already been historically established and
enthroned in Latin American cultural and academic institutions since colonial
times. Finally, a good dose of vernacular fundamentalism and cultural protection-
ism, tending to reject a priori ideas that have not originated within the traditional
parameters of national culture, also contributed to delay the acceptance of cultural
104

104 Mabel Moraña

studies as a valid and productive option to generate and reproduce critical cultural
knowledge in Latin America.
In this sense, one of the most common arguments was to point out that a copi-
ous tradition of Latin American critical thought had already been carrying out, at
least since the formation of nation-​states, this very work of cultural decodification.
It is necessary here to establish a demarcation, which I have analyzed elsewhere,
between what we are calling cultural studies and what may be called the study
of culture (or cultural criticism), a practice that intersects in multiple ways with
the history of ideas or of “Latin American thought.”12 I am referring to the con-
siderable critical lineage that begins to develop with the criollo intellectuals in the
colonial period, establishes itself more firmly at the beginning of the nineteenth
century with authors like Simón Rodríguez, Andrés Bello, etc. and is greatly
exemplified by Alfonso Reyes, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Carlos Mariátegui,
Ángel Rama, Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and many
others. The work of all of these critics undoubtedly constitutes an example of
interdisciplinarity from the perspective of their agendas and methodologies, that is
to say, of collaboration across established disciplinary fields, and it supplies an ines-
capable critical and historical foundation. The establishment of the sociohistorical
orientation, and already in the twentieth century, of the culture/​society approach,
is well known. This process was informed by the works of Lucien Goldmann,
Gyorgy Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin and others, as well as by the 104
work of Michel Foucault for the study of the relationship between culture and
power.
There is no doubt that this tradition of cultural study constructs and consoli-
dates the criollo archive, the heritage of knowledge, and fundamental analyses of
Latin American cultural history elaborated from within the region. Nevertheless,
it is precisely in reference to the concrete contributions and to the conceptual
and ideological characteristics of this critical corpus that one can say that cultural
studies constitutes a conceptual and ideological break, rather than a just a con-
tinuation of this solid tradition. Indeed, cultural studies establishes itself as the
explicit recognition of the crisis of the modern categories from which Latin
American thought emerges and develops. The progressive weakening of these
categories (nation, national culture, progress, identity, citizenship) as well as the
already-​mentioned fading of disciplinary borders in favor of a radical epistemo-
logical hybridization and an opening to alternative knowledges (i.e. other than
those of liberal historiography) provoke a discontinuity of certain lines of critical
thought and the emergence of others.The trajectories derived from cultural stud-
ies interrogate and problematize the criollo archive from new perspectives, marked
by the emergence of new subjects, new agendas, and new transnational hori-
zons. While cultural studies also re-​focuses on themes from previous periods, like
memory, populism, violence, and others, its new perspectives open up productive
avenues of inquiry. For example, the full consideration of the multi-​lingual nature
of Latin American culture and the recognition of orality as a communicative and
 105

The Cultural Studies Turn 105

representational alternative to the register of reading and writing constitute a

new angle for understanding the region’s complex and diverse cultural history.
It is worth nothing that some of the critical elaborations that developed in
Latin America since the 1970s, produced in parallel to the advance of cultural
studies in the Anglophone world, naturally articulated culturalist themes, objec-
tives, and methodologies.To refer to only a few fundamental categories of cultural
interpretation, one can mention the notion of heterogeneity elaborated by Antonio
Cornejo Polar for the Andean region but applied to other contexts (connected to
the idea of the motley society [sociedad abigarrada], proposed by the Bolivian critic
René Zavaleta Mercado); that of hybridity elaborated by Néstor García Canclini;
that of transculturation by which Ángel Rama extended the anthropological anal-
yses of Fernando Ortiz and Mariano Picón Salas; the notion of coloniality of power
proposed by Anibal Quijano; and the concept of transmodernity utilized by Enrique
Dussel to refer to the coexistence and interrelation of alternative forms of moder-
nity.13 These concepts permit distinctly angled dislocations of the liberal category
of the nation as a homogenous, centralized, and unified totality, exhibiting in its
place a series of antagonistic cultural systems and an infinite combinatory of ele-
ments belonging to diverse symbolic registers.They also make possible the decon-
struction of the project of modernity by elucidating its exclusionary character
and focusing on the hegemonic and homogenizing epistemologies that reinforce
104
the material and symbolic violence exercised from the centers of capitalism. Such
analyses converge with the suggestions of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi
Bhabha on postcolonial subjectivity, the migrant subject, problems of representa-
tion and representability for colonial subaltern subjects, etc.
The long and solid Latin American tradition of critical thought, as well as the
contributions of cultural studies that have proved instrumental for the analysis of
the region’s cultural history, has developed as an implementation of what I have
called the four “I”s of critical thought: interruption of dominant discourses, integra-
tion of local knowledges, intervention in existing categories of analysis in order to
modify them in accordance with specific goals and necessities, and conceptual and
ideological interpellation, that is, use of critical analysis as a strategy for the activa-
tion of emancipatory and decolonizing forms of social conscience.

Final Balance
As is well known, the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of
Birmingham was dismantled in 2002 due to an administrative reorganization.
Nonetheless, some of the principle shifts toward the reorganization of knowl-
edge inspired by the work of Birmingham had already crystallized, catalyz-
ing fundamental transformations in the production of intellectual work across
the world.
Cultural studies does not cease, however, to almost obsessively self-​analyze. In
a 1997 article titled “El malestar de los Estudios Culturales” Néstor García Canclini
016

106 Mabel Moraña

refers to this process with the term stagflation, taken from economics (which signals,
basically, stagnation and inflation). In different contexts, the frequent critiques of
cultural studies generally turn on issues of method, thematic selection, and extreme
eclecticism.14 It was in this sense that I once referred, in an article titled “El disci-
plinamiento de los Estudios Culturales,” to the symptoms of a domestication of the
field’s critical ethos, and to signs of a certain naturalization and absorption of this
work in academia since the end of the 1990s. I recalled then the opinion of Fredric
Jameson that whatever the intellectual or university destiny of this critical orien-
tation, and whether or not it could come to compete with new tendencies in the
production of knowledge, the transformation carried out by cultural studies had
already been realized, leaving its indelible mark on social and cultural interpretation.
Its principal achievements include a deep criticism of the Enlightenment project of
modernity, the dismantling—​at least partially—​of the grand narrative of globaliza-
tion, the re-​centralization of culture as a symbolic register of social conflict, as well as
insights on changes in educational systems, on the emergence of the cultural market,
on the modification of the role of the intellectual, and on intercultural dynamics.
There remains much to do, however, in particular with regard to the analysis
of state culture and the redefinition of the political, especially considering acceler-
ating shifts in the forms of agency and modes of intervention in the context of
globalization. I believe it is fundamental to recall that although the fragmentation
of civil society and the breakdown of totalizing interpretive narratives are facts of 016
our times, it is essential not to renounce broad modes of comprehension for the
phenomena, resistances, and models of social action. Concurrently, these new sce-
narios require a new language capable of conceptualizing social conflict and its
symbolic representations in new political and epistemic horizons.

Notes
1 I will re-​elaborate and expand in this study prior analyses on the development of Latin
American cultural studies, particularly ideas presented in Critica impura and La escritura del
limite.
2 We understand by “late capitalism” the economic system characterized by the acceler-
ated development of technology; the centralization of transnational capital; the expo-
nential growth of the market; state intervention in favor of big business; flexibilization of
labor; and the strengthening of neocolonial dependence in less developed nations. These
processes coexist with socioeconomic phenomena like mass migration, the growth of
transnational violence, and the intensification of audiovisual culture. On these subjects,
see Habermas, Mandel, and Jameson.
3 See my article “Los estudios de área en un mundo global” in Inscripciones críticas
(213–​246).
4 I have referred to the changes produced within anthropology in “Borges y yo: Primera
reflexión sobre ‘El etnógrafo,” in Crítica impura.
5 Some fields, such as postcolonial and subaltern studies, are contiguous to those we have
been analyzing but nonetheless have distinct research agendas and political focuses.These
are in a sometimes tense dialogue with cultural studies and share similar themes and
spaces of debate.
 107

The Cultural Studies Turn 107

6 Considered a great achievement of critical thought, the Gulbenkian Commission’s

report nonetheless had its critics. See for example Michael Burawoy’s article, “Open
the Social Sciences: To Whom and for What?”
7 The challenge to “open the social sciences” was accepted with enthusiasm in Latin
America. Some of the greatest examples of this proposal are Indisciplinar las ciencias
sociales: Geopolíticas del conocimiento y colonialidad del poder: Perspectivas desde lo Andino,
edited by Catherine Walsh, Freya Schiwy and Santiago Castro Gómez, as well as similar
volumes edited by Castro Gómez, Catherine Walsh, Edgardo Lander, etc.
8 On affects and biopolitics, see, respectively, Moraña/​Sánchez Prado, editors. El lenguaje
de las emociones and Heridas abiertas.
9 These other approximations of the issue of Latin America are likewise subject to criti-
cism. See for example the work of Trigo on transatlantic studies. For a sharp explora-
tion of the relations between Cultural Studies and Latin Americanism, see Richard,
“Intersecting Latin America with Latin Americanism.”
10 On multiculturalism and interculturalism, see my works “El multiculturalismo y el tráf-
ico de la diferencia” in La escritura del límite and “Geopolíticas del saber, transmodernidad
y buen vivir” in Inscripciones críticas, which have extensive bibliographies on these themes.
11 On changes in the function of the intellectual, see Moraña/​Gustafson. On the theme
of cultural politics, see Yúdice and García Canclini.
12 On this, see Del Sarto “Cultural Critique in Latin America” and Moraña, “El disci-
plinamiento de los Estudios Culturales” in La escritura del límite.
13 On the concepts of heterogeneity, non-​dialectical contradiction, and the migrant sub-
ject see those articles about Cornejo Polar included in Moraña, Crítica impura. On the
concepts of transculturation and the lettered city in the work of Rama, see the works
compiled in Moraña, editor. Ángel Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos.
14 Indeed, in the proliferation of culturalist practice, quantity and quality do not always
016
feed off one another, and cultural studies’ different modalities of application open onto
a sometimes uncontrollable generalism and lightness. For a Latin American critique of
Cultural Studies see Reynoso.

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Lander, Edgardo, editor. La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales—​perspectivas

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—​—​—​. The Return of the Political. Verso, 1993.
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 1

7
THE DECOLONIAL TURN
Nelson Maldonado-​Torres

Translated by Robert Cavooris

The concept “decolonial turn” has been used to indicate the theoretical, artistic,
and political relevance of a wide variety of positions in multiple geographical
regions and fields of enquiry.1 Decolonial refers to the activity of decolonization,
10
generally, and to decoloniality, more specifically.2 Different from the postcolonial,
decoloniality makes reference, not only or primarily to the plight of formally col-
onized territories that obtained their independence in the twentieth century, but,
more precisely, to the insurgent positionality of subjects and to the possibilities
of decolonization in the longue durée of modern/​colonial cultures and structures.
These modern/​colonial structures and cultures have been in place at least since
the formation of the modern interstate and colonial system, the start of the world
capitalist economy, and the emergence of modern/​colonial cultural formations
with the opening of the Atlantic and the formation of the New World.
Defined in this way, decoloniality is intrinsically connected to coloniality,
which, different from colonialism, refers to the specific colonial matrix of power,
being, and knowledge that became a central, if not a constitutive, dimension of
Western modernity and its hegemonic civilization project (Quijano, “Coloniality
and Modernity/Rationality”; Quijano and Wallerstein; Wynter, “Unsettling the
Coloniality”; Mignolo, Local Histories/​Global Designs). One of the most lethal
aspects of coloniality is the sense that certain subjects and peoples, as well as most
aspects associated with them, are both inferior, in comparison to what is con-
sidered normal, and problematic (Du Bois; Gordon, Existentia Africana). Modern
subjects are socialized and disciplined into living in a world organized around such
lines of differentiation, which they also reproduce. Their desires, aspirations, and
conceptions of what is to be human are defined beforehand by structures, cultures,
and symbols that consider aspects such as indigeneity and blackness, among other
markers of damnation, as signs of wretchedness and animality.
12

112 Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Against coloniality, the decolonial turn refers, on the one hand, to an epistemic,
practical, aesthetic, emotional, and oftentimes spiritual repositioning of the mod-
ern/​colonial subject by virtue of which modernity, and not the colonized subject
herself and himself, appears as a problem. On the other hand, the decolonial turn
refers to decolonization or decoloniality as a project that aspires to create a world
with symbols, relations of power, forms of being, and ways of knowing beyond
modernity/​coloniality. That is, the decolonial turn introduces decoloniality fun-
damentally as an imperative, a need for survival, and as a project, from which
then can also be taken up as a possibility or an option (for an elaboration of
decoloniality as an option see Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity). The
decolonial turn can be understood in relation to various philosophical turns such
as the linguistic turn, or the pragmatic turn, but, in contrast to them, it can also
be approached as a critical response and corrective to Western modernity itself,
particularly to its lethal combination and apparent reconciliation between ideas
of equality and individual liberty on the one hand, and naturalized inequality and
colonial activity on the other.
The decolonial turn presents a vision, a horizon of action, and an orienta-
tion that differ from the vision, horizon, and orientation of modernity. This turn
finds its basis in the contradictions and systematic violence met principally by
communities that have been negatively marked by coloniality, and in the most
consistent forms through which these subjects and communities respond to those 12
contradictions and excesses. If modernity represents itself as rational, democratic,
and secular, the decolonial turn reveals it as modernity/​coloniality, and for that
reason, inseparable from elements of modern colonialism like the hierarchization
of human difference, the imposition of racial slavery, the appropriation of land, the
monopolization of knowledge, and the naturalization of a nonethics of war where
acts like extermination and rape are normalized against bodies negatively marked
by coloniality.
In relation to theory and philosophical discourse, the decolonial turn does
not simply propose a change of priorities or philosophical principles within the
frames of modern philosophical thought, be it with regard to language, as in the
linguistic turn, to action and practice, as in the pragmatic turn, or to phenomena
or existence, as in the phenomenological and existential turns. It rather suggests
the emergence of an attitude that proposes and reveals Western modernity as a
problem to be overcome rather than as a project to complete. This decolonial
orientation frequently reappropriates, redefines, and criticizes elements of dis-
tinct theoretical turns with the aim of clarifying the forms by which modernity
includes coloniality as an intimate, constitutive, and inseparable element. The
decolonial turn is an about-​face which brings modernity into question and takes
the colonized not as a problem, but as a source for inquiry into problems created
by modernity and forms that may adequately respond to these problems. More
concretely, the decolonial turn expresses itself in the appearance of suspicions
and questions that propose—​more than the disenchantment with any tradition,
 13

The Decolonial Turn 113

or with the idea of tradition as such—​a real scandal in regard to the emergence
and expansion of modernity/​coloniality and the multiple ways it justifies and
naturalizes technologies of death and domination (Maldonado-​Torres, “Post-​
continental Philosophy”). The scandal expresses itself not only in questions, but
also in cries of desperation. These cries, suspicions, and questions are present in
both individual and collective expressions within a wide variety of spheres and
across them: the intellectual, the artistic, the spiritual, and that of social and politi-
cal activism, among others. They can also express themselves in methodological
proposals and conceptions of philosophical principles, beginning with provoca-
tions that arise from intellectual, artistic, and social contributions from subjects
and movements.
That the decolonial turn suggests a change of attitude in the face of moder-
nity, and in the face of the common sense, expectations, and definitions posed by
modernity, does not mean that all of the dimensions of modernity remain excluded,
a priori, from participation in the creation of a decolonized world. What the deco-
lonial turn proposes is that decolonization should be seen not only as the search for
independence or for achieving sovereignty, but rather as a project whose objective
consists in expanding the practices and forms of decolonized thought and action
to try and shape a new world “in which many worlds fit” (Subcomandante Marcos
88). Such a world will comprise various ways of understanding subjectivity, com-
12
munity, and institutions, which will seek to give consistent expression to the sharp-
est articulations of interrelationality and human coexistence from diverse epistemic
worlds, including both European modernity and the forms of thought it has colo-
nized. In this sense, the decolonial turn proposes decoloniality, and not modernity,
as an incomplete project (Grosfoguel, Maldonado-Torres, and Saldívar; Maldonado-​
Torres, Against War; Maldonado-​Torres, “Enrique Dussel’s Liberation Thought”).
While certain expressions of Latin American thought have been crucial to
the conception of the decolonial turn, the origin of the concept refers to various
intellectual and theoretical projects only partially from Latin America. The con-
cept, in addition to a way of naming the emergence of decolonizing reflection,
serves as a bridge or conceptual hinge between various theoretical expressions,
which share a similar attitude to modernity and to each other.The decolonial turn
suggests a shift in orientation, a form of theory and critique generated by that shift,
and a set of relations between forms of intellectual, artistic, and social activity that
find their inspiration or basis there. The concept of the decolonial turn and its
plural, decolonial turns, refer to distinct spaces and historical moments when those
intellectual, artistic, and/​or social movements arise that suggest a fundamental atti-
tudinal change with regard to modernity as well as to colonized communities. In
these contexts, coloniality appears as a global and structural, as a cultural, as well
as an intimate and subjective problematic that imposes its relevance for thinking,
being, and doing. The decolonial turn is related in this sense to the emergence of
consciousness about colonization as a fundamental problem and to decolonizing
thought at a global level.
14

114 Nelson Maldonado-Torres

In what follows, I will first recount the origin of the concept of the “decolonial
turn.” This recounting complements other accounts that have focused on its Latin
American roots (see, for example, Ballestrin; Blanco). I present it here as a post-​
and transcontinental turn with its principal basis in the Americas but not limited
to this region. By a post-​and transcontinental turn, I mean forms of thought
which, on the one hand, signal the importance of space and geopolitics in the
formation of hierarchies of thought, but on the other, reject the tendency to limit
critical responses to dominant European thought to a struggle for recognition
and vindication based on the importance of thought from other continents. That
is, the decolonial turn notes the importance of geopolitics, but rejects a vision of
space and of the production of knowledge which would consider continental and
national space as natural or normative. In short, I am not proposing the decolonial
turn as a philosophical nationalism, as an expression of non-​European continental
spaces over and against Europe, or just as a form of ethno-​philosophy. Decolonial
thought tends to demonstrate the importance of interstitial spaces, edges, borders,
diasporas, migrations, archipelagos, ancestral territorial relations, and connections
of peoples through spaces and times that resist incorporation into a continentalist
geopolitical imaginary like that which inspires fields as apparently distant as con-
tinental or world philosophy and area studies.
The second section offers some clarification with respect to the concepts of
colonization, decolonization, and related concepts such as emancipation and lib- 14
eration. In the final section I will briefly sketch a genealogy of the decolonial turn
and introduce some examples of the decolonial turn as found in the work of a
number of figures from the Caribbean and the Latin Americas.

Emergence of the Concept of the “Decolonial Turn”

The concept of the “decolonial turn” first came to light in a conference at the
University of California, Berkeley in 2005. I was the main organizer, and I pro-
posed the concept as a sort of conceptual hinge and to some extent as an umbrella
to identify the massive theoretical and epistemological breakthroughs in the works
of Third World figures, such as Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, and
Sylvia Wynter, among many others. It was the kind of breakthrough that I also
identified in the works of a younger but not less illustrious generation of scholars,
including Linda Martin Alcoff, Lewis Gordon, María Lugones, Walter Mignolo,
Chela Sandoval, and Catherine Walsh, as well as in collectives such as the moder-
nity/​coloniality/​decoloniality network, the Caribbean Philosophical Association,
and in a varied group of Latina/​o philosophers and critics, among others.
The concept “decolonial turn” meant to convey the irreducible character
of the problem of colonization and the far-​reaching dimensions of the open,
generative, creative, and unfinished project of decolonization. The concept was
radically open: the decolonial turn pointed to a multiplicity of projects glob-
ally that had been in the making for a long time and that yet to some extent
 15

The Decolonial Turn 115

are still young given the enormous scope of decolonial work. And so, while the
conference brought together multiple scholars, particularly from the Caribbean,
Latin America, and the US Third World, whose work was and continues to be
informed with various European philosophical turns, the idea was that, together,
their work revealed a different turn. This turn could also be identified in the
work of multiple other scholars on whose shoulders the more recent generations
stand, as well as in a wide variety of subjects, communities, and movements across
the globe.
In short, the idea was that in addition to a Copernican, a linguistic, or a post-
modern turn, one can also refer to a decolonial turn. My interest with philosophi-
cal turns went back to my training in philosophy, including discussions with Lewis
Gordon about existentialism, phenomenology, and poststructuralism, and with
Enrique Dussel about his engagement with Levinas, Marxism, and the pragmatic
turn of the Frankfurt School, specially his conversations with Karl-​Otto Apel.
Gordon’s Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995), and his Existentia Africana
(2000), as well as Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion
(1998), represented for me an original engagement with various European philo-
sophical turns that broke new ground and could not be taken simply as an exten-
sion of those other turns.
Multiple other publications and conferences during the late 1990s and early
14
2000s demonstrated similar breakthroughs. They included Walter Mignolo’s Local
Histories/​Global Designs (2000), Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed
(2000), and Emma Pérez’s Decolonial Imaginary (1999). There were also various
encounters and conferences, some of which took place barely one year before the
conference at Berkeley: for example, the first annual conference of the Caribbean
Philosophical Association in Barbados, and a meeting of the modernity/​coloniality
network at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
organized by Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar.There was thus an effervescence
of reflections about coloniality and decoloniality at the time, many of them in
conversation with important works published in the late 1980s and early 1990s
such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/​La frontera, and essays by Anibal Quijano
and Sylvia Wynter. All of this and more contributed to the birth of the concept
decolonial turn.
The idea of “mapping” in the title of the conference alluded to a plural geo-
political space where distinct critical voices and theoretical expressions emerge.
The idea is that these voices and positions are related to each other by virtue of
the (decolonial) orientation that they exhibit with respect to modernity, its dis-
courses, and its normative institutions, such as the idea of development and the
nation-​state. The concept of “mapping” with respect to philosophical turns and
thought paradigms was current at the time, as evinced in the anthology Mapping
the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (Davis and Womack).
“Mapping the decolonial turn” became a provocation to expand and deepen the
lines of dialogue that were already open among various speakers in the conference
16

116 Nelson Maldonado-Torres

as well as the start of an effort to identify key dimensions of the decolonial turn
and multiple other sites of it in the past and the present. Mapping the decolonial
turn was a way of “shifting the geography of reason” (which is the motto of the
Caribbean Philosophical Association, see Gordon, “Shifting the Geography”) as
well as an invitation to engage in an effort to produce multiple genealogies and
typologies of the decolonial turn with attention to the different spaces where this
turn appears.
It is no less important that the faculty hosts (Ramón Grosfoguel, José David
Saldívar and myself) were appointed in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley, and that this unit was also the main sponsor
of the event. This department was created out of decolonial activism in the late
1960s and served as a hub for multiple decolonial projects. Indebted to the spirit
of Third World revolts, ethnic studies had offered the possibility to pursue intel-
lectual, artistic, and community projects that shared the widely international and
empowering vision of spatiality and temporality that was part of the conference
and of the concept of the decolonial turn.
From the outside, many scholars saw and still see ethnic studies as an inferior
academic space, a combination of areas fixed in identity and that, together, lack the
substance and rigor of a method. This is neither surprising nor too original since
it can be understood as a translation, at the level of epistemology, of the prejudices
that people of color in general and academics of color in particular face every day. 16
From the inside, however, ethnic studies is the site of decolonial scholarly, theoreti-
cal, artistic, and creative production that intentionally challenges the reification of
methods and that opens up the possibility of producing knowledge beyond the
strictures and limits of modernity/​coloniality. Ethnic studies itself can be seen as
the direct result of a decolonial turn among youth of color in the formally post-​
segregated setting of the late 1960s. The time and the space where the conference
happened and where the category of the decolonial turn was introduced were
thus significant.

Fundamental Concepts3
Decolonizing thought arose in the very first moments of the conquest and coloni-
zation of the Americas, now more than 500 years ago. This refers to the horror of
indigenous populations, whose very existence was threatened by a genocide with-
out parallel in the recorded history of humanity until then, and who were sub-
mitted to the dominion of people who considered themselves superior to them in
every order of existence.The conquest and colonization of the Americas, genocide
of indigenous peoples, and the racial slavery of both black Africans and so-​called
“Indian” populations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not represent
simply one more episode in humanity’s history of imperialism. For thinkers of
decolonization, what arises with the supposed discovery of the Americas is noth-
ing less than a new form of being and of power in the world. Against this new
 17

The Decolonial Turn 117

order, with its colonial and modern character, a wave of ideas and practices arose
that sought to reconstruct the humanity of dehumanized subjects and peoples, not
to return to an irrecoverable past, but as a rejection of any simple reconciliation
with the point of view and philosophies of the colonizer.Those ideas and practices
carry the mark of a fragmented subject, exposed to the most terrifying inten-
tional and unintentional consequences of modern European civilization, while
they also express an irrepressible desire to reconstruct a human world. This is the
double basis, horror and desire, negative and positive, of philosophical decoloniz-
ing thought.
We begin here with the explanation of fundamental concepts like colonialism
and coloniality on one hand, and emancipation, liberation, independence, decolo-
nization, and decoloniality on the other. Decolonizing philosophical thought is
critical of coloniality, beyond colonialism, and seeks to affirm and support the
incomplete project of decolonization, beyond emancipation, liberation, or mere
independence. As has already been posited, decolonizing philosophical thought
has existed for as long as modern colonialism.Without a doubt, it acquires a strong
international dimension with the independence movements of the nineteenth and
mid twentieth centuries, relating to multiple projects that seek to forge a postco-
lonial world.These movements affirmed, in distinct forms and to different degrees,
the possibility of a post-​Eurocentric world in the context of a legitimacy crisis for
16
the project of European civilization.This same combination, a crisis of the existing
order and an affirmation of a possible post-​Eurocentric world, was also present at
the end of the twentieth century after the fall of the Soviet empire and the emer-
gence of neo-​Zapatismo, among other movements.
I will use the concepts of decolonial turn and decolonial turns to explain the
significance and international character of modes of thought inspired simultane-
ously by a crisis of thought and of the European civilizing project on the one hand,
and by the affirmative possibilities of being, power, and knowledge that supersede
the constitutive limits of Eurocentric modernity on the other. Decolonizing phil-
osophical thought is a central part of these turns, but it must be seen alongside the
historical events that carried deep significance for it. As such, we consider here the
relevance not only of specific thinkers, but also of events that challenge the hege-
monic form of thinking and open possible horizons for overcoming colonization
and its legacies in the modern world.

From Colonialism to Coloniality

The first central theme for understanding decolonizing philosophical thought is
that of modern colonization and coloniality. These have their roots in the ideas
and forms of social organization that emerge in relation to the so-​called “discov-
ery” of America and the subsequent genocides, killings, racial enslavements, and
exploitations of natural and human resources. In contrast to the Middle Ages, the
“discovery” establishes the notion that salvation does not reside in the destiny of
18

118 Nelson Maldonado-Torres

the soul after death, but in the enjoyment and benefits of the earthly world itself
through the exploitation and mercantile use of the resources that were alleg-
edly discovered (see Wynter, “1492: A New World View”). A change in worldview
makes accumulation an index of salvation, which opens the door for capitalism
to transform from a mode of production existing only in some areas into the
dominant mode of production in an emergent Europe-​centered world system.
Thus, the “discovery” supports the Renaissance point of view, as well as capitalism
itself, in so far as it values “the new” discovered by human senses and capacities
instead of the predictions and anticipations of revelation. And whatever is discov-
ered by the senses is there for the enjoyment and wellbeing of humans—​but not
all humans, mainly only the “discoverers” (of masculine and European origin) and
Christian kingdoms. Hence, the concepts and practices that arise with modernity
and capitalism recognize the difference between the bourgeoisie and the exploited
on one side, and the colonized and inherently enslaved subjects on the other, who
can be exploited but who more often resemble disposable commodities rather
than commodity producers.
The colonialism that begins to happen with the European Renaissance there-
fore has continuities and discontinuities with medieval conceptions of being,
power, and knowledge. The difference between the discoverers and the nondis-
coverers extends along the same general line as the difference between Christians
and non-​Christians in the Middle Ages, although now it appears in relation to 18
apparent human virtues revealed in the discovery itself, and not entirely with
respect to a difference of religious creed. Thus, even more novel relations emerge
between the discoverers and the discovered, between colonizers and colonized.
It is relevant that Christopher Columbus refers to the inhabitants he encounters
on his first trip across the Atlantic as subjects “without faith” or religion, which
indicates a new type of differentiation between Christian subjects and subjects
from territories that had been considered uninhabited or even nonexistent in
the Middle Ages.4 A new kind of hierarchy or human order emerges. The differ-
ence between Christians as adherents to the true religion and other peoples with
false religions becomes more complex with the appearance of subjects without
religion. These subjects are doubted not only in their capacity to know the true
religion, but also in their capacity to relate to God. That is, not only were these
subjects devoid of cognitive capacities, but rather, as Paracelsus proposed, they did
not have souls and did not descend from Adam and Eve (Pagden 22; Wood 33).
This makes the fundamental problem with the discovered not only epistemo-
logical, but also ontological. Therefore, decolonizing or decolonial philosophi-
cal thought concerns itself with redefining the significance of human beings, of
thought, and of the relations of power that give apparent order to the world.
The modern/​ colonial world is thus constructed on the basis of a violent
propagation and creative transformation of old hierarchies—​like the difference
between the Christian God and humanity, between Christianity and other beliefs,
between king and subject, between man and woman—​as well as the creation of
 19

The Decolonial Turn 119

new conceptions anchored in notions of greater or lesser humanity that placed

European men on one side, and colonial subjects, hypersexualized and with
uncertain genders, on the other. Following Mignolo, it is possible to refer to
this new order as the modern/​colonial world (Mignolo, Local Histories/Global
Designs). Similarly, following Quijano and Wallerstein, one could refer to the rela-
tions of power that operate there as coloniality (Quijano and Wallerstein; Quijano
“Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social,” “Coloniality and Modernity/​
Rationality”). Colonialism in its most literal form refers to particular political rela-
tions; coloniality refers rather to relations of power, and to conceptions of being
and knowing that produce a world divided between legitimate human subjects, on
the one hand, and others considered not only exploitable or dependent, but fun-
damentally dispensable, possessing no value, and denoting only negative or exotic
meaning in the various orders of social life, on the other.

On Emancipation, Liberation, and Decolonization

The second central theme through which to understand and locate decolonizing
thought is that of decolonization or decoloniality. The concept of decolonization
refers to processes of symbolic, epistemic, and/​or material violence or irruption
through which one intends to restore humanity in all orders of existence, social
18
relations, symbols and thought. Decolonization has surely existed as a desire, an
idea, maybe even a project from the beginnings of colonization itself. But it only
effectively becomes an explicit project by multiple groups and peoples in the
globe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
It is necessary to distinguish here, in the first place, between decolonization and
emancipation. The terms are different, but not opposed. Emancipation has three
key historical references.The first is the process through which Europe challenged
and defeated the monarchic order and ended despotism. This process was pro-
duced by a nascent bourgeoisie and other popular sectors to which the monarchy
appeared an illegitimate and paternalistic limitation on liberty. This occurred dur-
ing the Enlightenment, when emancipation was conceived as a process of matura-
tion against a controlling or paternalistic despotism.
The second meaning of emancipation refers to the abolition of slavery.
Emancipation here no longer refers to the bourgeoisie, or to the European “peo-
ple,” but rather to subjects condemned to slavery. Emancipation here develops
in relation not only to the limitation of freedoms, but rather to slavery’s radical
and systematic dehumanizing violence. This process occurred in colonial soci-
eties, principally with plantations that depended on slave labor, some of which
were influenced directly by European emancipatory discourses that proposed the
overcoming of despotism. Nonetheless, for slaves and free blacks interested in the
abolition of slavery, emancipation questioned not only monarchy but also the reg-
imen of slave-​holding power that existed on plantations, as well as colonial power
more generally.
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120 Nelson Maldonado-Torres

The third sense of emancipation refers to processes of independence and

liberation directed primarily by criollo elites in Europe’s American colonies.
This spans from the independence of the United States through that of the
Latin American territories that became republics in the nineteenth century. In
the United States and in Latin America, the most common term used to refer
to this emancipation was independence. Liberation, on the other hand, is the
term adopted in the twentieth century in the various independence struggles
of European colonies in Africa and Asia, as well as in Latin America to oppose
dependency and the discourse of modernization. There are, therefore, not only
fronts of national liberation, but also sociologies, theologies, and philosophies of
liberation.
The concept of decolonization is related to emancipation, liberation, and inde-
pendence, but it has its own specific significance. If one takes as a starting point
the work of Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth; Black Skin, White Masks),
decolonization does not only refer directly to colonialism (nor only to absolut-
ism), but also aims at the idea that the future emancipated or liberated subject can
only forge itself, conceive itself, and constitute itself in the struggle for decoloniza-
tion. However, the concept of decolonization has typically been related to specific
political struggles, and not to the collection of practices and ideas that attempt
to undo coloniality and reconstitute the world of meaning and human practice.
For this reason, following the work of Chela Sandoval and Catherine Walsh, in 210
addition to decolonization, we use the concept of decoloniality (Sandoval; Walsh).
Decolonization, understood as decoloniality, refers to a process of undoing colo-
nial reality and its multiple hierarchies of power as a whole, which suggests the
immediate necessity of work at both the subjective and structural levels. This
makes explicit that neither opposition to despotism, to colonialism, nor to slav-
ery necessarily do away with coloniality. Coloniality can continue after having
achieved independence or emancipation, which means that decolonization does
not have as its goal merely an independent or emancipated being. To the contrary,
decolonization aims to reestablish genuine relations of interdependence, in addi-
tion to the liberty of individuals or peoples. Finally, the notion of decolonization,
as opposed to the concepts of independence or emancipation, contains less of a
sense that it can be granted by another. Decolonization implies action on the part
of the colonized. For this reason, the concept is more directly linked to the notion
of liberation than to the other terms.

Toward a Genealogy of the Decolonial Turn: Post-​and

Transcontinental Expressions of the Decolonial Turn in the
Americas
The various meanings of colonization, decolonization, and of related terms that
were considered in the previous section emerged in particular contexts. In addi-
tion to obtaining clarity about the meaning of those concepts, it is also important
 12

The Decolonial Turn 121

to have at least a general sense of the various moments of the decolonial turn.
Here I will just identify a few of the ones that had most impact. The first massive
moment of the decolonial turn takes place in the first wave of revolutions of inde-
pendence at the end of the eighteenth and through the first half of the nineteenth
century. Particularly important here is the position of the Haitian Revolution
which, with all its ambivalences, sought to affirm the significance of African and
African diasporic subjects as well as to establish the material conditions for social
equality. In comparison to the Haitian Revolution, the US American Revolution
was an effort of seeking full inclusion into the order of coloniality as an equal to
European powers. Latin American revolutionaries tended to reject the influence
of Spain and Portugal, but only to seek participation in the enlightened moder-
nity of other European territories such as France and England. Other significant
revolutions and projects within this first period of the decolonial turn include the
Tupac Katari Revolution in Bolivia in the late eighteenth century, and the Pan-​
African conferences from 1900 to 1945.
A second moment of the decolonial turn starts with the end of the Second
World War and the emergence of an entire new wave of decolonization primar-
ily in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Unlike in the previous moment, Western
powers started then to formally renounce eugenics and biological racism. Also
different was that contrary to the experiences of the United States and of most
210
of Latin America, the territories that sought independence in the twentieth
century were overwhelmingly inhabited by a majority of natives from those
countries. To be sure, biological racism was only a vulgar form of rationalizing
coloniality and the challenge for these revolutionary movements would involve
finding ways to become independent without reproducing the molds of Western
racial liberalism and capitalism or Sovietism.This second moment of the decolo-
nial turn has other key moments in the Bandung Conference of 1955, the Civil
Rights Movement in the United States, including the creation of the ethnic
power movements, and the formation of what Chela Sandoval has characterized
as US Third World feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. This period also includes
the emergence of postcolonial theory.
The historical coincidence of the end of the Cold War and the celebration of
the 500th year anniversary of the “discovery” of the Americas inaugurate a third
massive moment of the decolonial turn. The increasing skepticism about the crit-
ical possibilities of historical materialism among leftist intellectuals takes place in
the context of indigenous protests in the Americas and globally about the plans to
celebrate the “discovery” of the New World. In this context, already existing and
new indigenous perspectives find new ears. Also, specialists in colonialism con-
sider the relevance of the period to understand contemporary affairs. It is in that
context that Quijano publishes “Coloniality and Modernity/​Rationality” (2007
[1991]) and that he and Wallerstein publish their essay “Americanity as a Concept,
or the Americas in the Modern World-​System” (1992), two of the writings that
introduced the concept of coloniality.
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122 Nelson Maldonado-Torres

These three massive moments of the decolonial turn offer various ways to
consider colonialism as a fundamental problem, and decolonization as a project.
Taking colonialism as a fundamental problem means that before becoming an
object of study, colonialism has already shaped the ways in which one looks at
problems and objects of study.The shift of thinking about colonialism as an object
of study to considering it as a generative epistemological foundation of the mod-
ern world, or as coloniality, involves a decolonial turn. I will conclude this essay by
briefly reviewing specific expressions of the decolonial turn among some intel-
lectuals from the second and third moment of the decolonial turn. Each one
involves a particular way of theorizing colonialism as well as of reflecting about
the meaning and significance of decolonization. Each proposal also involves a way
of understanding space and time that is different from Eurocentric world history
and from area studies.
With the longest history of exposure to modern Western colonialism and the
longest history of opposition to it (from the native inhabitants and slaves, up to
Haiti, and continued calls for decolonization in places like Martinique and Puerto
Rico), it should not be surprising that the Caribbean counts with some of the
most important and influential voices in the decolonial turn—​consider Fanon, for
instance. In the twentieth century, the decolonial turn is proposed in a particu-
larly clear and forceful way in the Discourse on Colonialism by Caribbean political
activist, poet, and thinker Aimé Césaire. Originally published in 1950, Césaire’s 21
text captures the spirit of skepticism toward the superiority of European civiliza-
tion that followed two world wars, the Nazi project of human extermination,
and the many struggles for decolonization in the twentieth century. Discourse on
Colonialism expresses the scandal before European civilization plainly revealed at
that moment not only in its connection to war, dehumanization, and extermi-
nation, but also in a context where Europeans attempted to continue justifying
the supposed superiority of European civilization as well as colonialism. Césaire
argues that those who attempt to justify colonization with reference to the alleged
civilization that accompanies it suffer from a “curse” through which one becomes
“the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents prob-
lems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them” (32). In the
face of this curse Césaire proposes that “the essential thing here is to see clearly, to
think clearly—​that is, dangerously—​and to answer clearly the innocent first ques-
tion: what, fundamentally, is colonization?” (32).
I have already elaborated, in another context, the relationship between Césaire’s
argument on the need “to see clearly, to think clearly” and the Cartesian experi-
ment in the Discourse on Method. The Discourse on Colonialism approximates a dis-
course on method and on first philosophy that poses the “curse” of a collective
modern hypocrisy as a problem, and suggests the question of colonization’s origins
as a way out of the curse. Here, precisely, is the decolonial turn in its most basic
form: thinking modernity as a problem, and paying attention to the meaning of
colonization as a possible way out or answer to the problem.
 123

The Decolonial Turn 123

Beginning with the “innocent first question,” Césaire again poses the problem-
atic of civilization and colonization. It is worth citing at length here to capture
both Césaire’s depth of thought and his passionate, poetic, stylistic ability:

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to

brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him
to buried instincts […]; and we must show that each time … they accept the
fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes
place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at
the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have
been propagated […], all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison
has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the conti-
nent proceeds toward savagery.
(35–​36)

Beginning with Césaire, we can view the decolonial turn as a repositioning that
abandons the viewpoint of Western modernity as ideal or promise, since this view-
point is used to justify colonialism, and instead poses modernity as a problem. On
that basis, it reconsiders the meaning of colonialism in its relation to modernity.
Césaire’s decolonial turn feeds on the complex spatiality and temporality of the
21
Caribbean, with its ties to European empires, its proximity to the United States,
and its relationship with Latin America, Asia, and Africa, as well as on Césaire’s
participation in intellectual and artistic movements of the African diaspora. Thus,
Césaire’s object cannot be reduced to the typical coordinates of area studies or
European scholarship. On the contrary, Césaire’s Discourse, like that of Descartes’,
attempts to establish a foundation for the justification and orientation of new
knowledges. These knowledges are multiple and varied expressions of the decolo-
nial turn. One finds examples of them in what has come to be called “ethnic stud-
ies,” which points us once again toward the relationship between the decolonial
turn and the epistemological space of that project—​as opposed to traditional area
studies or European disciplines in the humanities and sciences.
One also finds a profound concern with the decolonization of space and
time in the Latin Americas. Like Césaire’s Discourse, Latin American liberation
philosophy was also motivated by a suspicion about the relationship between
European modernity and the production of the Third World through coloniza-
tion—​its structures, and its forms of power, being, and knowledge. This is evi-
dent in Enrique Dussel’s early writing of the late 1950s, but particularly in the
work that he produced in the context of reflecting on the significance of the
500th year anniversary of the “discovery” of the Americas. What Césaire refers
to as a “curse” (fukú, one could argue, in the terms that it appears in Junot Díaz’s
novel The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), appears in Dussel’s The Invention of the
Americas (1992) as a sacrificial myth. In order to escape from this curse/​myth,
it is necessary to rethink world history from the perspective of those who have
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124 Nelson Maldonado-Torres

been considered subjects without history proper, to critically review the entire
arrangement of basic philosophical areas and concepts (ethics, politics, econom-
ics, rationality, consensus, critique, etc.), and to establish dialogical relations with
colonial subjects everywhere, particularly with those struggling against colonial-
ity and for decolonization.
Two other powerful voices of the decolonial turn are Caribbean writer and
theorist Sylvia Wynter and the Chicana feminist philosopher and author Gloria
Anzaldúa, among other intellectuals. Since at least the beginning of the 1980s,
Wynter draws a clear relationship between the perspective of Césaire and that of
ethnic studies, which arose in the 1960s and 1970s (see Wynter, “Ceremony”). For
her, both are decolonizing discourses that permit transcultural studies and studies of
human systems liberated from the modern Eurocentic viewpoint. Gloria Anzaldúa,
for her part, in texts such as Borderlands/​La frontera (Anzaldúa), offers a creative
account and an analysis of both the colonization of subjectivity and the coloniality
of language. Her exploration of border thinking and being presents decolonization
as an activity that generates meaning in the dynamic of opposing itself to hierar-
chies of power, navigating little-​visited or prohibited zones of being and think-
ing, and bringing together elements that appear to be opposed. This perspective is
shared by other Chicana feminists such as Emma Pérez and Chela Sandoval, which
in the terrain of history and fiction on the one hand, and of critical theory on the
other, suggests forms of decolonizing the imaginary and knowledge. 214
The decolonial Chicana perspective is critical for Latino authors like Walter
Mignolo, who examines the forms in which meaning is produced in colonial
contexts, leading him to posit the idea of a “colonial difference” in spheres of
meaning, power, and knowledge, which remain hierarchically divided following
the model of the relationship between colonizer and colonized (Local Histories/​
Global Designs). Mignolo also takes from Anzaldúa the importance of the perspec-
tive of the colonized for achieving a more critical view toward modernity and of
producing ideas that go beyond it. In Anzaldúa and Mignolo one finds both sides
of the decolonial turn: thinking of coloniality as a “wound,” and decoloniality as
a project of rehumanization. Anzaldúa’s work, however, has a sustained engage-
ment with spirituality that is missed in probably most other formulations of the
decolonial turn.
In figures as diverse as Césaire,Wynter, Anzaldúa, Sandoval, Pérez, and Mignolo,
among many others, one can identify a double movement of making colonialism
a fundamental problem, and of conceiving decoloniality as an unfinished pro-
ject. Their theoretical and creative works reflect a critique of modernity that is
grounded on the lived experience of coloniality, along with a conception of the
colonized that considers their subjectivity and their creations as sites of decolonial
possibility. In this process, modern/​colonial space and time give way to different,
decolonizing, conceptions and ways of relating with temporality and spatiality.The
position of the subject is also radically altered. From a modern/​colonial attitude
of enchantment with modernity and either phobia or indifference toward the
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The Decolonial Turn 125

colonized, the decolonial turn generates a decolonial attitude that takes primacy
over method, allowing subjects to uncover fundamental problems and to join oth-
ers in the effort to address them.

Notes
1 See, for example, Atallah; Ballestrin; Blanco; Carmona Báez and Soto-​Lafontaine; Castro-​
Gómez and Grosfoguel; Grosfoguel; Maldonado-​Torres “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial
Turn,” “La Descolonización y el giro des-​colonial,” Against War, La descolonización y el giro
des-​colonial, “Enrique Dussel’s Liberation Thought,” “El pensamiento filosófico del ‘giro
descolonizador’,” “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn,” “Decoloniality at Large”;
Ndlovu; Ndlovu-​Gatsheni Empire, Global Coloniality, The Decolonial Mandela; Rodriguez
Reyes; Sithole; Tlostanova. Also consider a special issue in preparation on “Disability
and the Decolonial Turn: Perspectives from the Americas” by Roberto Sirvent and Amy
Reed-​Sandoval for the journal Disability and the Global South, among other projects and
writings.
2 Translator’s note: Throughout the text, I have translated “decolonial” and “decolonialidad”
as “decolonial and “decoloniality,” respectively. The author, however, also occasionally
uses the terms des-​colonial and des-​colonialidad which I have translated “decolonial” and
“decoloniality.” The latter pair of Spanish formulations differs in emphasis from the for-
mer in that the prefix des-​suggests a more active process and is generally used with verbs.
My hope is that by emphasizing the prefix in English I have conveyed some sense of this
fine distinction.
3 This section is a revised version of a portion of Maldonado-​Torres “El pensamiento
214 filosófico del ‘giro descolonizador’” 683–​686.
4 For further discussion on the notion of being without religion and the use and impli-
cations of that idea, see Maldonado-​Torres “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn,”
“Religion, Conquest, and Race”.

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Quijano, Anibal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas
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8
THE INDIGENOUS STUDIES TURN
Nicole Fabricant and Nancy Postero

The past thirty years in Latin America have been marked by the struggles of
indigenous peoples. Claiming citizenship and human rights, indigenous peoples
have demanded both self-​determination and political participation, pressuring
nation-​states to broaden their understandings of democracy. As we describe 218
here, their efforts have met with varied success. In many countries, states have
responded to the multicultural nature of their societies by recognizing their
citizenship. In some countries, notably Bolivia and Ecuador, indigeneity has
been transformed from a subaltern claim to the basis of revolutionary state-​
building. However, across the continent, indigenous peoples continue to fight
against their states and transnational corporations for autonomy and territorial
sovereignty.
In this essay, we trace the scholarship documenting the emergence and strug-
gles of indigenous peoples.We cannot adequately cover all the robust and dynamic
work our colleagues have produced; our goal instead is to trace the ways scholars
have framed this topic, focusing on what we see as the most significant areas of
contemporary scholarship. We begin with the question of how to define indig-
enous peoples and then describe the rise of indigeneity as political platform in
the 1980s and 1990s. Then we turn to four themes that are animating scholarship
today: (1) neoliberal multiculturalism; (2) indigenous relations to natural resources;
(3) gender and intersectionality; and (4) the ontological turn.

Definitions of Indigeneity
At the beginning of the indigenous turn in the 1980s, scholars and activists
devoted substantial energy to defining indigeneity. Perhaps the most widely cited
was the definition of the 1986 UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, which
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The Indigenous Studies Turn 129

stressed that indigeneity was a matter of self-​identification by peoples with a “his-

torical continuity” with pre-​colonial societies, who “consider themselves distinct”
from those dominant sectors prevailing on their territories (Martínez Cobo 379ff).
Over the years, scholars have backed away from such specific definitions, arguing
instead that who counts as indigenous is a fluid political consideration, emerging
from struggles over particular social, cultural, environmental, and economic mat-
ters during particular moments (Postero “Negotiating Indigeneity”; García). We
now suggest that indigeneity is a historically contingent formulation that changes
over time. Moreover, indigeneity is relational; like all forms of identity, it emerges
from contested and co-​constituting social fields of opposition and sameness (de la
Cadena and Starn 4).Thus, indigeneity is not a fixed identity but a discursive con-
struction that emerges in particular circumstances to accomplish concrete goals.
As we will see, however, difference remains a critical issue. We ask how difference
is understood, articulated, and mobilized in distinct periods, inquiring specifically
about how scholars theorize this difference.
Indigeneity emerged first during colonialism, as a category produced by and
justifying the violent dispossessions of native peoples by settlers. Since colonial
times, the Indian was opposed to the European, and later to the mestizo. In this
early period, identity was measured in terms of blood and biology to describe
the progeny of mixtures between native, European, and African peoples (Wade).
218
Indigeneity was a sign of radical otherness, a discourse linked to savagery, danger,
and nature that justified practices of colonialism, rape, and dispossession (Hall). It
was also a fiscal category, as native peoples were forced to provide labor power
and pay tribute to the colonizers (Platt). After independence from Spain, Latin
American criollo elites opposed indigeneity to modernity, representing it as an
obstacle to national progress and liberal Enlightenment ideals (Larson). Popular
national imaginaries viewed their emerging countries as based in mestizaje, or the
mixture of indigenous and Europeans. Mexico is the classic case of this, where
elites created postrevolutionary unity on the image of the new raza cósmica, the
Mexican mestizo (Vasconcelos).
While some did assimilate, many indigenous peoples maintained their lands,
languages, and cultures, although under constant threat of dispossession through
new legal systems. For much of the twentieth century, these groups were charac-
terized not in ethnic or racial terms but on the basis of class: they were peasants,
marked by rural poverty and/​or subsistence agriculture. As Judith Friedlander sug-
gested, they were Indians because they were poor, and they were poor because
they were Indians (75). Much of the scholarship from the 1950s to the 1970s
focused on peasant struggles, examining their poverty, their oppressive labor con-
ditions (Nash), or the logics that kept them ensconced within nonmodern “closed
corporate communities” (Wolf). Thus, class was a key framework of identity in
political and scholarly circles. This was reinforced by the wave of agrarian reforms
across the continent and the importance of peasant unions as a key form of polit-
ical organization.
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130 Nicole Fabricant and Nancy Postero

The Rise of Indigeneity: Human Rights and Multiculturalism

During the 1980s, however, the focus on class faded as native communities began
to organize, taking up new identities as original peoples of the lands—​in part
with the help of anthropologists and NGOs—​in order to make demands at both
the national and international levels. These efforts drew on several larger transfor-
mations. First, this emerged in the period of democratization in Latin America,
as countries emerged from dictatorship. This provided spaces for organizing that
had been dangerous in earlier eras (Yashar). Second, they were part of neoliberal
reforms, which linked market-​driven practices with expanded forms of decentral-
ized political participation. Third, this organizing was influenced by globalization,
and especially the globalized struggle for indigenous rights. Alison Brysk dem-
onstrated that in most countries, indigenous peoples did not identify with their
nation-​states and were often legally defined as second-​class citizens. As a result
they found working at the international level a more useful strategy (Brysk 9–​10).
Anna Tsing described how native peoples engaged in local struggles utilizing this
emerging globalized discourse of rights, articulating what she calls an “indigenous
voice” (38). Scholars began to theorize about indigenous peoples as part of the
“new social movements,” challenging dominant power structures (Warren). Two
events drew attention to indigenous peoples at this crucial moment. First was
the 1992 Quinto centenario anniversary, which offered indigenous peoples a site
for pan-​continental alliances and spectacular re-​representations. The second was 310

the startling emergence of the Zapatista army in Mexico in 1994, which posi-
tioned indigenous peoples and their allies as key challengers of neoliberalism with
the capacity to join with other social movements to organize globally (Dietz).
The Zapatistas proposed alternatives including land rights and new forms of self-​
government, called juntas del buen gobierno (Speed).
Indigenous organizing in the 1990s gave rise to two parallel and interlocking
efforts to gain rights and recognition. On the one hand, indigenous groups mar-
shaled their allies to push for rights at the international level, using international
institutions such as the UN, the International Working Group on Indigenous
Peoples, and transnational NGOs. Engle argues that because powerful states saw
indigenous demands for autonomy as threats to national sovereignty, indigenous
organizations and their allies developed a discourse involving a “human right to
culture” a less threatening foundation for indigenous claims (Engle 3). This can
be seen in the key text of the era, the UN’s International Labour Organization
(ILO) Convention 169, an agreement that was signed by the majority of states in
the 1990s, thus becoming part of national law. The convention recognized “the
aspirations of [native peoples] to exercise control over their own institutions, ways
of life and economic development … and to maintain and develop their identities,
languages, and religions, within the framework of the States in which they live”
(ILO). One important result of this international organizing is the 2007 United
Nation’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
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The Indigenous Studies Turn 131

On the other hand, indigenous groups used these key texts to push for
expanded citizenship in their own countries. In response, nation-​states reformed
their constitutions, transforming citizenship regimes across the continent (Van
Cott; Seider). Donna Lee Van Cott argued that indigenous peoples’ efforts to seek
inclusion expanded democracy for all citizens. Scholarship in this period focused
on what indigenous citizenship meant in everyday life (García; Postero “Now We
Are Citizens”), how indigenous groups were able (or not) to organize to raise the
“Indian Question” in political arenas (Postero and Zamosc), and how these legal
and political reforms altered state–​civil society relations (Assies et al.).
Thus, the 1980s and 1990s saw indigeneity emerge as a central category through
which local peoples were able to organize and make claims for rights and justice
(Canessa “Conflict, Claim, and Contradiction”; Webber). Scholars, ever cautious
about accepting discursive categories as natural, have documented the successes
and struggles of indigenous peoples as they fought extractivist resource projects
(Sawyer; Hindery), channeled NGO funding to their communities (Radcliffe),
fought for territory (Fabricant and Gustafson), and struggled over representation
and racism. In recent years, however, scholars have begun to rethink the category
of indigeneity, theorizing more deeply about what indigeneity produces as it is
taken up as both a site of governance and as new forms of liberatory politics
(Postero “Negotiating Indigeneity”). We turn now to four areas of contemporary
310
research.

Neoliberal Multiculturalism
The first area of critical research we point to is scholars’ analysis of “neoliberal
multiculturalism.” The 1990s saw the wholesale adoption of a neoliberal model
that linked global capitalism and democracy. This “market democracy” model
encouraged nation-​states to open up their markets, liberalize trade, and privatize
state-​owned industries, on the one hand, and to promote cultural shifts toward
diversity and inclusion, on the other. Proponents of neoliberalism actively pro-
moted “a substantive, if limited, version of indigenous cultural rights” (Hale “Does
Multiculturalism Menace” 487) including recognition of indigenous languages,
collective titles to certain indigenous territories, and new forms of political partic-
ipation for its indigenous peoples (Van Cott). These reforms were supplemented
by NGO-​funded projects focused on cultural heritage and revitalization, as well
territorial titling efforts.
As these reforms advanced, however, scholars began to note how these schemes
of recognition enacted new forms of governance. Scholars utilized the insights of
Foucault and other theorists to examine the ways neoliberal reforms created new
forms of individualized and responsible subjects, as well as the ways market prin-
ciples were asserted as solutions to political and cultural problems. They argued
that although indigeneity proved a platform for claiming rights, in most countries,
indigenous people remain subjects of national sovereignty and deeply implicated
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132 Nicole Fabricant and Nancy Postero

in unequal relations of global capitalism. Charles Hale thus suggested that neolib-
eral multiculturalism has a “menacing” aspect: it creates new ways of governing
indigenous subjects. Those whose claims fall within the logic of globalized cap-
italism (he terms them indios permitidos, or “authorized Indians”) are supported,
while those whose demands challenge the nation-​state or its capitalist projects are
prohibited.
Three cases make clear the importance of this turn. In the Guatemalan case
Hale studied, multiculturalism established a package of rights to cultural differ-
ence, recognizing Mayan culture and language, as long as they do not challenge
the underlying inequities of neoliberal capitalism (491). Thus, claims to inter-
cultural language programs are acceptable, while demands for territorial sov-
ereignty may not be. He demonstrated how Mayan politicians were forced to
balance between pursuing a Mayanist agenda and being marginalized for making
what seem like radical or dangerous demands. Like Hale, Postero’s analysis of the
Bolivian multicultural reforms concludes that neoliberal multiculturalism acts as a
strategy of management and containment, with little systemic effect on the struc-
tures of racial hierarchy and economic inequality (Postero Now We Are Citizens).
She showed that while indigenous peoples were invited to participate in munici-
pal budget decisions, the structural relations of political domination by white/​
mestizo dominated political parties prevented any real redistribution of mate-
rial resources. Ironically, frustrated with the failures of both multiculturalism and 312
the economic model which privatized basic resources and exacerbated inequities,
indigenous people took to the ballot box, eventually electing the first indigenous
president in 2005. The Bolivian case demonstrates not only the limitations of
neoliberal multiculturalism, but also the fact that its practices can form the terrain
for further struggle.
Finally, in Chile, neoliberal multiculturalism produced very different results
(Richards). Richards documents the ways that Chilean development continued
the relentless expropriation of Mapuche lands for forestry and hydroelectric dams,
while at the same time targeting them in poverty alleviation schemes. Where the
Guatemalan and Bolivian cases showed that multicultural recognition trumped real
redistribution, in Chile, the state was willing to pursue limited forms of ameliora-
tive development projects, but it was never willing to allow indigenous peoples
decision-​making rights or any historic collective land rights. Yet, Richards points
out similarities as well: while state development and health projects reinforce the
actions of indios permitidos, Chilean state violence against Mapuche “insurrectos”
may be the most extreme form of discipline in the region. Mapuche protesters are
regularly tried as terrorists and sentenced to lengthy jail sentences.
These studies return us to the tensions underlying claims to indigeneity.
Assertions of cultural difference may act as a form of radical politics, drawing atten-
tion to the exclusions inherent in liberal democratic societies. Yet, this very form
of difference may be taken up by liberalism to support its agenda, coopting dif-
ference to its ends (Povinelli “Cunning of Recognition”). Indigenous experiences
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The Indigenous Studies Turn 133

with multiculturalism thus provoke a continued examination of liberalism, citi-

zenship, and democracy. That is, the view from indigenous people’s “position,” to
use Li’s term, makes clear that liberalism continues to produce racialized exclu-
sions, even when its proponents assert inclusionary intentions. This has prompted
efforts to go beyond multiculturalism. Bolivia’s 2009 constitution, for instance,
established the country as “plurinational” and declares decolonization as the fun-
damental goal of the newly established state.While this new constitution is not the
utopia indigenous activists hoped it would be, it does provide a new horizon for
post-​multicultural membership.

Natural Resources
A second area of research that has emerged over the past decade examines indig-
enous struggles over natural resources. This became increasingly important during
the neoliberal period as countries increasingly opened their natural resources to
exploitation by transnational corporations, and it continues to be a site of con-
tention today. A wealth of popular and scholarly work explored how neoliberal
governance sparked new forms of politics across race, class, and ethnic identity
(Gustafson and Fabricant). This is particularly clear in Bolivia, where movements
fighting for rights to resources used indigenous identity and practices as critical
312
ways to mobilize. During the 2000 “water war” in Cochabamba, local people
claimed traditional uses of water as a collective cultural right to fight privatiza-
tion (Olivera and Lewis). Similarly, coca farmers fighting for the right to grow
coca asserted its ancestral provenance. Urban residents in El Alto claimed national
sovereignty in their struggle to reclaim/​nationalize gas from transnational corpo-
rations in the “gas war” in 2003. Tom Perreault argues that both the water and gas
wars mobilized indigeneity in order to obtain greater participation in decision-​
making regarding resource management, more equitable distribution of the eco-
nomic benefits derived from resource exploitation, and a more socially oriented
alternative to Bolivia’s neoliberal economic model of development. More recent
work has focused on communal usos y costumbres as a strategy to confront water
scarcity in urban/​rural regions of the Andes (Fabricant and Hicks).
Across Latin America, ideas about indigenous autonomy, territoriality, and the
environment come together as a powerful discourse to mobilize against extrac-
tive industries and large-​scale development projects. Yet, this has not stopped the
juggernaut of extractivism: across the continent, we continue to see indigenous
peoples’ lands sacrificed to development, including oil and gas exploitation, mines,
highway projects, and dams (Perreault; Gustafson; Hindery;Anthias). Suzana Sawyer
demonstrates that recent contests over land and oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon
were as much about reconfiguring questions of national and transnational inequal-
ity and rupturing silences around racial injustice, as they were about extraction of
resources (Sawyer; Sawyer and Gomez). Becker has described the ways indigenous
activists in Ecuador have drawn on usos y costumbres and rights to territory to
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134 Nicole Fabricant and Nancy Postero

protest government’s revised plans to drill oil in the ecologically sensitive Yasuni
National Park in the eastern Amazon basin. The Ecuadorian case parallels the
Bolivian, where scholars have described the controversy over the government’s
proposal to push a highway through an indigenous territory and park known
by its acronym, TIPNIS (McNeish). These battles draw attention not only to the
links between indigenous communities and their territories but also the ways that
indigeneity has become a malleable discourse that many distinct groups—​from
the state to environmentalists to the right wing—​can use to stake claims, often
speaking for the “Indian” (Fabricant and Postero). In many cases, these actors rely
on “romantic” or essentializing representations of indigenous people saving the
planet. Thus, this area of scholarship also draws our attention to the tension that
inhabits the category of indigeneity. Indigeneity can function as a powerful politi-
cal force, utilized by indigenous groups as emancipatory politics or by others seek-
ing to appropriate it for their own interests to enact forms of governance.The best
scholarship goes beyond the simplistic notions of virtuous indigenous to examine
the complex lived experiences of indigenous peoples today.
For instance, climate change across Latin America threatens to disrupt local
economies and ways of life, and indigenous peoples are beginning to organize
in response. Scholars have explored the ways in which indigenous movements
mobilize the notion of “buen vivir” (living well, an alternative epistemological cos-
mological concept we might gloss as sustainable development) (sumak kawsay in 314
Quicha, or suma qamaña in Aymara) as a way to combat extractive capitalism,
which essentially has created the climate crisis (Albó; Radcliffe “Development
for a Postneoliberal Era”). Nicole Fabricant questions whether the discourses
of “Ayllu” (Andean collective forms of self-​government) resonate with reali-
ties of urban Indians today, and whether they have the organizational capacity
to address the complicated and multilayered structural problems associated with
climate change. This disjuncture between discourses of indigeneity and realities
of contemporary indigenous life is also key in Juliet Erazo’s work about cash-
ing in on carbon-​reduction policies in the Ecuadorian Amazon. She argues that
while for some indigenous organizations, REDD (Reducing Emissions from the
Deforestation and Degradation) and REDD+ programs merely justify capitalism,
for others, these projects represent good wages and much-​needed resources in
indigenous and autonomous areas (Erazo 57).
This draws our attention to the central contradiction of indigenous self-​
determination, the continuing tension between recognition and redistribution.
Where constitutions provide for indigenous territories or autonomy, they rarely
provide the material means to make sovereignty more than symbolic. Often
autonomous communities are unable to tax or collect annual dues from their
residents. Instead, the leaders of indigenous territories must seek funds to sup-
port their governance tasks either by relying on funds from the central state or by
working with outsiders, like NGOs or even transnational oil companies. Penelope
Anthias’s work points directly to this contradiction. She looks at how Guaranís
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The Indigenous Studies Turn 135

in the Bolivian Chaco have abandoned negotiations with the state over terri-
torial titling, instead negotiating directly with Repsol (the Spanish transnational
oil company) authorizing continued oil exploitation in exchange for revenue to
compensate the communities for environmental damage. For these organizations,
indigenous autonomy is articulated as negotiating “on our own” with the trans-
national oil company. Anthias, like Erazo, points toward a key dilemma facing
indigenous peoples: participating fully in the global capitalist market may be the
only choice for survival, yet it may cause negative ecological, territorial, and even
climatic consequences for their lands and peoples.

Gender and Intersectionality

One of the most powerful interventions in feminist theory at the end of the
twentieth century was the articulation of intersectionality by women of color in
the United States who argued that rather than being seen as separate or additive
concepts, race, gender, ethnicity, and social class should be viewed as elements that
simultaneously shaped and transformed the lived experience of women (and men)
(see McCall; Denis; and Rousseau). In this section, we show how this concept of
intersectionality has “traveled” to Latin America, challenging us to think about
multiple and intersecting identities across time and scale. Particularly by examin-
314
ing the ways indigeneity and gender intersect, scholars in this turn problematize
simplistic notions of indigeneity.
There is a large body of feminist scholarship recognizing the ways colonialism
was always gendered (Choque Quispe; Rivera Cuscanqui and Barragán; Schiwy).
María Lugones argues that Europeans brought with them a conception of civiliza-
tion that privileged white men as “the human being par excellence.” This turned
“the colonized woman” into an empty signifier, a sort of “nonhuman” whose
sex becomes a legitimate site of exploitation, violence, and terror (Lugones 744).
These colonial legacies continue to be a site of struggle. As indigenous women
have mobilized for change over the past few decades, scholars have documented
the dilemmas they face: indigenous women activists can find themselves caught
between their support for their movements’ collective projects of decolonization
and autonomy, and their critiques of patriarchal practices and norms within their
communities (Rousseau). Rousseau suggests that women’s role as agents for pre-
serving and reproducing the community can be empowering as it strengthens
endangered identities, but it can also act as an obstacle to full participation in
public or political roles.
Yet scholars have also documented the creative ways in which these women
have used indigenous ideas of complementarity to struggle for justice within
their communities and within their families (Burman). While some reject fem-
inism as a Western bourgeois notion and defend indigenous cosmovisions as
a more legitimate space of resistance, others have increasingly put forward
new forms of “indigenous feminism,” in which their positions as both women
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136 Nicole Fabricant and Nancy Postero

and indigenous are mutually reinforcing (Hernández Castillo; Speed, Rights

in Rebellion). In a provocative intervention into this debate, Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui argues that indigenous organizing focused on recovering territories
in fact ignores the issues most important to indigenous women who live and
work in cities—​issues of exploitative labor and sexual violence. By limiting their
activism to questions of political or territorial rights, she says male indigenous
leaders are missing broader and potentially more liberatory notions of rights
(Rivera Cusicanqui 49–​50).
Women are not the only focus of this new research. Andrew Canessa (“Intimate
Indigeneities”) describes how men in highland Bolivia are often forced to travel
out of the villages to take part in the military and commerce. There, they not only
experience historical injustices and racism but also assume a broader sense of citi-
zenship than the women, who tend to remain at home. Linking macro forces to
intimate spaces of sexuality, Canessa shows how indigeneity is both expressed and
contested in the realm of desire. Men come to understand their own indigene-
ity through sleeping with women of other ethnicities, while village women are
further deprecated by their partners for symbolizing an indigeneity they cannot
escape. Canessa demonstrates then that masculinity is enacted in the intersection
of race, class, and gender.
Indigenous people’s intersectional positions have also proven an important
site from which to think about issues such as human rights and development. 136
Shannon Speed’s work with women migrating from Mexico to the United States
points to the ways in which indigenous women are situated at the intersection of
multiple axes of oppression (“Intersectionality”). Here Mexican women migrants
are subjected to gendered violence in their homes, raped and kidnapped as they
migrate, and face new violence, including incarceration if they ask for asylum,
once they reach the United States. The plight of indigenous women caught in
this “multicriminalism” makes clear that neither multiculturalism nor human
rights has delivered on its promises. Sarah Radcliffe’s new work on indigenous
women and postcolonial development asks how categories of social difference—​
including gender, race ethnicity, sexuality, disability, location, and class—​come to
be conceptualized and then acted upon in development. She argues that social
heterogeneity is key to how development NGOs seek to enact their projects,
and ultimately determines who receives aid and who does not. Because they are
perceived to be different and less capable aid recipients, indigenous women are
not targeted for the same sorts of development as mestizo women, or indigenous
men. But precisely because of their position at the intersection of indigeneity
and gender, indigenous women also have a privileged site from which to mount
critiques of development.
Intersectionality has thus proven to be a rich site for rethinking both gender
and indigeneity, problematizing categories of difference and describing the rich
gendered and classed sites from which indigenous identity emerges. Given the
ever more complex sites in which indigenous people live and work—​in urban
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The Indigenous Studies Turn 137

spaces, in transnational circuits of commerce (Tassi et al.), and in mixed-​ethnicity

neighborhoods (Kirshner)—​we anticipate that analyses showing the intersections
between race/​ethnicity and class will be emerging in coming days.

The Postcolonial and Ontological Turns

Perhaps the most provocative turn in indigenous studies is the “ontological turn”
(Escobar “Ontological Turn”). These scholars begin with the idea that indige-
nous peoples may have ontologies that are very different from Western “mod-
ern” ontologies. Here ontology refers to how people understand the universe
to be organized: what exists, the conditions of their existence, and the relations
between them (Blaser “Political Ontology” 877). In part, this academic move par-
allels activism by indigenous peoples, who pushed beyond multiculturalism to
argue for decolonization and plurinationalism alongside economic redistribution.
Indigenous intellectuals and activists point to the hegemonic myths of Western
superiority that continue to underlie modern liberal democracies, and argue for
a radical revolution at the level of epistemology, demanding a reevaluation of
indigenous customs, logics, and values (Bautista). This draws in part upon the
work of modernity/​coloniality scholars describing the discursive legacies of colo-
niality, what Quijano calls the “coloniality of power.” (See also Mignolo, Walsh.)
136
This group argues that Euro-​modernity took hold in parallel with the conquest
of Latin America, and created a system of hierarchies (modern and nonmodern)
that justified colonial violence against native peoples and continues to bolster
contemporary racism.
As we described above, recognizing indigenous difference (albeit in a lim-
ited way) was a fundamental part of multicultural schemes of governance. In this
period, indigenous knowledge was recognized as valuable and worth preserving
and even promoting.Yet the ontological scholarship provides another explanation
for why multiculturalism “failed”: because it is based on an effort to make indig-
enous difference commensurable to modernity and European models of develop-
ment. These scholars rely on Latour and Descola’s science studies arguments that
modernity is one ontological formation among others, but one that has particular
power-​laden effects. Most importantly, they suggest, modern ontologies separate
nature from culture, and assume that other ways of seeing the world are based
in superstition or religion. The result, says Latour, is the “Great Divide” between
“moderns” who make this differentiation and others who do not (Latour 99).
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro suggests that this divide has made it difficult for schol-
ars to see the radically different “perspectives” or “worlds” that people inhabit.
He argues that contrary to modern multicultural understandings, which posit
one nature and many culturally situated perspectives of it, the indigenous peoples
he studies envision many different kinds of natures. From this “multinaturalist”
notion, he argues that scholars should explore the “equivocations” or misunder-
standings that occur when different ontologies collide, recognizing that they are
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138 Nicole Fabricant and Nancy Postero

evidence that different worlds are being enacted and assumed (Viveiros de Castro;
Blaser “The Threat of the Yrmo” 4).
Two scholars demonstrate what is at stake when these ontological concerns are
ignored. Marisol de la Cadena describes how indigenous Peruvians explain their
opposition to mining in nearby mountains. They refer to the mountains as beings
with whom they have relations and whose anger might threaten their communi-
ties. To many, these explanations appear as mystical or culturalist visions, instead
of legitimate political arguments. Thus, de la Cadena argues that the epistemic
maneuver Latour described dividing nature from culture effectively “bans” both
indigenous beliefs as well as the nonhuman “earth beings” (the mountains at risk)
from the sphere of politics (de la Cadena). She asks: what form might politics take
if scholars and politicians took these emerging forms of indigeneity seriously?
Thinking about Andean mountains as sites of equivocation that make visible the
partially connected worlds between environmentalists and indigenous politicians
might produce the sort of disagreement Rancière posits as the basis of political
subjectivity (351).
Mario Blaser follows a similar argument, describing the equivocation between
development NGOs and the Yshiro People in northern Paraguay. When the
NGOs order a hunting ban in a degraded environment, the Yshiro fail to comply.
Their ontological understanding of human–​animal relations is completely differ-
ent from that of the NGO. Their world is governed by a principle of relationality 138
between humans and nonhumans, but the availability of fauna is not strictly a
result of how humans treat animals. Instead, if animals are not available, it means
that at some point in the network, the flow of reciprocity is failing, usually in the
human-​to-​human interface (Blaser “The Threat of the Yrmo” 8). This equivoca-
tion demonstrates two different worlds at play. Blaser shows how the “factish”
of endangered environment “performed” by the NGOs, the national parks, and
ranchers was accepted as true, while the Yshiro’s world was sidelined. He calls
his analysis “political ontology,” illuminating “the conflicts that ensue as differ-
ent worlds or ontologies strive to sustain their own existence as they interact and
mingle with each other” (Blaser “The Threat of the Yrmo” 3).
The ontological turn has produced enormous debates. Some see it as a dan-
gerous return to essentialized notions of the Indian as linked to nature (Turner).
Others suggest that it ignores the ways contemporary indigenous people are fully
engaged in the logics of global capitalism, and particularly ignores the vulner-
abilities this structural position implies (Bessire and Bond). Most importantly, it
does not address what scholars of multiculturalism have repeatedly argued: that
representations of radical alterity continue to form the basis of new regimes of
inequality and governance (Povinelli “Cunning of Recognition”; Bessire and
Bond 445).Yet, these ontology scholars have called attention to an essential ques-
tion, especially for anthropology. If one of the central goals of studying indigenous
peoples has been to understand and translate intercultural equivocality or differ-
ence, we must understand the conditions and assumptions that modern ontologies
 319

The Indigenous Studies Turn 139

bring to the endeavor. Viveiros de Castro makes a provocative claim: “The error
or illusion par excellence consists, precisely, in imagining that the univocal exists
beneath the equivocal, and that the anthropologist is its ventriloquist” (10). He
proposes instead a “controlled equivocation,” a recognition of other ontologies on
their own terms, a translation that “allows the alien concepts to deform or subvert
the conceptual tools of the translator’s toolbox so that the intentio of the original
language can be expressed within the new one” (3).

Conclusion
This chapter traced the dynamic scholarship following the rise of the indigenous
rights movement in the 1980s and 1990s. We have identified four critical themes
of this era—​neoliberal multiculturalism, natural resources, intersectionality, and
the ontological turn—​arguing that what links these four areas of scholarship is
how intellectuals and activists have theorized difference. In each of these areas,
scholars have questioned naturalized notions of difference, pointing out that the
category of indigenous can only be understood in relation to other discourses
(like neoliberalism or modernity) or other categories (like gender or class). Yet,
because indigenous peoples have been continually positioned as different from
whites/​mestizos or moderns, their experiences and struggles have illuminated
138
many other fundamental questions, from colonialism to modernity to democ-
racy. During the era of neoliberal multiculturalism, state efforts to recognize this
difference showed both the flexibility of liberalism and its limitations. That is,
while neoliberal forms of governance expanded their definitions of citizenship
to allow for indigenous practices and organizations, the overarching lesson from
scholars of multiculturalism seems to be that late liberal societies can only toler-
ate difference in limited doses, and only if it does not challenge the nation-​state
and/​or global capitalism. Scholars of the ontological turn expand this conclu-
sion, explaining liberalism’s limitations at the level of worldview or ontology.The
fact that indigenous visions of human/​nature relations are silenced or seen as
totally exterior to politics or science is further proof of the hegemony of Western
notions of modernity.
For scholars following indigenous peoples’ struggles over natural resources, dif-
ference plays a more complicated role. Situated on the faultlines between local
livelihoods, capitalist extractivism, and global climate change, native peoples often
bear the burden of being the alternative, of refusing, of opposing both states and
corporate development plans, and of taking the role of the saviors of nature. Here
indigenous positions have shed light on the rapacious nature of late capitalism,
and the ways nation-​states, even progressive ones, continue to sacrifice the most
vulnerable to development.Yet, increasingly, scholars note the conflicted positions
in which indigenous people find themselves, “enduring” precarious lives of pov-
erty (Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment) and engaging with capitalism. Here the
gender and intersectionality scholars show how difficult it is to define difference,
410

140 Nicole Fabricant and Nancy Postero

instead arguing for a fluid multidimensional understanding of the complex dis-

courses and fields of force at play in indigenous peoples’ lives. We anticipate con-
tinued and productive debates between scholars who see difference as ontological
and those who see it as emerging from multicontextual lived positions in the
contemporary world.
While these have been important areas for exploring the ways scholars have
engaged indigeneity in recent years, we end here with ideas for where scholarship
on indigeneity might go in the next decade or so. It seems as though questions
regarding the environment and natural resources will become ever more impor-
tant in the upcoming years as resources become more finite and global climate
change advances. It is our hope that scholars will continue to analyze these devel-
opment projects to draw attention to both the inequities they can produce, as well
as the alternatives being proposed to them. Decolonization and buen vivir offer
new horizons for indigenous peoples to claim sovereignty and land rights, but
these will no doubt continue to be deeply contested. Climate change is a product
of enormously complex interactions between economic and political processes
and uneven geographical developments across Latin America, so new work will
have to address these multi-​scalar intersects. Perhaps this will lead to new interdis-
ciplinary work across the physical and social and humanistic sciences.
As we have argued in other papers, there is certainly space for more critical
work on intersectionality between race, ethnicity, gender, and class. We hope to 410
see more work on indigenous peoples engaged with capitalism, like the upwardly
mobile Aymaras in La Paz. How and in what ways might they borrow from Aymara
traditions of reciprocity and exchange to build political and economic networks
that stretch across national/​global space? We argue here for more attention to
macro and micro shifts, as flows of capital and new markets open up across Latin
America. How might indigenous people be engaging these markets as important
actors in these new global spaces? The goal of the next decade is to create robust
theories that look at the intersections of race, class, gender, and the multiple layers
and levels of power shaping indigenous peoples’ lives in rural and urban areas, in
spaces of governance, and in international decision-​making.

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41
 145

9
THE PERFORMANCE TURN
Angela Marino

When, in late 2014, Bill De Blasio, the mayor of New York City, entered the
funeral service of two police officers allegedly murdered in revenge for the death
of Eric Garner, several members of the police union turned their backs to show
41
their disapproval. In their eyes, De Blasio, who had spoken out against the con-
duct of Staten Island officers who killed Mr. Garner, was to blame for betraying
the policemen’s fraternal code of standing by “one’s own.”1 The moment at the
funeral was arguably a small act, especially considering the hundreds of inventive
performance protests across the country that demanded retribution for police vio-
lence. Activists staged “die-​ins” and protests with chants and gestures of “hands up,
don’t shoot,” blocking freeways, shopping malls and eateries around the country
as part of building the movement around Black Lives Matter. These tactics joined
flash mobs, slogans, and numbers such as “132” and “43” that acquired significant
and particular meanings regionally and across the hemisphere.Yet, the turn at the
funeral needed no words and no explanation. This “old-​school” performance to
turn one’s back to the face of power, registered a very particular and elemental set
of meanings to a wider viewing audience.2 The turn in this case meant to stand
against, to refuse witness. It was a bodily move that appropriated ritualized forms
of the sacred and profane and a long history of religious performance practice.
The moment at the funeral happened about the time I started thinking about
this essay on twenty-​five years of Latin American studies and the multiple mean-
ings of a performance turn. A turn presumes a divergence from the status quo.
It speaks the language of dissent but relies on the staying power of a new stance.
From a post-​2016 perspective, this turning of one’s back to power meant rejec-
tion as much as new allegiance. Performance studies scholar Tracy Davis dubbed
the turn from inside the field as, “the pirouette, detour, revolution, deflection,
deviation, tack and yaw of the performative turn,” suggesting that the field itself
416

146 Angela Marino

was undergoing multiple explorations of “both the subject of study and very
often the means” (Davis 2). Following Davis, I consider a performance turn in
Latin American studies of multiple moves. Its effects have irreversibly shifted
the way we think about issues of ephemerality and evidence, the concept of
performativity, and approaches to aesthetics and power. Each debate overlaps
with the other, some as detours, others as an expansive yaw or revolution. What
proponents share is the belief that performance is inseparably linked to what
we know and how we know it, thus expanding objects of study and methods
of research.
What are deemed “new” objects and methods of study, however, must be con-
sidered next to the question of new for whom, and perhaps another step back,
what does one mean by performance and why does it matter? A recent trilin-
gual (English, Spanish, and Portuguese) publication edited by Diana Taylor and
Marcos Steuernagel offers as many different ideas as contributors, with thirty
scholars from seven countries in the Americas.3 Performance can be an event in
an auditorium, in the street or at a podium. To perform, “to bring forth,” could
also be ascribed to what comes out of the engine of a car, a quality of speed or
power. That which “performs,” appears between the curtains on a stage, as social
drama, or within Erving Goffman’s frames of the performance in everyday life.
The term performative has been used as an adjective and a noun, shifting focus to
that which does rather than that which is. Rather than universalizing definitions 416
of performance, emphasis in the field was placed on process and to ask, what is
performance useful for as a mode of analysis?
Much of the catalyst for this turn came about through the emergence of an
interdisciplinary field. Building on the work of anthropologist Victor Turner,
performance studies in the United States often is said to begin with Richard
Schechner, who is perhaps most recognized as an innovator and a practicing art-
ist and scholar on the relationship between ritual performance, theater, and social
political action. Of course he wasn’t the first. A decade earlier, scholars and prac-
titioners like Augusto Boal worked to bridge ritual and theater production with
social movements and political assembly as forums on the streets to higher political
office. Both artists and scholars, one in the academy and the other in the legisla-
ture, they prompted shifts around theory and practice of performance in the 1970s
through the 1990s and now, a full generation later, led to subsequent demands for
a broadening of institutional practice.
This work of course matters when we seek to analyze an orientation of the past
twenty-​five years, since these and other scholars and practitioners helped build
the institutional structures to support thousands more in drawing connections
between ritual processions and staged theater to performance art and activism,
mapping its range from free-​form improvisation, movement, and play to stylized
and scripted staged roles.Theories of performativity and performatives drew open
even more possibilities as a greater interest in unfixing identities, social groups and
structures of power as processual, dynamic and embodied. Performativity took
 147

The Performance Turn 147

on new meanings across disciplines as ways to explain normative and reiterative

behaviors that resulted from conditioning regimens, hailing, and other kinds of
habitual and interactive reinforcement.
Developed by theorists such as Judith Butler, who draws from J. L. Austin as I’ll
discuss further on, performatives meant a combination of agency and identifying
the incessant regulatory systems that shape gender, politics, and identities of all
kinds. Thus, at its basic level, the expansion of “objects of study” in the perfor-
mance turn is about scholars who recognized that more than objects with discrete
beginnings and ends, the loci of critical intervention are an ever moving target and
better approached as relational and interdependent acts.
A broader genealogy of knowledge production was always at stake. Knowledge
is not just based in the book and written lexicon. The knowledge transmitted in
the gestural, the communal, spatial and temporal experience requires different
kinds of analysis and approaches. It is also about the body, affect, transformative
identities, and to borrow from Arjun Appadurai’s important work in 1998, the
social life of things.4 Debates and varying perspectives of what counts as perfor-
mance and what/​who does the performing keep the field exciting and turbulent.
No one seems in a rush to limit the range of what is possible, and all indications
are that the turn may be only at the beginning.
Latin American studies carries its own history entangled with the preeminence
416
of text-​based knowledge production in the Western tradition. When looking at
the archive in the mid 1980s, few if any academics mentioned the significance of
performance and yet, as Diana Taylor points out, it was right there at the center of
the codices in glyphs such as Olin, the movement energy that turns the skies, the
planet and our bodies in the Mexica cosmology. Scholars at the intersection of
Latin American studies, cultural studies, anthropology and theatre research, con-
tinue to make a strong case that symbolic and performed repertoires draw from
a thousands-​year-​old history of performance-​based cultural transmission. From
this perspective, performance is a praxis and episteme of the organizing forces
of the world in which we live. Given these multiple turns of “performance,” its
staying power in a cultural imagination, its active role in shifting the foci of study,
and the epistemic dimension of embodied practice, the performance turn pres-
ents many expansive curlicues, as Kamau Brathwaite would say. In the following
section, I’ll look more closely at these issues of evidence and ephemerality, and
in particular the ways in which that evidence was a) dismissed by letrados histor-
ically and currently, and b) otherwise mobilized to sustain alternative systems of
knowing.

Ephemerality and Evidence

The performance turn expanded ideas of “texts” to open up often entirely ignored
performance repertoires as objects of study. Performance studies scholars are
well aware that repertoire has often been occluded in the study of the written
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148 Angela Marino

archive. Funeral records might have the time and cause of death, but outside of
what is sometimes referred to as “anecdotal” evidence, the historical record rarely
describes the way people behaved, remembered, or experienced the velorio (wake).
The lettered elite in Latin America controlled the libraries, the courts of law, and
the academies. Performance—​even though it took place in plain view on streets,
in annual processions, at weddings, in Saint’s days, and on the stages of outdoor and
enclosed theaters in small towns and urban centers—​was often ignored in scholar-
ship. One of the major proponents of the performance turn in Latin American
studies, Diana Taylor, raises this issue when she describes performance as “strategi-
cally positioned outside of history, rendered invalid as a form of cultural transmis-
sion” (Taylor “Performance and/​as History” 70). Thus, even though performance
was highly visible, as a language and meaning-​making system in daily life it was
often dismissed as evidence, relegated to a footnote, or reproduced within the
academy as frozen in the past or explicitly ahistorical.
Certainly, the performance turn in Latin American studies did not take place
in isolation. In the US academy, research in performance studies developed out of
other fields such as theater, cultural studies, anthropology, and literature. Latin/​o
American scholars and artists propelled these questions forward by their insertion
of the debates and stakes of performance research from the global south into the
fissures of the global north. Ana Mendieta’s Silhouettes, her famous earth works
from the 1970s, streaked through art and political discourse in a retrospective in 418
the early 1990s. Mendieta raised the questions of traces, permanence and cultural
memory beyond the identity debates of a politics of inclusion. Likewise, Coco
Fusco and Guillermo Gómez Peña’s now classic Couple in the Cage performance
took on language, art and representation in the significant cultural turn of that
period. Positioning themselves as fictional native subjects on display in a cage they
exposed the still-​pervasive biases of viewing publics, the museum, and the reacti-
vated “scenario of discovery” (Taylor The Archive and the Repertoire). At about the
same time, Marta Savigliano published a book that combined dance with labor,
tracing tango from Argentine brothels to a transnational commodity. While no
singular game-​changer, each of these works fanned out into areas of gender and
sexuality, race, class, and globalism in the interdisciplinary shifts of the 1990s.Their
work also reminds us of the ongoing and overlapping relationship of performance
to various modes of transmission: embodied “live” performance, visual art, media,
and what were then nascent digital forms.
While these scholars and artists were working on sometimes entirely divergent
inquiries, they were also linked to cultural and political production of greater
insurgency outside the academy. I assert that the performance turn of Latin
American studies grew from what was going on outside the academy as popu-
lar movements manifesting in the arts looked for new inroads in the 1990s and
beyond. In the popular arts, a surge in theater festivals throughout the continent
gathered thousands, circulating puppet performers, mimes, and ensemble groups of
creación colectiva in a relatively uncharted (for the academy) course in the Americas.
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The Performance Turn 149

These much-​overlooked circuits of performing arts sustain performance cultures

in many parts of the Americas. In one way, they remain today unacknowledged
and ignored, not unlike how the letrados dismissed them for hundreds of years.Yet,
increasingly, scholars are paying attention. In his book, El Discurso de la Calle: Los
Cómicos Ambulantes y las Tensiones de la Modernidad en el Perú (2001), Victor Vich
Flores describes how popular street performance in the 1990s presented a chal-
lenge to modernizing forces in Peru, in which street clowns and mimes in Lima
reworked the social order against the state. As ensembles, itinerant performers, and
large-​scale community-​based practices, these producers and the scholars that write
about them move in and out of spectacle, spirituality, embodiment, and ideas of
representation.
Next to issues of erasure and institutional change, a theoretical debate by per-
formance studies scholars put ephemerality and evidence vividly forth. Peggy
Phelan’s now classic work Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993) conveyed
an understanding of ephemerality that sought to free performance from other-
wise constraining and inscribed systems of power and, particularly, capitalism.
Performance in this view is fleeting, and inherently inimitable, one time and in
the now. Thus, “Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves
nothing” (Phelan 148). However, rather than a void, the ephemeral “liveness” of
performance meant “its distinctly oppositional edge” (Phelan 148). While docu-
418
mentation and a sustained pedagogical foci in the academy were arguably expand-
ing into areas of performance research, theoretically, the power of performance
was, in this case, in its capacity to disappear.
Meanwhile, Schechner’s understanding of performance as twice-​ repeated
behaviors hung next to the “live,” as a loose aggregate, by definition hinged on
ideas of mimesis and representation. It may be true that the identical performance
could never happen exactly the same way twice.Yet we say the lines again. Social
dramas recur. Repetition is the heart of habitus. Whether the performance is or
is not identical night after night, or even from different seats in the theater, is a
question of perception. Only in the now does performance transpire.Yet, as Taylor
points out, “Whose memories, traditions, and claims to history disappear if per-
formance practices lack the staying power to transmit vital knowledge?” (Taylor
The Archive and the Repertoire 5). Both scholars were aware of the implications.
For Phelan, institutions such as museums, archives, banks and universities must
“invent an economy not based on preservation but one which is answerable to the
consequences of disappearance” (Phelan 165–​166). Taylor, in another way, turned
to cultural memory scholars such as Pierre Nora, Paul Connerton, and others to
explain how embodiment and repertoires have their own episteme of storing and
transmitting knowledge.
The work of Diana Taylor has been pivotal in the performance turn in Latin
American studies. First, it showed that rather than necessarily escaping the system
of consumption and accumulation, performance is crucial to the operations that
contest and legitimize such systems. Performance is strongly linked to visibility and
510

150 Angela Marino

exposure but also is an episteme. Rather than ahistorical, Taylor argues that per-
formance is a means of reproducing cultural memory. Performance both reveals
and obscures people and their histories. Thus, it gives voice to the erasures of the
archive, erasures induced by trauma and culturally situated biases about knowledge
and histories that are enacted in individual and collective life (Taylor The Archive
and the Repertoire 143, 205). As Leda Martins says, “the body remembers.”5 Where
material artifacts are missing information, the repertoire serves as another vital
mnemonic. Rather than in opposition to the archive, these repertoires condition
and define the archives and vice versa.What has been different between these two
inseparable systems, as Taylor emphasizes in “Performance and/​as History,” is that
written histories still authorize power in ways that the repertoire has not (Taylor
“Performance and/​as History”). Nevertheless, performance is increasingly recog-
nized as playing a part in this process of legitimating knowledge and the juridical,
political systems that rest on it for very unequal ends.
Particularly in times in which the “official story” masks state terror, this impor-
tant work by scholars and practitioners of performance sought to document
“unofficial” stories. In Disappearing Acts (1997), for example, Taylor linked Guy
Debord’s spectacle to dictatorship and gendered nationalism in Argentina. The
generals lined up in their motorcades in the role of “protecting fathers” of the
homeland. Meanwhile ordinary citizens were trained to look away, in what Taylor
called “percepticide,” or a kind of social injunction to not see, even that which 510
took place in one’s immediate presence. The Argentine madres, by holding the
first diapers and photographs of their missing children at the Plaza de Mayo in
Buenos Aires, could then subvert the one-​way spectacle of “father knows best.”
In the meantime, Marjorie Agosín collected arpilleras during the dictatorship in
Chile, textile weavings of detailed scenes and stories, some that depicted women
performing the “national” dance of the Cueca with invisible partners to bring
attention to state terror and the “disappeared” (Agosín). Performance served to
disrupt the officially sanctioned story and to evidence hidden truths.
Performance that confronts oppression certainly has been a major focus of
scholarship, yet performance, ontologically speaking, takes no sides. As much
as some performance jams up, exposes and asserts an alternative to the abuse
of power, performance can also legitimate tyranny, imperialism and colonial-
ity, as shown by the example of the generals performing “protecting fathers”
in their motorcade. Right wing urban spectacles against the left in Bolivia and
Venezuela, for example, appropriate popular music, clothing and Anonymous
Guy Fawkes masks as disguises or signals of overlapping complexities in their
ideological leanings (Lovato). Nicole Fabricant’s analysis of the campesino dress
worn by anti-​Morales urban elites in Bolivia is one such example where cos-
tuming signals an important source of social information. Thus, as much as the
temptation might be to rally behind the potentially liberating “return of the
dance,” the question has always been how performance is mobilized, by whom,
and for what purpose.
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The Performance Turn 151

While “the book” may be a symbol of an imposed form of law that sought to
subjugate and colonize, in glyphs and codices, in the colonial requerimientos and
the law, performance was always needed to legitimate the text. Some more visible
than others. As a method, or way of approaching knowledge transmission, the per-
formance turn likewise has meant a fuller embrace of orality, embodied action and
events that shape how we read and what we know of a text in the first place.Taylor
consistently has argued that the two—​the written and the performed—​operate
together with interrelated implications. Their difference plays out as particular
forces privilege certain forms of knowledge to maintain power. While the circu-
larity may seem absurd, it leads to the second debate I discuss in the performance
turn, that of performativity.

Performativity
One of the most prolific expansions of the debate on evidence and ephemeral-
ity in performance studies has come out of the major theoretical move known as
performativity. Based on J. L. Austin’s book How to Do Things with Words (1962), and
his concept of performative as words that do things in the world, performativity
was developed by Judith Butler and others to show the ways that performance
works in and through our bodies and the systems that discipline them. What was
510
thought to be genetic, biological, and inherent, is really part of a system of reitera-
tive practices that work on and through identity formation. Performativity sug-
gests, then, that the subject’s identity is a dynamic and discursive act. It implies a
reiterative action, one that produces effect and outcomes as much as it makes room
for agency to intervene. Common use also took up the term performativity as an
adjective to describe processes or things that act and do rather than fixed objects,
and relational forces instead of subject or entities that are acted upon. Uses of per-
formativity spread like wildfire among the humanities as a new way to describe
and theorize agency.
Performativity however, also left some things behind. Like Austin’s idea of
words, performativity is authorized by a regulatory system, ultimately theorized
in linguistic terms. Terms such as citationality rely on models of power that are
invisible but highly pervasive. To cite is a form of notation that operates through
presumably profuse iterations. It allows a powerful theory of action and agency
that knits the basic functions of our body to the social and political world. Our
body is not only the result of our experience as social and political beings. It is
also capable of transforming that experience. What performativity does, then, is to
identify the operations of action and agency that go on in these regulatory systems
as a way to draw attention to the system of discursive regulation and how that sys-
tem is made legible through its effects on the body.Yet, what is therefore legible is
read as authorized and authorizing, pointing back to the regulatory system rather
than necessarily the multiple dimensions of the enactment itself. How might that
kind of enactment matter? In what ways do timing, spatiality and affect change or
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152 Angela Marino

temper the effects of these systems? While the effects may seem obvious (and yet
arguably understudied), the process of normalization can be extremely difficult
to pinpoint and analyze (Taylor “Translating Performance” 46). Thus, while the
notion of performativity continues to generate new conversations in performance
studies and throughout the human and social sciences, the complexity of often
extremely visible enactments of bodies moving in temporal and spatial frames can
get lost in a theoretical entanglement, limiting our capacity to explain what hap-
pens around performed behaviors in actual events, from theatrical and staged, from
the spectacular to the everyday and ordinary.
For this reason, a distinction remains between the performative, as a specific
discursive-​based process, and what Taylor calls performatic, the adjectival form of
performance, as a way to reference performance acts and their own ability to
carry and transfer information in gestures, shouts, bumps and silences on the stage,
timing and location, in the streets, on screens, at podiums, and so forth. The term
performatic therefore describes, more broadly perhaps, some of the issues that
cross over to theatricality, such as the idea of audiences, spectatorship, and what I
think of as the big three (components) of space, time, and embodiment of perfor-
mance practice. Taylor thus raises the possibility that the performance turn moves
in two directions: performativity as the process of reiterative emergence, and per-
formatic as qualities of a performed event or act. What is common to both is the
body at the center. Proponents agree that simply too much is at stake in how the 512
body, in its multiple forms of transmission and reception, performs differently than
conventional approaches to language studies can account for, which brings us to
questions of aesthetics and power.

Performance as Aesthetics and Power

One of the underlying and central discussions of the performance turn has to
do with questions of aesthetics and power. In Latin American studies, questions
of aesthetics often reference theater and theatricality, perhaps aptly searching for
a space within which art and the communal interact, and pushing further the
important claim that “aesthetics is inherently social” (Hamera 3). From ritual to
happenings, Ileana Diéguez discusses social and aesthetic interventions of a “limi-
nal theater,” one challenged by its own disavowal of Western theater, set aside and
apart from “real” time and space. The turn to performance “suddenly decentered”
the theater, which was “obliged to redefine itself ” without losing the specificity of
space and spectatorship (Féral and Bermingham 92, 97). For Féral and others, the
expansion of theatricality means that things on the stage can be applied to social
and off-​stage environments. We must be cautious, however, of suggesting this sud-
den realization has radically affected the field. Different ideas of theatricality and
ritual have been in tension in Latin America since at least the fifteenth century.
Paul Scolieri’s extraordinary book, Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards and
the Choreography of Conquest (2013), illustrates precisely these tensions that reveal
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The Performance Turn 153

as much about the distorted perceptions of early chroniclers as they do about the
various forms of theatrical, ritual, and music performances that they saw. What
Féral and other theater scholars observe therefore may have to do with the fram-
ing of theatrical events, and how ritual, spectacle, and quotidian acts challenge the
presumed conventions of theater studies, which in themselves are debated, tempo-
rary, and political across the field.
Reframing research around “staging” or “performing” could only go so far
without situating those terms in more solid theoretical footings.To merely rename
the space a “stage” or call the subway car a concert hall because a musician got on
board stops short of its real potential to explain these varying states of experience
and meaning. It also precludes sufficient attention be paid to questions such as:
Who becomes the audience? What happens to transform the spatial arrangement?
How does embodiment factor? In which ways is the act influenced or regulated
by timing or a means to recognize and understand time? Space, time and the body
are three major concerns of performance research that are also informed by partic-
ular situations, a sequence of events, issues of transmission, representation or affect.
At some point, observing any kind of quotidian behavior could turn that act into
a performance, not that it would necessarily be interesting or even worthwhile to
view it as such. What matters has more to do with where you set the frame and
for what purpose.
512
The quotidian can also be analyzed through social-​sexual identities. Several
leading performance studies scholars focus on the intersections of “Latinidad” an
analysis of queer identities and sexuality (see Muñoz; Rivera-​Servera; La Fountain-​
Stokes). They support a next generation of scholars interested in theorizing out-
side and beyond the gender normativity linked to nationalisms. At the same time,
these scholarly works advance the thesis that performance of one’s sexuality is
also inextricably linked to diasporic, transnational, and social transformation across
national borders. These scholars reach further than a mere inclusionary identitar-
ian politics of the 1990s. Instead, they propose new ways to define, organize, and
politicize transcultural experience. Intersectionally, they claim that if performance
crosses borders then it needs a different kind of transnational lens.
The word “performance” in Latin America usually refers to performance art
with questions of embodiment next to a highly symbolic social and political aes-
thetics. The performance art of the group known as CADA (Colectivo Acciones
De Arte) in Chile is an excellent example showing how artists attempted to sub-
vert the logics of the state under Pinochet (see Eltit; Neustadt; Richard). As per-
formance moves in and out of the museum, artists such as Helio Oiticica and
Lygia Clark used performance to advance and also critique the institutions of art
(museums, the art market, etc.) by exposing the industry of objects, preservation
and display embedded in the art world itself. Turning objects into live beings, that
which is rock, metal, and plastic into animated forms, these artists bring “live-
ness” into otherwise still forms, photographs, and sculpture. As curators attempt
to preserve Oiticica’s parangoles, cloth capes that are activated by the wearer, they
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154 Angela Marino

also further their own complicity as agents in removing the body from its mate-
rial condition as a wearable, responsive or otherwise “living” art. What can be
embalmed or kept and at what expense and what does it expose? Regina José
Galindo’s surgical dentistry of gold teeth in the 2010 Looting is another example
of a performance art piece in which the artist’s teeth were drilled and filled with
Guatemalan gold “of the highest purity” in Berlin and then extracted to produce
molded “crowns” that rest on a velvet pillow under exhibit glass in Spain.6 The
object is removed from the body, but not without its very mold, its shape, and the
condition of its extraction, mobility, and materiality. The gold on display from the
body of a Guatemalan-​born woman brings attention in the geopolitical order to a
transnational resource-​extraction economy. At the same time Galindo’s own body
as art produces a different relationship to and as a global commodity.What remains
is the living substance of gold and eight printed teeth sitting on that velvet pillow.
Yet, for all the catalogs and essays, books that are printed and documents that are
stored, these material remainders of (and not of) the body produce sensations and
paradoxes irreducible to text, seemingly with no translation.
Others moved from the body back to text. Professor Leda Martins of the
Universidade de Minas Gerais considers performance an embodied philosophy
of Afro-​descendant performance. Martins’ work is primarily in and about the
Bantu tradition, in which movements of the body create what she calls a “grafia.”
According to Martins’ idea of spiral time, the body opens a multidimensional 514
space, a language that can be considered an “expressive contiguous syntax” emerg-
ing from the shared presence of ancestors (Martins). If the body remembers and
that memory is ancestral, then authorization from the body to grafia provides
an entirely different basis to inscription. In this case, the bodily turn is the ulti-
mate “performative,” generating its own space, time and language, yet without
the need for words to do anything at all. Where performativity for J. L. Austin is
about authorizing words to do things in the world, spiral time moves from the
body in the world to inscription in which words are the result rather than the
starting point. Here ancestors authorize. The dance is a practice of writing with
the body as its instrument, a temporal and spatial syntax generated by the spaces
created between one dancer and another. Martins calls these “holes in the social
tissue” where time and space open to communicate with ancestors. The spiral in
this philosophy of embodiment is a very particular move in which its meaning as
experience-​act cannot be separated from its social aesthetic function.
One of the questions that gathered momentum around social aesthetics is how
the iconic personality functions in politics and popular culture. In Selenidad: Selena,
Latinos and the Performance of Memory (2009), Deborah Paredez records the popular
memorialization of Selena as an icon of Latina femininity. Selena became a collec-
tive expression of grief in response to nativist violence connected to the politics of
the music industry, and the cultural expansion of Latina/​os in the United States.
Theatre historian Jean Graham-​Jones (2014) deals also with iconicity in what
she calls the “femicon” to analyze specifically how female icons operate in the
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The Performance Turn 155

national sphere from the nineteenth century to the present. “Femicons” such
as Evita in Argentina, brought questions of affect, symbolic and material power
together in a changing media scape of radio, television, and film.
Significantly, this work is concerned with how messaging and embodiment not
just in, but across, various media play a part in maintaining or disrupting systems of
representation. Perhaps for these reasons, scholars today seem to move increasingly
toward transmedial approaches in visual culture, performance art, and popular per-
formance. Patricia Ybarra’s book, Performing Conquest (2009), for example, focuses
with geographic specificity on Tlaxcala, Mexico through an expansive chronology
across theater, media, visual communication, and festival. Again, the performance
turn connects these important disciplinary intersections of live performance and
medial arts with questions embedded in the humanities and social sciences.
Theorists such as Jesús Martín-​Barbero and Rossana Reguillo no doubt push
the performance turn of Latin American studies toward deeper questions of medi-
ations and mediality. Both scholars were trained and teach in communications
studies, but with different trajectories. Martín-​Barbero connects performance even
further to popular cultural expression, the marketplace, and technologies.The soap
opera may be canned, but it still provides the occasion for lively interaction and
debates among its viewers (Martín-​Barbero). They are not simply text-​based but
depend on their cultural activation and interpretation by viewers.
514
Perhaps some of the most pressing questions of activism and aesthetics are
being raised by Rosanna Reguillo, who asks how aesthetics influence collective
action. For example, in her work on the politics of fear, Reguillo notes the effects
of the space of “no-​conflict” that produce social anxieties, monstrosity, and threat
in various ways. For Reguillo, following Foucault, the body is crucial as a site for
the reproduction of state violence. Without careful analysis, she argues, work on
awareness or visibility of violence can just as easily reproduce it. Aesthetics matter
to the efficacy of social movements. Thus Reguillo and others shift the “perfor-
mative turn” within communication studies to identify and craft a more complex
level of expressive agency. Scholars such as Jill Lane return full circle to questions
of “liveness” and evidence to ask how the body transmits through airwaves and
digital forms.7 Increasingly, intermedial conversations around activism and aes-
thetics compel us to reimagine the who, what and why of performance research,
especially given unequal resources, and the question of to whom does this schol-
arship actually serve. This brings us to the second section on the imperative for
institutional shifts of the performance turn.

The Methods Imperative

We need new models and means of approaching performance that do not con-
flate performance repertoires with “texts.” “Performance study, then,” as Taylor
describes, “offers a way of rethinking the canon and ritual methodologies. For
even as scholars in the United States and Latin America acknowledge the need
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156 Angela Marino

to free ourselves from the dominance of the text—​as the privileged or even sole
object of analysis—​our theoretical tools continue to be haunted by the liter-
ary legacy” (Taylor The Archive and the Repertoire 27). Moving away from solely
text-​based systems, these are practices of embodiment, visuality, memory, spatiality,
temporality, reception, and transmission that are irreducible to text.Thus, to better
understand how performance operates as practice, we need a different apparatus
than a purely text-​based model. Scholars in the new millennium focused on pro-
posing models that seek to better interpret and analyze the history and gestural
language of performance repertoires that have been left out. What kinds of histo-
ries are activated? Which frame of witness matters: the act of the live performance
at the funeral or the repeated performed act on media for local audiences familiar
with De Blasio and the policeman’s union, or the perspective of those in different
parts of the country and the world in 2017? The expansion of what is considered
performance is always intimately tethered to questions of how (and also why) a
performance is produced, who produces it, and how it organizes particular net-
works of people in and across time.
The implication for historical studies is tremendous, as much as contemporary
acts such as the Standing Rock Lakota prayer circles of 2016 that accessed voices
of ancestors from the seventh generation through dance and prayer. Leo Cabranes-​
Grant sees this expansion of networks taking place around the uses of objects in
a historical context, which opens the frame exponentially for what and how we 516
understand the artifact in such a context, drawing greater possibilities for the
work of historical and contemporary performance research. Building from Bruno
Latour’s actor-​network theory, Cabranes-​Grant theorizes intercultural exchanges
by “remapping the relational ties that make them viable” (500). Paying attention
to the complexity of networks, the “dynamic lateral relations” opens up the deeper
relations of labor and material power sometimes hidden by models that otherwise
focus on reception between actors and audiences.
In the field, these lateral relations are often aided by publications, and in the
performance turn many have survived the last twenty-​five years or more such as
Revista Conjunto from the Casa de las Américas (Cuba) edited by Vivian Martínez
Tabares, Teatro CELCIT (Argentina) a publication of the Centro Latinoamericano de
Creación e Investigación Teatral, and the Latin American Theater Review (United States)
edited by Jacqueline Bixler and Stuart Day. Among others to participate in the pro-
liferation of these performance circuits, scholar and practitioner, Zeca Ligiero devel-
oped the Center for the Study of Afro-​Amerindian Performance, NEPAA out of the
Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, featuring its own publications and
research initiatives. However, again, well in the new millennium, the performance
turn is not just coming from the academy. Since 2010, artists and activists made visi-
ble claims for and against the state in rallies on the streets and online that pushed the
performance turn into vital new directions throughout the hemisphere and globe.
Chilean students used performance inventively to center a national debate on fee
increases in the university. Flash mobs from Santiago to Montreal contributed to
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The Performance Turn 157

social movements, in some cases using new technologies and crossing over to dig-
ital communications and social media.
These practices require new methods of performance research. Anthropologist
Claudia Briones makes an important clarification that social praxis is about much
more than explaining “fieldwork”. It is to reexamine the very purpose and terms
of engagement. The schema of north to south observation ultimately needed to
be disrupted. Partnerships arose. Working groups were established. Some were
effective; others fizzled away. Those venturing into the challenge contended
with power differentials that shaped, and in some cases eroded, collaborative
relationships.
Since 1998, the Taylor-​directed Hemispheric Institute of Performance and
Politics has brought hundreds of scholars, practitioners and artists together
with visibility and a platform in their biennial Encuentro to forge new spaces
for performance studies. Ensembles such as Yuyachkani,8 Mapa Teatro, Teatro
Buendia and Fomma shared the stage with artists and cultural critics such as
Jesusa Rodríguez and Luis Millones (to mention only a few). Each plenary was
translated in at least three languages. Working groups met daily for the nine days
of the conference, with performances every night. The Encuentro implemented
the model of Lois Weaver’s The Long Table to bring people to the table in less
hierarchical constructs. Still, contradictions emerged. Participants engaged in
516
debates over human rights demanding justice in the capitol cities, while blood
spilled with impunity in the rural districts.9 Nevertheless, as a conference paral-
lel to LASA, the Hemi Encuentro enables a very different set of relationships,
questions and projects to emerge toward a practitioner-​scholar-​activist model
in the academy.
The Otros Saberes Project is currently ramping up in LASA to spell out these
challenges and imperatives for research. Even written knowledge and the sanctity
of archives that have so often legitimated the claims of the academy are, as many
scholars have pointed out, subject to radical reorganization by the very questions,
perspectives and (dis)abilities of the human body. As Taylor argues, the archive is
anything but stable. The performance turn brings attention to these instabilities of
what were once considered bedrock principles in the academy. It reflects different
models for documenting evidence and experience, and new approaches to maps,
language, criteria, and so on.
The “turn” implies change in the very structure of our systems of knowledge
production. We feel the effects in active learning classrooms, and so-​called “flip-
ping” the classroom to privilege real-​world problem solving and the greater pre-
rogative of universities to be made up by diverse regional and global populations.
Redirecting resources to support these broader systems of knowledge production
needs to remain at the center of instruction and research. This challenge is, in
many ways, part of the theory and practice of performance studies to situate action
and events next to the systems of labor and production that are visible or invisible
through it. Professors like Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui chose to construct the very
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158 Angela Marino

physical foundations of an alternative university. It is an approach that recognizes

that we need to build the very space in which a deeper study can take place.Thus,
in a truly public-​generated system of knowledge production the structural dimen-
sions of the very classroom, the forums, and the people who are at the table by
choice and by invitation matter.
To produce and sustain popular participation and expanding networks has
long been one of the aims of this performance turn, and we could say that the
academy is working hard to catch up. As new projects develop, the goal is a
south-​to-​south exchange that combines written knowledge with performance-​
based knowledge, recognizing more explicitly what each transmits, allows, and
disavows. Cultural performance organizers across the continents, the titiriteros
(puppet artists) and other street artists and collectives know this kind of engage-
ment in public spaces and with large groups of people working for sustained
organization and resources. For this reason, I believe the performance turn could
bend even further to seriously take performance and performance histories as
central to epistemological (and as such also political) possibilities. Grounded
in the specific cultural contexts of performance histories in the Americas, the
performance turn becomes much more prismatic and complex. Will the turn
to performance-​based practices shift the authority around who creates and who
sits at the table, or around the drum? Like many of the turns in the academy, the
performance turn means a reorientation of power and the purpose of the ques- 518
tions, a pedagogy and an epistemology that turns the classroom, and possibly the
academy, inside out.

Notes
1 Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch said that De Blasio had
“blood on his hands.” (The Washington Times, December 21, 2014. Article by Douglas
Ernst).
2 When the back-​ turning moment at the funeral was broadcast on national media,
New York City voters rejected it by a vast majority. See www.washingtonpost.com/​
blogs/​the-​fix/​wp/​2015/​01/​15/​new-​yorkers-​split-​between-​de-​blasio-​and-​nypd-​but-​
strongly-​oppose-​police-​turning-​their-​backs (accessed June 14, 2017).
3 See interviews for What is Performance Studies? at http://​scalar.usc.edu/​nehvectors/​wips/​
index (accessed June 14, 2017).
4 By the “social life of things,” I am referring to Arjun Appadurai’s influential book titled
the same, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1988).
5 Interview with Leda Martins by Marino and Cuellar, UC Berkeley, March 2013.
6 Work commissioned by House der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany; produced by
House der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany and Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani. cour-
tesy of Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Italy.
7 See also Fuentes, “Performance, Politics, and Protest.”
8 See Miguel Rubio Zapata, El Cuerpo Ausente. Lima, Peru: Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani,
2008.
9 The same week as the 2009 Encuentro in Bogotá, nearly a dozen people were murdered
in Cauca. See Paolo Vignolo.
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The Performance Turn 159

References
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 16

10
TURNING TO FEMINISMS
Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa

Introduction
The “mainstream” of Latin American(ist) studies of culture, power and politics
did not take (and perhaps still has not taken) feminist insights to heart. Prevailing
610 strands of early gender studies in the region did not make culture a central axis of
analysis either. Though feminist interventions arguably had a marked impact on
cultural studies in the Anglo-​American academy, that influence was marginal, at
best, in scholarly circles in Latin America, despite the clear political significance of
culture for early second-​wave feminist activism in the region. Zeroing in on Brazil,
we review several factors that help explain why hegemonic feminist scholarship
tended to neglect culture and, especially, cultural politics. By the early 1990s, activist
cultural interventions had been rendered less visible with the ascent of more insti-
tutionalized, professionalized, and policy-​focused feminist politics. Since the 2000s,
cultural politics have again been foregrounded by multiple expressions of subal-
tern feminist activism and their academic counterparts among decolonial, transla-
tional, queer, anti-​racist, and other recent forms of feminist theorizing. “Turning to
feminisms,” this essay contends, should offer the field of culture-​power-​politics rich
insights with which to move forward for at least the next twenty-​five years.

Looking for Feminism: The “Presence of Absence” in the

Study of Culture, Power, and Politics in Latin America
Despite having a decisive influence in the field of cultural studies in the north,
a feminist agenda in studies of culture-​power-​politics in Latin America has been
largely absent, the reasons for which will be explored in the following pages. But,
first, let us turn briefly to the “feminist hijacking” of British cultural studies.
612

162 Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa

When feminists working at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in

Birmingham constituted themselves as a research group, they revolutionized the
course of the center’s work by bringing women and gender into the agenda. The
most important and immediate consequences of these two inclusions, or better
yet, “interruptions” (Brundson) were a focus on the private sphere and on coun-
ter-​public spaces; the displacement of class as a primary mechanism of oppression;
and an emphasis on subjectivity, identity, sexuality, desire, and emotion. Inquiring
into contradictorily positioned subjectivities enabled these feminists to understand
that categories of identity rarely constituted monolithic social units but, instead,
were always in complex and conflictive entanglements with other identities and
power relations.
Moreover, given their engagement with the women’s movement, scholars in
the emergent field of feminist cultural studies viewed subordination and domi-
nation as far exceeding purely epistemological limits and written into women’s
bodies. They insisted on the importance of analyzing the subjective and symbolic
dimensions of women’s experiences, along with the political project of interven-
ing in the structures shaping women’s everyday lives. Both tasks provided feminist
theories with powerful tools to cut into the materiality of culture and power.
We maintain, however, that there was no equivalent or even comparable fem-
inist “interruption” in the case of cultural studies, or as some prefer, studies of
culture, power and politics in Latin America. The intellectual tradition in the 612
study of culture in the region was principally concerned with so-​called “larger”
problems such as imperialism, ideological domination and class struggle (as artic-
ulated by the forerunners of Latin American cultural studies in the 1970s), while
remaining oblivious to the critical gender, sexual, and racial dimensions of those
issues and their complex imbrications with capitalism, colonialism, “cultural
imperialism,” and so on. In the 1980s, except for the contribution of a handful of
feminist intellectuals committed to the reshaping of the emergent cultural studies
field—​among them Jean Franco, Nelly Richard, Mary Louise Pratt, Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui, Francine Masiello, Debra Castillo, Marta Lamas, Heloísa Buarque de
Hollanda, and Carlos Monsiváis—​prevailing debates for the most part centered
on postmodernism, class struggle, mass culture and hegemony through the influ-
ence of Gramsci, Althusser, French sociology of culture, and the Frankfurt School
(del Sarto 165).
Still, the mainstream of emergent cultural studies remained largely impervi-
ous to the fact that, by the 1980s, hundreds of feminist activist organizations across
the region were intent on interrupting dominant cultural conceptions of “women,”
and, later, gender and its racial, sexual, class, and other intersections. Many early
feminist activists enacted an embodied cultural politics through innovative practices,
ludic demonstrations, and performative interventions aimed at mocking and unset-
tling the constitutive meanings that defined and sustained prevailing gender power
arrangements. International Women’s Day demonstrations—​always an important
 613

Turning to Feminisms 163

mobilizational moment for feminists throughout Latin America—​regularly featured

white-​lace-​clad brides and witches on broomsticks; Peruvian feminists joined other
anti-​Fujimori activists in “lava-​lav(b)andera” actions in the Plaza de Armas, featuring
scrubwomen (and some men) at tubs ceremoniously cleansing the national flag,
which had been “soiled” by government repression and corruption; Chileans, who
like other feminists in the region were overwhelmingly linked to the left, literally
put their bodies on the line in the struggle against Pinochet. Mujeres por la Vida, for
example, held up their “manos limpias” (clean hands) when Carabineros (with blood
soaked hands) ignored dominant gentlemanly norms and water-​gunned demon-
strating women ruthlessly. In short, while much of the rest of the left continued to
organize hierarchically and intone stale marching orders (“a slogan depleted, should
never be repeated”…), many early feminist activists demonstrated a keen awareness
that culture is political, “because meanings are constitutive of processes that, implic-
itly or explicitly, seek to define social power” (Alvarez et al. 7).
Despite the significant, if still marginalized, presence of feminist activist inter-
ventions in culture and politics, the absence of parallel feminist impacts in the
academic field of cultural studies in Latin America can be attributed to the rigidity
of prevailing variants of Marxist cultural theory, the privileged site for the study
of culture and power. That site was insensitive when not overtly hostile to gen-
der, sexuality, and race analysis. As Franco observes, in its heyday, Latin American
612
cultural studies

seem to have overlooked the constitution of the feminine in culture as well

as “the crisis of masculinity” that permeated many cultural manifestations.
While cultural studies scholars cite all kinds of theorists—​from Stuart
Hall to Walter Benjamin; from Bakhtin to Foucault—​they neglect theories
of gender in their analyses. If they mention gender, they do it alongside
other terms such as “ethnicity” or “identities,” but without exploring the
genealogies and the scope involved. This omission is particularly disastrous
if we consider that gender and sexual difference are not only women’s
and feminists’ concerns, but rather issues that affect a large spectrum of
society from social organizations, politics, and forms of resistance, to social
reproduction.
(76)

In this classic article, Franco singles out not only gender-​blind male cultural
critics such as Néstor García Canclini, Jesús Martín-​Barbero, and Renato Ortiz,
but some important women such as Beatriz Sarlo as well. She analyzes the works
of pioneering Latin American feminist critics such as Nelly Richard, Kemy
Oyarzún, Marta Lamas, and Lia Zanotta Machado, detailing the multiple ways in
which they linked gender to issues such as equality and difference, the neoliberal
state, violence against women, and indigenous women’s rights.
164

164 Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa

The important early work of this relatively small group of feminist critics did
not make much of a dent in the traditional study of culture and power—​much less
the kind of full-​scale “interruption” noted by Hall in the case of the UK. For Mary
Louise Pratt, that tradition is like a national brotherhood, which created and insti-
tutionalized obstacles and hierarchies in the construction of a cultural hegemony
favorable to patriarchal formations and the dominant classes. Echoing Pratt’s con-
cerns, Yúdice points out that this tradition paid very little attention to “questions
of gender and sexual orientation … for example, in the work of Néstor García
Canclini … The gender category is making its way into several disciplines through
the work of feminists, but does not have the same importance as in the United
States.” Nelly Richard similarly defines cultural studies as necessarily traversing the
incorporation of feminist theory as a key dimension of the critique and politiciza-
tion of knowledge from the situated location of difference (160).
Another case in point regarding Latin American cultural studies’ continued
impermeability to gender (race and sexuality) concerns is the 2005 doorstopper
The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader. This groundbreaking 818-​page anthol-
ogy on the “state of the field” contains only and shamefully six contributions
by feminists out of a total of thirty-​two chapters on what the editors apparently
regarded as “more general” (and serious?) cultural concerns.1 Coeditor Abril Trigo
claims that
164
the most boisterous forms of U.S. and French feminism have not prospered
in Latin America, where they many times have been deemed a bourgeois
and metropolitan phenomenon and where women’s demands have been
integrated into wider sociopolitical agendas […], feminism has stamped a
solid though diffuse imprint on Latin American cultural studies.
(370)

As evident from our preceding analysis, however, the notion that there was “a
strong, albeit diffuse” influence of feminism on Latin American cultural studies is,
at best, wishful thinking, and, at worst, outright misleading—​as is Trigo’s assertion
that feminism found no fertile ground in the region.
Notwithstanding the failure of masculinist knowledge formations, including
cultural studies, to acknowledge and incorporate feminist contributions, one finds
important, if dispersed, strands of feminist cultural studies in most countries. As
Maria Tereza Martínez et al. suggest, feminist literary criticism, memory studies of
women victims of dictatorship, and analyses of women’s performative interven-
tions, for instance, made important inroads into several political, methodological
and epistemological practices. We cannot possibly do justice to the full range or
significance of these contributions, so we will mention only a handful of those
that have been particularly influential among feminist cultural critics, even when
sometimes under-​appreciated and under-​cited by the cultural studies malestream
in both the North and South of the Americas.
 165

Turning to Feminisms 165

In Chile, for example, the extensive work of French émigré Nelly Richard on
the tensions between aesthetics and politics, as well as her deconstructive readings
of gender, was foundational to feminist studies of culture, power, and politics. As
editor of the renowned Revista de Crítica Cultural, her writings were influential
well beyond feminist circles. In Argentina, the Interdisciplinary Institute of Gender
Studies at Universidad de Buenos Aires was key to legitimizing feminist cultural
studies, as their widely recognized Revista Mora attests. The Argentine feminist
journal Feminaria (1988–​2007), under the leadership of Lea Fletcher, played a
major role in articulating cultural critique with feminist analyses of women’s lit-
erary production. The feminist supplement to the Argentinian newspaper Página/​
12 also stands as an attempt to bridge academic discourses and feminist activist
readings on culture, power, and politics as evinced by the insightful analysis of
Francine Masiello (“Conhecimento Suplementar”). And in Mexico, Marta Lamas,
heading the highly regarded Debate Feminista—​in our view, the foremost exam-
ple of a feminist cultural studies journal in the region—​set an important agenda
for gender, race, and ethnicity-​inflected analyses and expressive feminist cultural
interventions.

Disciplining Gender and Marginalizing Feminist Cultural

Studies in Brazil
164
Despite the fairly visible and institutionalized place that feminist studies have
occupied in the Brazilian academy since the 1980s, as compared with other Latin
American contexts, cultural studies encountered far more resistance—​within and
without women’s studies—​than might be expected. Only since the late 1990s has
feminist cultural studies—​inflected by poststructuralist theories—​begun to make
its way into the journals and conferences of major Brazilian professional associa-
tions. In what follows we examine four possible reasons that may have contrib-
uted to this lamentable scenario: the specific conjunctural situation of Brazilian
society; resistance in Brazilian women’s studies to interdisciplinary pursuits; the
paucity of translations of works by non-​Brazilian academic feminists; and the con-
tinued silencing of marginalized voices (e.g. Afro-​descendants, lesbians) within the
Brazilian academy.
Albertina Costa, in a perceptive mid-​1990s assessment of the field of women’s
studies in Brazil, argued that radical social transformations—​such as urbaniza-
tion, mass media expansion, and improved educational standards—​occurring
under authoritarian rule in the 1970s, had deep implications for women’s social
status and resonated in the rigid bureaucratic structures of the academy. As
increasing numbers of women students entered the university, women’s issues
came to feature among their academic concerns. Additionally, university struc-
tural reforms, the expansion of graduate programs, and government incentives
for scientific research contributed to the appearance of research projects priori-
tizing “women’s issues.”
61

166 Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa

Nonetheless, A. Costa also suggested that, in the larger context of economic

“modernization,” social injustice and repression—​and “in accordance with the
then predominant paradigms of dependency theory, the Latin American version
of Marxism, and modernization theory” (39)—​applied research areas in the areas
of labor, population, and development rapidly became the “ghetto” of feminist
interventions. Moreover, feminists faced pressures from both their academic col-
leagues and research agencies to adhere to sanctioned “scientific” standards. In
light of these factors, she argues, it was difficult for academic feminism in Brazil
to present a more thoroughgoing challenge to established scholarly canons.
This situation began shifting in the mid to late 1980s, during the final phases
of the transition from military authoritarianism, enabling the emergence of social
movements and new political subjects and identities. During this period, women’s
studies as a field expanded and diversified to include different topics (sexuality, the
body, the study of daily life) and disciplinary areas (history, anthropology, literature,
politics, communication).The 1980s also witnessed the establishment of university
women’s studies núcleos and independent research centers—​such as the pioneer-
ing women’s research group organized at the Fundação Carlos Chagas in São
Paulo in the mid 1970s, the Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares sobre a Mulher
at the Federal University of Bahia, established in 1983, and the Núcleo de Estudos
e Pesquisas sobre a Mulher (NEPEM) of the Federal University of Minas Gerais,
founded in 1984. 61
By the late 1980s, however, partly due to the influence of increasingly transna-
tional feminist theoretical debates as well as international foundations like Ford,
gender gradually came to replace the category “woman”—​both in the academy
and among more professionalized activist sectors. As Ana Alice Costa and Cecília
Sardenberg argued in a compelling (and controversial) article penned in 1994,
the displacement of woman by gender had contradictory consequences. On the
one hand, this conceptual shift, in principle, presented feminists with an oppor-
tunity to leave the “ghetto” of women’s studies behind and “to conquer a new
space of reflection at a broader level—​one that would cross over into other areas
of knowledge to incorporate not only women but the scientific community as
a whole” (394). On the other hand, the use of gender in many instances simply
introduced a change of label, not of content; that is, research continued to con-
ceptualize woman as a preexisting essence, not taking into account how the cat-
egory is constructed culturally, socially, and relationally. Moreover, beyond failing
to break down the divisive walls of traditional disciplines via more interdisci-
plinary practices, the increased focus on gender studies (as opposed to women’s
or feminist studies) also signaled a growing depoliticization of academic femi-
nism that further accentuated the rift between “theory” and “praxis,” and con-
sequently deepened the tensions between feminist academics and activists. In a
trenchant critique of colleagues they dubbed “genéricas,” Costa and Sardenberg
contended that
 167

Turning to Feminisms 167

For the academy it is much easier to assimilate “gender studies” than

“feminism,” which has always been identified by some sectors with
advocacy and not with proper scientific endeavor. Therefore, gender studies
appealed to many academics who could continue doing “women’s studies”
without running the risk of being identified with feminism. They are what
feminist activists have referred to, in a derisive way, as the genéricas [roughly,
“genderologists”].
(395–​396)

Indeed, the search for scientific “rigor and excellence,” coupled with the rigid
structure of the Brazilian academy, impeded dialogue among feminist scholars in
different disciplines, thus hindering the questioning of the scientific canon itself—​
one of the fundamental facets of much feminist scholarship and cultural studies
outside Brazil.
The case of literary criticism deserves particular attention, given its impor-
tant role as a cultural studies inroad in the rest of Latin America. Noting that
only in 1986 a “Women in Literature” division was constituted in a major liter-
ary and linguistic professional association, Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda lamented
the slow and belated shaping of a feminist literary tradition in Brazilian litera-
ture departments. Even in light of the mounting importance of interdisciplinary
61
work and the growing legitimation of alternative literary genres, such as testimony,
diary, and popular romance, feminist scholarship was still kept at bay. Although
women writers were (and continue to be) largely absent from the Brazilian liter-
ary canon, several researchers, prominently Zahidé Muzart and Constância Lima
Duarte, uncovered the existence of a profusion of female counter-​public spaces in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wherein a rich women’s “informal
literary economy” (Hollanda 66) circulated. Despite clear evidence of women’s
literary production, Hollanda argued that feminist critics had not succeeded in
influencing mainstream literary criticism.
The lack of bibliographical materials on women, notably those published in
other countries in Latin America, represented another reason Brazilian femi-
nist scholars may have had difficulty discarding “the master’s tools” in con-
structing a new field of knowledge. Some theories, particularly when they fall
under the rubric of feminism, travel considerably less than their male counter-
parts in the translation business. One commonly sees Portuguese translations
of male continental philosophers, but translations of work by authors such
as Haraway, Spivak, hooks, Hill Collins, and Anzaldúa remained quite rare. As
Sandra Azeredo argued, much of early Brazilian feminist theorizing was pro-
duced by white, economically privileged [heterosexual, leftist] feminists, for
whom the question of multiple differences/​subject positions was typically lim-
ited to the gender-​class couplet. Race did not matter, neither did sexuality or
gender identity.
618

168 Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa

Undisciplining Feminisms and Multiplying Cultural-​Political

Interventions in Brazil
While forming a crucial, if still marginalized and often silenced, part of feminist
activism from the outset of the so-​called second wave, feminist organizing among
Afro-​Brazilian women, poor and working-​class women, lesbians, transwomen, and
others among early feminism’s “others” had blossomed by the early to mid 1990s.
Feminism (and “women”) became evidently ever more plural, heterogeneous,
multifaceted, and eventually “intersectional,” and feminist practices became more
culturally and politically contentious.
These diverse, multiple faces of feminist activism, the proliferation of alternative
feminist publications, scholarly journals, university nuclei, feminist conferences, and
so on, gradually spilled over into feminist theorizing, thereby progressively dislodg-
ing it from its traditional moorings at the intersection of gender and class. A report
on the state of the art in women’s studies in various disciplines, Uma Questão de
Gênero (A Question of Gender), edited by Albertina Costa and Cristina Bruschini,
stands as a landmark of those changing times. It spoke of epistemic shifts in femi-
nist scholarship, from questions of identity to issues of difference, from the singular
to the plural, while looking at gender in the context of other social divisions and
directly acknowledging the poststructuralist turn in social and cultural theory.
The Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, and espe-
cially its aftermath, signaled a comparable sea change in “undisciplining” Brazilian 618

and other Latin American feminist activisms (Alvarez “Latin American Feminisms
‘Go Global’”; Alvarez et al.). By the second half of the 1990s, it had become clear
that the feminist project of influencing official national and international policy
spheres had yielded meager results. If some of elements of the feminist agenda had
been incorporated into international accords and some local policies, by the late
1990s it became increasingly clear that more significant changes in the life condi-
tions of most women were blocked by the intensification of neoliberal globaliza-
tion and the concomitant erosion of citizenship and social policies.
At century’s turn, extensive debate, criticism, and self-​criticism within the
feminist field about the admittedly excessive previous focus on national and inter-
national “gender policy” to the neglect of other arenas of cultural-​political inter-
vention propelled another significant shift in feminist activism—​one that, as we
elaborate below, has found theoretical and academic fellow travelers in variants
of decolonial, Afro-​descendant, indigenous, anti-​racist, and queer/​transfeminist
knowledge production in recent times.The imbrication of culture-​power-​politics,
we maintain, is at the very center of this most recent feminist turn. We attempt
to illustrate that shift among activisms first, with brief reference to three Brazilian
feminist “marchas” and two “festivais.”
If, in 1995, Beijing signaled the apex of NGOized gender policy advocacy, the
World Social Forum (WSF) process, which held its first edition in the southern
Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 2001, served as a beacon of transformations in
 619

Turning to Feminisms 169

feminist activism underway. The Marcha Mundial das Mulheres (World March of
Women or MMM), originating in Quebec, found fertile ground in Brazil from
the time of its founding in 2000, and became a powerful cultural-​political actor in
the WSF from the outset. Headquartered in the São Paulo-​based NGO, Sempre
Viva Organização Feminista (SOF), which has deep and extensive ties to urban
and rural popular women’s groups and trade union women across the country,
the MMM insistently pushed the WSF to incorporate gender/​women’s concerns
“transversally,” that is, across all aspects of the Forum’s political program. Though
largely focused on a kind of updated (that is, anti-​neoliberal) class-​gender couplet,
due to its ties to one of the most influential left factions of the Workers’ Party,
the Brazilian MMM also has been literally instrumental in bringing gender trans-
gressive and ludic practices to the forefront of the WSF. With their giant puppet
representations of “ordinary” working women and their effusive “batucada femi-
nista”—​percussion fashioned from “feminine” household items like buckets and
pots and pans—​the MMM politically muscled their way into leading the also
generally “carnavalized” demonstrations that customarily opened WSF events.
Many of the MMM’s practices in Brazil continue to focus on promoting
political awareness through culture, as evident in the frequent art and perfor-
mance workshops aimed at their poor and working-​class membership. And its
batucada has evolved into a full-​scale, semi-​autonomous, invariably boisterous, and
618
irreverent “fuzarca”—​popularly understood to be a party, revelry, carousel, a farra,
folia—​which performs at MMM and other left/​popular demonstrations. Here’s
an example of one of the fuzarca’s recent marchinhas, a popular carnival musical
genre, entitled “Marchinha sem água,” composed to protest São Paulo’s severe
water shortage in 2014–​2015, largely the result of the conservative state govern-
ment’s incompetence and neglect:

Ai ai ai ai
Water is running out and my work is increasing more and more
Ai ai ai ai
After a full day’s work I can’t even take a bath
It is a system that feeds capital
While it privatizes, mineral water runs out
It is not the people’s fault, the state government is to blame
I want to end the patriarchal system.2
[Ai ai ai ai
A água tá acabando e o meu trabalho aumenta mais
Ai ai ai ai
Depois de um dia inteiro nem um banho eu posso mais
É um sistema que alimenta o capital
Enquanto privatiza acaba a água mineral
A culpa não é do povo é do governo estadual
Eu quero o fim do sistema patriarcal.]
710

170 Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa

A rather different marcha—​one explicitly not connected to political parties or

other left formations—​the Marcha das Vadias, Brazil’s version of the now global
“Slut Walk” phenomenon, has mobilized tens of thousands of young women,
transfeminists, and solidary gay and straight young men in dozens of Brazilian
cities since its first edition in 2011. Literally embodying their feminisms by embla-
zoning gender nonconforming, queer, anti-​racist, pro-​social justice, and trans-​
inclusive slogans on their bodies, the Vadias’ rebellious public defiance of gender
and sexual norms brazenly enacts a radical cultural politics.

Why the term “Vadias”? One rendition:

Slut (substantive).We appropriated this term because we realize that it is a
word used to address us women when we demonstrate any kind of attitude
of freedom, especially sexual freedom. If being free means being a slut, then
we are all sluts. We live in a society that is scandalized by strong words, but
not by violence [against women].
(Ferreira 40)

Gleidiane Ferreira, herself a Vadia from the Coletiva das Vagabundas do Desterro,
from the southern city of Florianópolis, explains that the use of the term itself
triggered extensive debate among feminists and their critics alike. She argues that
much like the North American perspective, “which sought to extract another 710
connotation from the term queer, the struggle for the resignification of the term
Vadia—​commonly used in Brazil as an expression of mockery and name-​calling—​
was one of the principal objectives of the marchas” (40).
The Marcha das Vadias enacts cultural interventions that, along with the anar-
chist scene, the hip hop crowd, the Blogueiras Feministas (Feminist Bloggers),
the Blogueiras Negras (Black Women Bloggers), the “minas do rock” (rock scene
girls), and many other ludic expressions of the recent past signal the growing
“popularization of feminism” among new generations of activists. Many feminists
of the 2010s declare that they want to construct “a feminist movement that returns
to the streets” (Name and Zanetti 15). Many see feminism through an irreverent
lens: they want “to make feminism a real threat again.”3
Like the Marcha das Vadias and the MMM’s fuzarca, a wide range of other
expressions of heterogeneous feminisms, frequently (and we think, erroneously)
lumped under the homogenizing category “feministas jovens” or young feminisms,
are bent on undermining dominant power formations through innovative cultural
politics. One novel recent organizing format is the “festival”—​a format that, as
a group of activists who were organizing the first “AntiFest Suspirin Feminista”
in Belo Horizonte for April 2014 explained, is more fluid, less structured than
the now traditional feminist Encontros of yesteryear, “is something much less
academic, kind of do-​it-​yourself, it’s contact with the streets, getting together
and doing it for ourselves”;4 it’s “a feminist breath of fresh air [a suspirin] in the
midst of machista violence and life’s messiness. It’s an attempt to practice together
 17

Turning to Feminisms 171

feminist ways of relating to one another and to construct autonomous zones of

feminist resistance” (Martello 50). For a flavor of their cultural-​political agenda,
suffice it to say that the anarca-​autonomist event featured “vegan cooking, shows,
debates about transfeminism, feminist activism against the prison-​industrial com-
plex, discussions of afro hair, binarisms, zine launchings, workshops on self-​defense,
gordofobia (fat phobia) and cuerpa (a gender/​queer reference to the body), FTM,
do-​it-​yourself sexual brinquedas (a gender/​queer reference to toys), and spanking,
among others”(ibid.).
The AntiFest was inspired by a similar festival, held yearly in Salvador, Bahia,
between 2010 and 2013: the Festival Vulva La Vida, whose third edition slogan
was “proudly feminists, necessarily inconvenient.” The public call for the meeting
described the event as follows:

It is a feminist countercultural festival: through the do-​it-​yourself ethics, we

believe that change does not depend on the initiative of political parties and
institutions; we should practice it daily, developing new values for relations
caught up in daily life. This implies rethinking our more “intimate” habits,
making revolution both in the streets and in bed. Politics is also fun!
(in Gonçalves et al. 19)

710
Still, some Afro-​Brazilian feminists critique the Marcha das Vadias and other pre-
dominantly white, majority middle-class expressions of feminist cultural trans-
gression, such as the Festivais, for their difficulty in “dealing with Black women’s
specificity” and demand “that antiracism cease to be facile verbiage and become
a quotidian practice embraced by everyone, women and men” (Hermida 13).
One black feminist, an organizer of the Vadias in Salvador, argued, that “racism
labels us as sluts and whores from the day we are born because of race. Historical
racism seized and imprisoned us within our own sexuality and that’s some-
thing that, for years, Black women’s struggles have been working to deconstruct”
(Hermida 14).
Today, the black women’s movement in Brazil, by increasingly intersecting
with other feminisms at various points and times, is in itself becoming an exten-
sive and diverse discursive field of action, composed of several strands. Among
these we find domestics, quilombolas (women from former slave territories or
maroons), lesbians, women from traditional African religious communities, and
young/hip-​hoppers/​grafiteiras (graffiti women)/​b-​g irls/​capoeiristas and others.5
Within each of these strands, there are women, and some men and transgender
people, who call themselves black feminists. It is worth noting that the “2015
Black Women’s March Against Racism and Violence and for Living Well” repre-
sents a recent process which advanced an “innovative methodology [that] recog-
nizes that diversity.”
The Marcha’s nationwide organizing efforts made cultural politics its cen-
terpiece, featuring Afro-​ religiosity, musicality, performance, social-​ interactive
172

172 Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa

community events, hip hop, and a wide mix of ludic expressions to draw in
women “who never went to hegemonic feminist meetings to engage in ‘build-
ing the Marcha’ from wherever they were situated.”6 The process explicitly called
upon the full range of expressions of organized and heretofore unorganized sec-
tors of Afro-​Brazilian women and their allies (of whatever genders and races) to
join them in loudly proclaiming black women as subjects of their own lives, of a
transformed racially and gender conscious citizenship. The Marcha’s recognition
of difference within racialized, gendered “cultural difference,” amply evident in
the excerpt from their call to action, signals the urgent need for us all to theorize
culture otherwise:

We are especially interested in mobilizing: Black girls, adolescents, and

young women, from the cities and the rural areas; Black nurses, teachers,
domestic workers, quilombolas, Black prostitutes, Black women doctors,
those linked to religions of African origin … Black women whose sons
and daughters have been assassinated by the police, Black washerwomen,
cooks, construction workers … nerds, punks, emos, Black women athletes,
artists, atheists … rappers, funkeiras [participants in funk music culture], DJs,
graffiti artists, Black women street cleaners, businesswomen … Black les-
bians, bisexuals, transsexuals, Black fashion models, Black landless women,
those affected by dams, homeless Black women … That is, all Black women, 172
including, and principally, all who are or have been discriminated against by
neighbors, doctors, dentists and others, and who have felt powerless in the
face of such enormous oppression.
(Convite geral marcha das mulheres negras—
​www.marchadasmulheresnegras.com/​#historico/​c1xsb)

The actual march on Brasilia, held on November 18, 2015, was the culmination
of an unprecedented multi-​year national mobilizational process, led by black femi-
nists, but involving every conceivable sector of Afro-​descendant women’s orga-
nizing and much of the “mixed-​gender” black movement in Brazil as well. The
“living well” in the Marcha’s name evokes decolonial discourse, very significant in
feminist circles in other parts of Latin America, but which is also gaining adherents
among some feminist theorists and black and indigenous women activists in Brazil
(e.g., C. Costa; Cardoso), as we discuss below.

Beyond the Cultural? The Feminist Decolonial Turn,

Equivocation, and the Feminist Politics of Translation
The feminist activist-​intellectual shift emphasizing the imbrication of culture-​
power-​politics explored in the above examples also represents a response to the
overall challenges posed by new epistemological and ontological configurations
facing feminist theories in the twenty-​first century. In epistemological terms,
 713

Turning to Feminisms 173

movements for decolonizing gender, mostly led by subaltern feminists in Latin

America, have been enacting a profound paradigm change. Geopolitically situated
in the colonial wound, and bringing the coloniality of gender (and its binarism)
as a key element of the coloniality of power, these movements advance radi-
cal challenges to authorized canons and methods in their articulation of alterna-
tive knowledges—​what Walsh describes as Latin American “pensamiento propio”
(231) or, pace Lélia Gonzalez, an Amefricano feminism (i.e. a feminism rooted in
Afro-​Indigenous-​Latin-​America).
According to Maria Lugones (“Heterosexualism”), seeing gender as a colonial
category allows us to historicize patriarchy, emphasizing the ways in which het-
eronormativity, capitalism and racial classifications are always-​already intertwined.
Lugones (“Coloniality”) also states that the gender binary introduces another
hierarchy: the human and the nonhuman. One of the goals of Christianity’s civi-
lizing mission was to transform the “colonized nonhuman” (black and indigenous
women and men) into the category of the human. Hence, the colonized non-
human female was not only racialized, but also reinvented as a woman through
Western gender codes.
Drawing on the writings of Nigerian feminist Oyeronke Oyewumi and
Native American writer/​novelist Paula Gunn Allen, Lugones and others argue,
on the one hand, that gender, along with race, were colonial constructs racializing
172
and gendering subaltern societies. They contend that gender had never been an
organizing principle or hierarchical category in tribal communities before the
“contact,” hence the need to decolonize it. Rita Segato, on the other hand, based
on her study of the Yorubá people, finds evidence of gender nomenclature in that
culture, thereby arguing that Afro-​American and tribal societies reveal the exis-
tence of a clear patriarchal order which is, however, distinct from Western patri-
archy. Segato calls it a “low intensity patriarchy” or, in the words of the Aymara
communitarian lesbian feminist Julieta Paredes, an entroncamiento de patriarcados
(imbrication of patriarchal systems). Instead of doing away with gender, one way
to intervene in these debates is by deploying the notion of equivocation (from
Amerindian perspectivism) and the concept of feminist translation, to which we
turn in closing.
In her influential essay on cosmopolitics, Marisol De La Cadena examines the
presence of earth beings, such as sacred mountains and animals, in indigenous
social protest. In bringing other-​than-​human beings into the human domain
of politics, she argues that these communities are undermining the ontological
distinction between humanity and nature that has been a hallmark of Western
modernity. Earth practices, such as considering the political needs and desires of
earth creatures, enact the respect and affect necessary for maintaining webs of
relationality between the human and its others (the nonhuman). To introduce
these practices into social protest (that is, to express earth beings’ claims in the
awakening of protest), invites us, in the words of Isabelle Stengers, to “slow down
reasoning,”7 since it constitutes a significant epistemic rupture.
174

174 Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa

It is here that the notion of equivocation—​a term derived from Amerindian

perspectivism and elaborated by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro—​becomes central.
Equivocation signifies not only deception or misconception, but also the fail-
ure to understand that there are different understandings of different worlds. For
example, class, race and ethnicity are categories that belong to the colonial divi-
sion nature/​culture. However, when deployed by indigenous peoples, they do not
necessarily correspond to the meanings they have been given in Western history.
They are equivocations or equivocal categories: although they appear to be the
same (i.e. to have the same meaning), in fact they may not be when signified by
other communities.
For the existence of heterogeneous worlds and the possibility of articulating
partial connections between them, the work of translation becomes necessary.
In other words, equivocation (in the sense of misinterpretation, error) calls for
translation: it is from politically motivated and unfaithful translations that the plu-
rality of worlds/​ontologies are interconnected without becoming commensurate.
Through the notion of equivocation, engagement with translation, and the prac-
tice of “slowing down reasoning,” decolonial feminists have been undoing the
perverse dualism between nature and culture. Inculcated by Western epistemology,
that dualism contributes to the disappearance of pluriversal worlds. Feminist theo-
ries are therefore emerging in Latin America as an integral part of an “oppositional
politics of knowledge in terms of gendered bodies who suffer racism, discrimina- 174
tion, rejection and violence” (Prada 74).
As Alvarez (“Introduction”) argues, a translocal feminist politics of translation
is crucial to the decolonial turn and a key strategy in building “connectant episte-
mologies” (Lao-​Montes 132) to confront the equivocations or mistranslations that
hinder feminist alliances. Translation therefore becomes a key element in forging
feminist political coalitions and epistemologies that are pro-​social justice, anti-​
racist, anti-​imperialist, and decolonial.
Ana Rebecca Prada offers a provocative analysis of how the Bolivian anarchist
feminist group, Mujeres Creando—​who describe themselves as cholas, chotas, and
birlochas (racist terms used in reference to indigenous migrant women in cities),
and also adopt other abject subjectivities (such as bitch, rechazada, desclasada)—​
converse with Anzaldúa in transporting Borderlands/​La Frontera to a context of
feminist politics beyond the Bolivian academy, establishing affinities between the
two political projects. The language of Anzaldúa, enunciated in the south within
the north, was appropriated by the south within the south and “incorporated de
facto in transnational feminism which … has no frontiers but the ones which patri-
archy, racism, and homophobia insist on” (73).
Boldly trafficking in feminist theories within contact zones (or translation
zones), Latin American and Latina feminists are developing a politics of translation
that uses knowledge produced by women of color and postcolonial feminisms
in the North of the Americas to cannibalize them, thereby shedding new light
on theories, practices, politics, and cultures in the South and vice versa. In the
 175

Turning to Feminisms 175

Latin American context, other translation zones can be found in the works of
subaltern/​decolonial subjects such as the diaries of Afro-​Brazilian favelada Carolina
Maria de Jesus, the writings of Afro-​Brazilian feminist theorist Lélia Gonzalez, the
autobiographical novels of black Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, as well as the
poetry, graffiti and street performances of Mujeres Creando, to cite just a few exam-
ples. A preoccupation with not forgetting, with our “memory alleyways” (Evaristo)
and the telling of other stories is undoubtedly a critical decolonial cultural practice.
As Paredes warns us,

to refer to our own memory, to our ontogenetic and phylogenetic memory,

connects us to our first real rebellion as wawas [girls], when we resisted
and fought against the sexist and unfair rules of society; connects us to the
rebellion of our great-​g randmothers, who resisted colonial and pre-​colonial
patriarchy.
(10)

Equivocal translations, queer readings of colonial texts, invasions of the arena of

politics by unusual earth beings, slowing down thinking, and rewriting memories
and histories in the articulation of other knowledges are, therefore, ethical and
political practices that decolonial feminists have initiated in many locations of our
174
vast and dense Latin/​a American terrain.
Resistance to the coloniality of gender implies, among other things, linguis-
tic resistance, and we would also say, translational resistance. It means putting
under erasure Eurocentric representation paradigms along with their anchor-
age in a dichotomous logic. Without giving up the (always equivocal) category
of gender, but instead articulating it in ways that challenge the perverse bina-
ries of modernity/​coloniality, perhaps we can join forces with feminists—​Latin
American, Latina/​o, black and indigenous—​in rethinking the colonial boundaries
between human and nonhuman, matter and discourse that have so far structured
the coloniality of gender and power. In short, we certainly would be moving in
the direction of a more robust notion of culture—​and democracy—​more inclu-
sive of other ontological communities, as well as toward another perspective, much
deeper and thicker, of the imbrications between culture-​power-​politics.

Notes
1 A similar criticism could be leveled against the Spanish-​language equivalent of this
anthology, entitled Nuevas Perspectivas desde/​sobre América Latina: El Desafio de los Estudios
Culturales, edited by Mabel Moraña.
2 Marchinha sem água—​ Fuzarca Feminista SP www.youtube.com/​watch?
list=UUh0Eth5qo5-​S1IMigJhTLdg&v=GbJyzXt7VzI (accessed September 25, 2015).
3 Above quotations taken from a collective interview with members of Coletiva Vadias do
Desterro, Florianópolis (Brazil). November 13, 2013.
4 Group interview, Belo Horizonte (Brazil). February 13, 2014.
716

176 Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa

5 Collective interview with “young feminists” from various racial, sexual, and gender iden-
tities, and from different sectors of the Bahian feminist field, in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil),
May 13, 2014.
6 Collective interview with Black feminists, Salvador, Bahia, May 11, 2014. For informa-
tion about the Marcha see www.marchadasmulheresnegras.com/​
7 To “slow down reasoning” entails the generation (might we say, engendering?) of a new
space for reflection by decelerating and creating the possibility of a new awareness of the
situations that mobilize us.

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11
THE TURN OF DECONSTRUCTION
Alberto Moreiras

Double Register
In Specters of Marx Jacques Derrida refers to a “double interpretation” (81) whose
need was for him irreducible at the time of accepting the complex Marxist legacy.
718 For Derrida, as to Marxism, “there is no precedent whatsoever for such an event.
In the whole history of humanity, in the whole history of the world and of the
earth, in all that to which one can give the name of history in general, such an
event (let us repeat, the event of a discourse in the philosophico-​scientific form
claiming to break with myth, religion, and that nationalist ‘mystique’) has been
bound, for the first time and inseparably, to worldwide forms of social organiza-
tion” (91).This is the “messianic promise” of Marxism, which “will have imprinted
an inaugural and unique mark in history” (91). Derrida places his own work vis-​
à-​vis such messianic promise: “deconstruction would have been impossible and
unthinkable in a pre-​Marxist space”; “deconstruction has never had any sense or
interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is also to say in the
tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism” (92).
Regarding, then, this “radicalization” of Marxism, Derrida’s “first interpre-
tation” is close to what Etienne Balibar, in an essay of the same years (Balibar
refers to Derrida’s Specters briefly [64]), called “fictitious or total universality”
(Balibar 61). For Balibar “fictitious or total universality is effective as means of
integration … because it leads dominated groups to struggle against discrim-
ination or inequality in the very name of the superior values of the commu-
nity: the legal and ethical values of the state itself (notably, justice) … To confront
the hegemonic structure by denouncing the gap or contradiction between its
official values and the actual practice … is the most effective way to enforce
its universality” (61–​62). And Derrida says of this first or fictitious register of
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180 Alberto Moreiras

interpretation: “Let us accept provisionally the hypothesis that all that is going
badly in the world today is but a measure of the gap between an empirical
reality and a regulating ideal” (86). Derrida’s regulating ideal is what Balibar
directly calls the official values of the hegemonic structure. Both thinkers, in
the spirit of Marxism, recommend critico-​political intervention in order to
close the empirical gap that keeps the democratic ideal so far from everyday
experience.1
But for Derrida that first register of critico-​political interpretation is not
enough, and he seeks a second interpretive articulation that is also in fact con-
sistent with the Balibarian notion of “ideal universality,” that is, a “latent insur-
rection” that guards an infinite and absolute claim “against the limits of any
institution” (64). In Derridean terms, “beyond the ‘facts,’ beyond the supposed
‘empirical evidence,’ beyond all that is inadequate to the ideal, it would be a ques-
tion of putting into question again, in certain of its essential predicates, the very
concept of the same ideal” through a radical critique of its articulations (86–​87).
Derrida claims that it is not possible, politically, to restrain oneself to either the first
or the second interpretation: both are necessary, since a unilateral insistence on
one of them would only result in either fatalist idealism or abstract and dogmatic
eschatology: the first interpretation, by itself, would dwell on the fact that nobody
could pull oneself out of one’s own context, that we are always determined by our
world, that we cannot get rid of our own ideological prejudices, and that there- 810
fore all that is possible is to make sure, or to demand, that our prejudices be kept
consistent with reality. This would be Derrida’s fatalist idealism. But, through the
second interpretation, we would fall into a permanent hole of critique without
remainder, a kind of absolute negation that Derrida calls abstract and dogmatic
eschatology (Derrida Specters 87).
At the time of writing Exhaustion of Difference (2001) I associated this Derridean,
and Balibarian, injunction to live or dwell in the ambiguity of the double register
to what I called “subalternist affirmation” (Exhaustion 289; see also 281–​289).That
seemed to me what needed to be done, critically or academically, in the name of
a politically productive deconstruction, or of a deconstructive political strategy,
whether or not it could be said to constitute a certain radicalization of Marxism.
But today I no longer find myself in that secure position. As a thought experi-
ment, metonymic, let me reduce the global or generalized political framework
invoked by Derrida or Balibar to institutional terms.To the university, for instance,
and its small history. Perhaps today we have come to know that the university no
longer works in the gap between its pure idea and an empirical reality, a sclerotic
conventionality, or a tendential reactionarism that follows some kind of entropic
law of decay. We are no longer convinced that it is enough to work for a return
to the old foundational idea of a free university. The notion of the university has
been modified to such an extent within the past twenty years that every kind of
“idealist” practice of it in the old sense must assume its internal ruin: there is no
longer a regulating ideal of the university, and to say this is neither fatalist nor
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The Turn of Deconstruction 181

second-​degree idealism but rather the only way to avoid concrete schizophrenia.
The first Derridean–​Balibarian register is by now critically insufficient, and must
be abandoned.
Can we then move toward the second one, according to which we must bring
into question the very concept of the said ideal? The practice of this second reg-
ister of interpretation could be said to be the deconstructive practice of critical
destruction of the old idea of the university in view of its potential radicaliza-
tion. But what are we to radicalize? And how are we to do it? If the political
possibility promised by the first register of interpretation falls, this second regis-
ter falls too—​there is no longer a hegemonic construct with an official ideality
that we can subject to demolishing critique in a politically productive way. Or, if
there is one, it is shamefully disavowed. Indeed, given the fact that the labor of
radicalization no longer has an institutional referent, and cannot find a horizon
within otherwise secured and recognizable parameters, any exercise of dismantling
might very well end up accelerating the transformation of the university into the
commercial-​instrumental enterprise that it already is. How are we to dwell insti-
tutionally against the institution, how are we to work beyond work so that, day
by day, we can get a glimpse of another world, a perspective that could perhaps
subjectively sustain our actions? But the university is just an example.Think about
recent Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, Argentinian, or Spanish political processes, not to
810
mention the United States, and how they are themselves metonymic examples
of why it is no longer feasible or reassuring to appeal to any hegemonic or ideal
structuration of institutional democracy or to any regulative notion of the social
that does not immediately explode in our faces. The legitimacy of parliamentary
democracy as we have known it is in deep crisis in Latin America, and Giorgio
Agamben has recently offered, in Il mistero del male, a powerful denunciation of
the void of legitimacy of power also in Europe: “If the crisis that our society is
crossing is so deep and grave, it is because it does not only set into question the
legality of institutions, but also their legitimacy; not just, as it is too often repeated,
the rules and modalities of the exercise of power, but also the very principles
that found it and legitimate it” (6). The failure of the Derridean–​Balibarian first
instance of political intervention opens an abyss that threatens to swallow the very
possibility of the second register.
Something new is being sought whose orientation and destiny are unclear and
not particularly inspiring from the perspective of the old democratic ideal that
more or less secular, more or less stable Western democracies can still be said to
harbor somewhere. In Latin America, from Zapatista Chiapas to the Mapuches and
from peasant areas in Brazil to barrio movements in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro,
Mexico or Bogota, not to mention Venezuela or Bolivia, there is a proliferation
of movements whose political projection is primarily consensual-​communitarian,
called “consensual authoritarianism” by people like Félix Patzi or Raúl Zibechi
(309), and which an idea of radical democracy would be hard-​pressed to endorse
without undergoing deep conceptual modifications in the best of cases.2 This
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182 Alberto Moreiras

is not failing to manifest itself at the level of academic ideology throughout the
hemisphere (that is, including the Latin Americanist establishment in the United
States), which is also increasingly neocommunitarian, and in many cases explicitly
nondemocratic. But is this what could possibly have been meant as fidelity to
a certain spirit of Marxism? Derrida said, “if there is a spirit of Marxism which
I will never be ready to renounce, it is not only the critical idea or the questioning
stance (a consistent deconstruction must insist on them even as it also learns that
this is not the last or first word). It is even more a certain emancipatory and mes-
sianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liber-
ate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-​religious determination,
from any messianism” (89).
It cannot be a mere matter of deciding that a change in hegemonic articulation
favoring the popular classes should suspend political critique and provoke uncondi-
tional endorsement. I suspect consensual, communitarian authoritarianism would not
qualify within the Derridean terms just mentioned, to the very extent—​and precisely
to the extent—​in which those movements partially find their inspiration in ancestral
ideas or traditions or inventions of tradition which are endorsed from perspectives that
are messianic, certainly, but also pregnant with explicit metaphysico-​religious deter-
mination and revisionist cultural ideologemes laden with decolonial dogma. An insis-
tence on avoiding mythic projections once again leaves deconstruction, as a partisan of
democracy understood as radical democracy, on either the wrong or the right side of 812
history, according to opinion, but in any case rather outside either ruling hegemony
or aspiring counterhegemonic ideologies struggling for political self-​construction.
Deconstruction never thought of itself as a participant in the drastically impoverished
notion of what is to count as political thought that those whose primary allegiance
is to political instrumentalization uphold or celebrate. It continues to be critical of
the political in so far as it is politically critical. The shifting of political ground that is
partially a result of the past fifteen years or so of Latin American political history has
not yet solved the issue—​whatever progress may have been made in some cases, new
questions constantly pop up. At the same time, the Derridean double interpretation
finds its limit at the border of political invention.What is there to do, then?

A Very Simple History

Deconstruction, if we think of it weakly (I will try to provide a stronger defini-
tion later) as an influential form of intellectual practice associated with the name
of Jacques Derrida, known for its tendency to reject facile claims for intellectual
closure at every level, and that affected first of all what were then primarily liter-
ary studies in the US university, hit Spanish and Latin American literature depart-
ments belatedly, not until the late 1980s. As the fortunes of deconstruction in that
very sense waned toward the end of the 1990s, we could talk about more or less a
decade of significant presence in the everyday discussions of the field. After the end
of the 1990s deconstruction, the very word, submerged for us. What has happened
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The Turn of Deconstruction 183

since then? And what happened during that decade? If there is a future for decon-
struction in the field, to what extent is that future premised on past accomplish-
ments? And to what extent is that future, if there is one, necessarily the product of
a potentially new invention? Of course only approximate responses can be given.
I was still a student in Barcelona when my friend Julián Abad showed me a
copy of Jacques Derrida’s La Dissémination. It must have been 1978.When I started
my doctoral studies at the University of Georgia in the early 1980s, only philoso-
phy professor Bernard Dauenhauer, one of my mentors, had a working knowledge
of a phenomenon that was in fact sweeping, he told me, through the admittedly
rarefied “continental philosophy” establishment out there, which increasingly
included people from French and English and comparative literature. There was
talk of a Yale school, and a book had just been published, with articles from the
members of that club, that was to be found in what were then the moribund phi-
losophy shelves in university bookstores throughout the country. Jacques Derrida’s
work was being increasingly translated, and it was to be clearly the new trend, or
it already was, in “literary theory.” People had heard of literary theory at the time,
and we all had to read Wayne Booth and the Russian formalists and Joseph Frank
and Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss in addition to a little Roland Barthes,
who was more confusing, a little Gadamer and Foucault, and an assorted series of
French names that made similar claims—​they were “similar” because they were all
812
theoretical: it was a matter of a new language first of all, and at the time it was the
“new” part as such that mattered; if you were serious enough, you would subscribe
to diacritics—​what an exciting and incomprehensible nightmare to have to read
through it—​and to New Literary History (more stolid, good, useful, but a bit bor-
ing all said and done). This was not quite philosophy, hence it could be ours, but
it was not quite, not quite, literary theory, and that was a problem, because what
were we to do if we could not use that stuff for our exclusively literary critical
endeavors, all the department wanted and supported? And feminism? Some pro-
fessors in English mentioned Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, and Sarah Kofman,
and Hélène Cixous, and it did not seem to be the same as the sociological North
American stuff. It was also new! But it took time.
I had finished my philosophy studies in Barcelona as a wannabe Nietzschean
and Deleuzian, but in Georgia I really got into Derrida and before him, into
Heidegger (thanks to Professor Dauenhauer, my mentor in theoretical issues). And
I wrote my dissertation—​what was supposed to be the introductory chapter, a
way of prefacing my proper literary criticism, became the whole dissertation, and
José Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy and James Joyce were short-​shifted into
the final chapter. But I had finished a book on deconstruction (later published
as Interpretación y diferencia), and my dissertation committee, as my adviser José
Luis Gómez regretfully told me, said they would not deal with it, they would not
read it, they could not understand it. I almost quit and applied to law schools, it
was perhaps too bad that a compromise was reached, although I did not change
a word. By the time I started my first job at the University of Wisconsin in 1987,
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184 Alberto Moreiras

there were a few people there that knew what I was wanting to talk about. That
was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
I am talking about Brett Levinson, and Marco Dorfsman, and Lori Hopkins,
and a few more students, most of them from comparative literature.We created the
Theory Colloquium, which was soon resented by some, and between skirmishes
and defensive operations we managed to attend almost every one of the Midwest
Modern Language Association annual meetings, great fun at the time, where we
were able to find some accomplices and a new host of enemies. The first split in
the theory crowd, alas, had started to develop, and those of us into deconstruction
were deemed to be never Marxist or “political” enough, never feminist enough,
never enough into the various identitarian causes that were already proliferating
as a sort of poor person’s theory thing. And it was fierce, but there came a point,
subtly, stealthily, perhaps in the very early 1990s, in which the theory people (all
of a sudden it was not “literary theory” any more, just theory, some people added
“critical,” but was that not the Frankfurt School?) had reached such a critical mass
that the enemy hordes started relenting and retreated to their winter quarters. We
could look forward, perhaps, to some years of being left, if not alone, perhaps less
than persecuted in our own departments or in the general field.
Then I went to Duke, not on my theory credentials, since they were still not
presentable for any Latin Americanist, and one rather needed to conceal them,
but rather following my wife, Teresa Vilarós. Once there, I suppose they had to 814
hire me. At Duke there was no interest in deconstruction—​one had to be a little
careful, which I have never been, not very, but the university was rich enough, and
generous enough, and liberal enough that one did not have to fight for resources.
So they ended up allowing me to do whatever I wanted to do in romance studies.
And we had a great time, partially through luck—​it turned out Gareth Williams,
a fellow Latin Americanist deconstructionist, got himself a job at North Carolina
State University, and Brett Levinson had a partner from Wisconsin, Ellen Risholm,
hired by the Duke German department, so he kept coming down a lot, and we had
many meetings and dinners and parties and conversations, and I had made friends
in Chile—​Nelly Richard, and Willy Thayer, and Pablo Oyarzún, and Federico
Galende, all of whom had a serious interest in deconstruction—​and I was able to
invite all of them to come, sometimes several times and for a full semester, and
some of our colleagues at the history department, like Danny James, were very
sympathetic and interested in what we were doing.
I would very much refrain from making any kind of claim that, if there is to be
talk, even minimal, of a deconstruction turn in Latin American studies, it started
at Duke, and it started in the mid 1990s precisely with that group, to which we
must add the different generations of students (including the editor of this volume,
Juan Poblete, who probably left too early in the game to see what was happen-
ing), but I must mention Idelber Avelar, and Adriana Johnson, and Horacio Legrás,
and Jon Beasley-​Murray, and Ryan Long, and Alessandro Fornazzari, and Marta
Hernández, and Isis Sadek, and Oscar Cabezas, and Kate Jenckes in particular (and
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The Turn of Deconstruction 185

also Elizabeth Collingwood-​Selby, who was for one year a doctoral student with us,
until she decided to go back to Chile) as those that I felt intellectually close to, of
whose work it can be said it has been impacted by deconstruction. And part of the
Duke constellation of those years were also John Kraniauskas (not a deconstructor,
never a deconstructor to his own mind, but a deconstructor nevertheless, given the
nature of his Marxist work) and Sergio Villalobos (who came to Duke to give a talk
during the second semester of his first doctoral year at Pittsburgh, when Federico
Galende was a visiting professor). Not too many of us, after all, but we had friends
and colleagues, and they would come to our gatherings, and students from other
departments, particularly from history, and literature, and we talked with them, and
we invited many people over, and something was going on that was, if not world-​
changing, certainly world-​building for us. But those were also the years of the Latin
American Subaltern Studies Group, which turned out to be a mistake.
We should have seen it coming, from the first meeting of the group to which
we were invited, in Puerto Rico, in 1996. I do not intend to rehearse the his-
tory of that group, on which I have partially commented elsewhere, let alone to
blame anyone for what happened, not even by implication, but those of us who
had just been invited—​Gareth Williams, and John Kraniauskas, and myself, among
others—​were already old enough to understand that it was going to be very dif-
ficult to keep together a group that was, to start with, criss-​crossed by all kinds
814
of emotional tensions and political passions if, now, for no good reason other
than our own respect for the founding members and our interest in being part
of an intergenerational collective, we joined it and brought to it what would end
up being seen as an irreconcilable intellectual and ideological difference. I will
not speak for Gareth or John, but I do not mind admitting that I was clueless
enough to believe that an earnest attitude of friendship and commitment should
and would be sufficient to guarantee a comfortable space of critical plurality and
exchange of perspectives for everyone.
It was not to be, and some of us, the more junior then, probably ended up
suffering more than our share until the group broke up shortly after the Cross-​
Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges Conference at Duke in the fall of 1998.
Let me simply evoke the moment to say what I think is the case, which is that after
that conference, in a clearly reductive manner, the notion that there was a group in
the professional field that thought of themselves as people engaged in (overly radi-
cal forms of) subalternist deconstruction, or deconstructive subalternism, was given
free rein.That the group included (phantasmatically, for the fact is, the group never
existed as such) people for whom deconstruction was not a real formative influence
(Danny James, Jon Beasley-​Murray, John Kraniauskas), and, in the uninformed eyes
of many, also people that had perhaps been astute enough not to want to join the
subalternist enterprise, like Idelber Avelar, seemed irrelevant. We had been tagged
as more or less young, ambitious Turks, and interviews and position papers started
appearing in which we were said to be opportunists, careerists, Eurocentric post-
modernists, and bent on hijacking the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group
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186 Alberto Moreiras

for our own nefarious and nihilistic purposes (this theme of nihilism, by the way, is
an interesting shibboleth for our antagonists, who have never stopped using it and
will no doubt continue to use it: a useful word, to their minds, but used for banal
purposes.) And that was, paradoxically, the sanction given by the professional field
to something like a deconstruction turn in Latin American cultural studies. So, if
there was a deconstruction turn, it was unfortunately born with lead in its wings.
In the meantime, however, dissertations and monographs from people in our
circles were being done and would start appearing soon. And of course many
articles were already being published. I will not talk about the latter for lack
of space, but if, for the sake of historiographic punctiliousness, we date the first
books that could possibly be considered at the outer limit of the turn to my own
Interpretación y diferencia (1991) and to Brett Levinson’s Secondary Moderns (1996),
I think it is fair to say those two books are not yet really part of any deconstruc-
tion turn in Latin American studies as such. But Levinson’s The Ends of Literature
(2001), Idelber Avelar’s The Untimely Present (1999), Gareth Williams’ The Other
Side of the Popular (2002), Danny James’ Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory,
and Political Identity (2000), and my own Tercer espacio (1999) and Exhaustion of
Difference (2001) are. Other books would follow, and I cannot be exhaustive, but
I would like to mention twenty of them or so, some of them long in the making,
which were inevitably published after the very word deconstruction seemed to
have become a thing of the past in standard critical usage. And yet many of those 816
books are among the best the field has offered over the last ten years: they are
Levinson’s Market and Thought (2004); Nelly Richard’s Masculine/​Feminine (2004)
and The Insubordination of Signs (2004); David Johnson and Scott Michaelsen’s
Anthropology’s Wake (2008), and Johnson’s Kant’s Dog (2013); Patrick Dove’s The
Catastrophe of Modernity (2004); Horacio Legrás’s Literature and Subjection (2008);
Kate Jenckes’s Reading Borges After Benjamin (2007); Elizabeth Collingwood-​Selby’s
El filo fotográfico de la historia (2009); Jon Beasley-​Murray’s Posthegemony (2010);
Adriana Johnson’s Sentencing Canudos (2010); Ryan Long’s Fictions of Totality (2008);
Gareth Williams’ The Mexican Exception (2011); Alessandro Fornazzari’s Speculative
Fictions (2013); Federico Galende’s Filtraciones (2007–​2011), La oreja de los nom-
bres (2005), and Walter Benjamin y la destrucción (2009); Willy Thayer’s El fragmento
repetido (2006) and Tecnologías de la crítica (2010); Oscar Cabezas’s Postsoberanía
(2013); Sergio Villalobos’ Soberanías en suspenso (2013); Bram Acosta’s Thresholds of
Illiteracy (2014); Erin Graff Zivin’s Figurative Inquisitions (2014); and my own Línea
de sombra (2007).3
Any reader familiar with a sample of the books will immediately recognize that
“deconstruction” is used here as a tag for a very mixed bag, and that the proper
and genuine deconstruction establishment (it exists) would not open the gate for
many of them—​they would be found insufficiently deconstructive. And yet such
is the way of things, and, if there is to be talk of a deconstruction turn in Latin
American cultural, and literary, studies, taking deconstruction only in the weak
sense specified above, then these are the books, it seems to me, through which
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The Turn of Deconstruction 187

one could start to unravel the constellation. They are all for the most part Latin
Americanist books that aspire to keep away from any kind of dogmatic claim at
the level of identitarian or geopolitical formation, that are reluctant to engage in
any substantialization of the concept of culture, that do not pursue the literary in
any exegetic-​paraphrastic way, and that have no interest in national traditions of
constitution.They all privilege reading the historical text from a sort of theoretical
force that itself remains at the level of desire, or drive, and is never articulated as
a grid for systematic deciphering. They are all politically critical, committed to a
certain notion of democracy which is not the liberal one, but skeptical of any kind
of prescriptive conceptualization regarding how to move forward socially.They are
the books that some of us have been able to produce, often against odds of various
kinds, taking all the risks one takes when one attempts to step out of disciplinary
boxes.While there may be no overwhelming reason to pretend such a list beats any
other comparable list produced by our professional field, whether in previous gen-
erations or in the wake of some other cluster of intellectual influences, it is simply
the list we have (although far from complete). And I think it may be allowed to
feel a certain amount of pride on it. But is that, now, enough?

Towards a Second Turn

816
What was John Beverley thinking when he said, in his Latinamericanism after 9/​
11, that it would be dangerous to equate Latin Americanism with deconstruction,
or to think that deconstruction can constitute “a new form of Latinamericanism”
(52)? He is somewhat right, it is a dangerous, and moreover, an absurd thing to do.
He is doing me the honor of glossing two quasiconcepts I offered in Exhaustion,
namely, “dirty atopianism” and “savage hybridity.” He says:

Dirty atopianism, Moreiras explains, “is the name for a nonprogramma-

ble program of thinking that refuses to find satisfaction in expropriating at
the same time that it refuses to fall into appropriative drives” (23). “Savage
hybridity” flows from this. As opposed to “cultural hybridity,” where, as
in Laclau’s well-​known formulation of “hegemonic articulation,” a given
cultural feature or artifact can be posited as an “empty signifier” for the
“national” or collective as such, “savage hybridity is simply the recognition
that every claim to totalization of identity, where the one is made to stand
for the many, including the claim of hegemonic articulation itself, ultimately
lacks foundation … As the ‘other side’ of the hegemonic relationship, savage
hybridity preserves, or holds in reserve, the site of the subaltern, just as it
preserves the site of a subalternist politics. It is not so much a locus of enun-
ciation as it is an atopic site, not a place for ontopologies but a place for the
destabilization of all ontopologies, for a critique of totality—​and a place for
the possibility of an other history.”
(Beverley 52)
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188 Alberto Moreiras

This is the moment when Beverley says I come very close to “proposing decon-
struction itself as a new form of Latinamericanism” (52). But it is not deconstruc-
tion that has been invoked by me in any of the segments of the long quote. What
I was invoking then was rather an attempt to move past the politics of hegemony.
With that caveat, I declare myself guilty of proposing or having proposed in the
past a posthegemonic Latin Americanist reflection, in the weak sense of a reflec-
tion on Latin American issues that does not take hegemony as the alpha and
omega of political articulation, whether on the side of the liberal criollo elite or
on the side of any conceivable non-​criollo, indigenous, popular, or subaltern coun-
terhegemonic push.The question as to whether there needs to be an identification
between posthegemony and deconstruction should be answered in the negative,
even factically, since Jon Beasley-​Murray’s proposal and extended presentation
of posthegemony in Latin America not only does not claim deconstruction, but
in fact militates against it. And of course there could be any number of varia-
tions on the notion of posthegemony in addition to Beasley-​Murray’s or mine.
Deconstruction makes no particular claim to possess posthegemony, and yet it
likes it, for reasons I will try to mention.
Beverley is moving toward establishing his conclusion, according to which
both any deconstructive “critique of the ‘ontotheological’ character of poli-
tics and the apocalyptic ultraleftism of … ‘posthegemony’ … involve in fact
a renunciation of actual politics, which means that despite their claim to be 18
‘transformative,’ they remain complicit with the existing order of things” (58).
Provided of course, one should say, following the tenor of Beverley’s book, that
the existing order of things is neoliberal, not postsubalternist. But the problem
is, what if what is ontotheological in non-​neoliberal politics is the particular
brand of postsubalternist hegemonic politics Beverley endorses, and with him
so many other enthusiastic sponsors of either instrumental subservience to who-
ever serves or seems to serve the popular cause or neocommunitarian consensual
authoritarianism?
Any continuation of a deconstruction turn in Latin American studies in gen-
eral should probably, at this stage, attempt to move toward a clearer articulation of
the stakes. We need to recognize that it is no longer enough simply to write, to
continue to write, in the loose invocation of a particular set of texts that have been
stimulating in the past, just as it is not enough to define ourselves according to
that which we are not (we are, say, not decolonialists, we are not postsubalternists,
we are not culturalists, we are not historicists or identitarians, and so forth). The
books of the past twenty years may have had a collective effect: to bring the field
of reflection into a certain maturity. An element of that maturity is necessarily to
understand, first of all, that there is no reason to continue to uphold an always
uncertain and improbable, imaginary state of affairs according to which those of
us blessed with the sacred mission of teaching about Latin America in the United
States, or elsewhere, should always do so in the name of Latin America itself, or
worse, in the name of some Latin Americanism that could only function, has only
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The Turn of Deconstruction 189

functioned, as a prison for thought—​a prison easily surveilled and panopticized

by the guardians of political orthodoxy, of which our field, on the right and on
the left, has always been plentiful. Getting rid of Latin Americanism, in order to
liberate the Latin American archive for itself, is perhaps the first task of a second-​
generation deconstructive turn. Latin Americanism has only ever been a metaphor,
perhaps useful at the time of the Cold War, or useful to the culturalists or those
who believe in some form of “clash” of civilizations, or that the world divides itself
into civilizations. Latin Americanism, like the related term “Orientalism,” obscures
more than it exposes, and it is also too convenient an alibi. But there is another
potential task, rather more difficult to undertake.
In 1964–​1965 Derrida devoted his seminar at the École Normale Supérieure
to the question of being and history in Heidegger’s thought. At the end of the
sixth seminar session Derrida says: “Sonambulism is perhaps the very essence
of metaphysics” (228). Metaphysical thought is premised on a certain sonambu-
lism incapable of keeping an open eye on the ceaseless process of metaphorical
reification that is metaphysical desire as such. If deconstruction can be politi-
cally translated as a demetaphorization of history on the impossible back of a
language without metaphor, then deconstruction is the ongoing process of ana-
lyzing and destroying metaphorical investments as formations of power. I want
to conclude by suggesting that this work on the radical reduction of metaphor
18
responds to an existential a priori that, incidentally, simultaneously organizes the
drive for posthegemonic politics. It is the task of deconstruction, if one wanted
to take it up.
There is a sonambulistic approach to thinking that simply moves on in obliv-
ion of the fact that history is not to be captured by political projections, and even
fails to note that its very sonambulism is itself a particular kind of political projec-
tion. There is nothing antipolitical about this. Derrida is clear enough, in Specters,
when he maintains that politics, as political philosophy, “structures implicitly all
philosophy or all thought on the subject of philosophy” (92). If ontotheology, read
metaphysics, is the hegemonic thought of the West, it thereby follows that the
attempt at a nonontotheological thought must be posthegemonic, and very politi-
cally so. Deconstruction’s detractors tend to think of it as a merely destructive and
negative attempt to ruin every piece of stable meaning, so it is even worse when
deconstruction says it wants to move politically: at that point, clearly, a number of
individuals give themselves over to a bad orgy of negativity without the people,
without the multitude, without a country, without a program, without a horizon,
opportunistically bent on poisoning all the beautiful constructive propositions
other members of the profession would have been trying to push forward, either
in terms of proper Latin American identity or else on the basis of a rather sui
generis version of the Marxist philosophy of history.
But we know enough to know that sonambulism may have caught up with
Marxism itself, and with so many other kinds of well-​intentioned political work,
and not once but many times. If sonambulism is the essence of metaphysics,
910

190 Alberto Moreiras

perhaps, says Derrida, and metaphysics is the hegemonic thought of the West, and
therefore of all territories marked by Western empires, like Latin America, then
hegemonic thought, and that also means the thought of hegemony, is sonambu-
list or it induces sonambulism. To want to wake up, to expose oneself to the trau-
matism of awakening, to abandon oneiric metaphorization, to demetaphorize the
dream of reason, not for the sake of an impossible full or literal language, still less
for the sake of a truth constitutive of a new subject, but rather in the name of a
future and of the preparation for a future that we do not yet know but that might
imply the de-​activation of every currently living metaphor—​such might be the
project of a new historicity, as new revolutionary, and as revolutionary leftist: but
not instrumentalizing, never aiming for a new capture of history by allegedly
progressive ideology. To return to Derrida’s 1964–​1965 seminar, if the thought of
the truth of being (deconstruction is fundamentally a thought of the ontological
difference, of the truth of being as opposed to beings, or it is nothing, and this
would be my strong definition of deconstruction), if the thought of the truth of
being is to come but to come as what has always-​already been buried, in other
words, if the structure of the to-​come is also the structure of the always-​already,
then perhaps the political dimension of deconstruction—​the notorious democ-
racy-​to-​come—​is also at the same time an existential a priori that first presents
itself at a level other than the political. Releasing thought on uncaptured life is
also a style of life. A second-​generation deconstruction should perhaps move 910
without reservation toward it, politically if one wants, but for the sake of that in
politics that founds its very pertinence, and against every instrumentalization and
capture.4
Derrida’s sonambulist appears in a particular context. He has just questioned
those who, in the wake of Nietzsche, Freud, or Marx, are looking to “solicit”
the privilege of consciousness and try to present it as a mere misunderstanding.
Things are not so easy. Only an arduous confrontation with Being-​as-​Presence
as the fundamental determination of metaphysical Being, which means only a
confrontation with Hegel as the thinker in whose work metaphysics closes in
upon itself, hence lets its end be seen, can preempt “gestures of aggression to
metaphysics or transcendental idealism [from] remaining prisoners of that at
which they aim” (228). In the absence of such a confrontation the efficacy of
the debunkers of consciousness “will have a sonambulistic style.” That sonam-
bulism might well be the essence of metaphysics therefore first of all means: a
confrontation with metaphysical thought that does not elude the fundamen-
tal consideration of the forgetting of being as the temporal horizon of being
is necessary—​in other words, a confrontation with a horizon of thought that
brings the alternative thought of the ontico-​ontological difference into play also
at the political level.
If sonambulists live the metaphoric dream, in nonvigilance on the metaphoric
character of language, “we could call thought and thought of being (the thought
of being constituting the horizon and the call for an impossible non-​metaphoric
 19

The Turn of Deconstruction 191

language) what calls for [a]‌gesture of demetaphorization” (278). In the final

conclusions of his 1964–​1965 seminar Derrida insists: “the thought of being
announces the horizon of non-​metaphor starting from which one can think met-
aphoricity … it is announced as the impossible on whose back the possible is
thinkable as such” (323). There is a problem with sonambulism, just like there is a
problem with demetaphorization. They need to be worked out. This is probably
all that can be said for a possible second-​order deconstruction in Latin American
studies or wherever else. In metaphor, given a literal and a figural term, given a gap
that both links and separates empirical reality and regulating ideal, it is not nec-
essarily easy to discern which of the two instances is necessarily the metaphoric
one. The political application of demetaphorization preempts the security of any
hegemonic demand or negotiation. We do not know what a life without meta-
phor might be. We do know that metaphors betray.

Notes
1 What would be called for here is what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe refer to
as the long tradition of popular and democratic struggles, struggles of position or sys-
temic struggles, struggles of maneuver, identitarian or class politics, solidarity politics,
and politics of representation. I am referring to both popular and democratic struggles
as famously theorized in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in particular, but it is clear that
910 Laclau and Mouffe have a lifelong interest in the phenomenology of political struggles
within this first register of interpretation.
2 It is worth quoting Zibechi: “I wouldn’t call this type of organization democratic.
I think it is something more complex. Felix Patzi says that the Andean community is
not a democratic [sic] but rather a form of ‘consensual authoritarianism.’ To be honest,
I do not advocate democratic forms as if they were superior.The family cannot function
democratically, because not all members have the same responsibilities and duties or the
same abilities to contribute to the collective. I think that we call democracy is a mode of
domination created by the West, but that is an altogether different question” (309). Is it,
really?
3 At the time of revising proofs, new books by Villalobos, Jenckes, Jaime Rodríguez Matos,
and Dove, among others, have become available.
4 There is a second kind of sonambulistic fellow that shows up in the Derridean text.
In an essay entitled “Thinking What Comes,” published in 2007 but partially read
at a conference shortly after the publication of Specters, in 1994, Derrida talks about
sonambulism again. Except that, this time, the sonambulist does not embody the essence
of metaphysics—​she is rather the dreamer that takes upon herself the “absolute risk,”
beyond knowledge and philosophy, “beyond all models and all prescriptive norms in
whose exhaustion we live,” of attempting a thought of what is to-​come/​always-​already
“that resembles the dream or the poetic, with the reservation of thinking the dream oth-
erwise” (46). Derrida is asking for the aplomb of the sonambulist, the trust and risk of
the sonambulist, in order to think the future, and he links it, strangely enough, to a word
of Lenin about the necessary disjunction or dis-​adequation between the dream and life,
on which the very possibility of justice would depend (61–​62). Thirty years would have
lapsed between the tentative affirmation of sonambulism as the essence of metaphysics
and the vindication of a certain poetic sonambulism, able to keep open the disjunction
of the future. It would be excessive to require terminological consistency from Derrida
after such long temporal bridge.
912

192 Alberto Moreiras

References
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Balibar, Etienne. “Ambiguous Universality.” Differences, vol. 7, no. 1, 1995, pp. 48–​74.
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Galende, Federico. La oreja de los nombres. Gorla, 2005.
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SUNY UP, 2007.
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—​—​—​. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. Duke
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914

12
THE CULTURAL POLICY TURN
Ana Wortman

Translated by Juan Poblete

This chapter will engage the meanings of cultural policies in Latin America in
the past twenty-​five years. This will involve thinking them in relation to the state,
the economy, civil society, and social organizations, as well as in connection to the
process of production of knowledge and the circulation of ideas in the world, and 914
more specifically, in Latin America.
Cultural policies, like all forms of politics, are shot through and through by
singular interactions among the aspects mentioned above, but they are also depen-
dent on the dominant meanings of culture in the countries were they are imple-
mented and the zeitgeist and the institutions that intervene in the production of
knowledge and their administration. To analyze the concept of cultural policies
implies not only to take on an intellectual issue but also to account for their prac-
tical dimension, including specific actions, which give them meaning in concrete
contexts.The true meaning of the concept includes both those sides. As it happens
with any concept involving the notion of culture, there are multiple controversies
about its proper understanding since it always seems possible to question, what are
we talking about when we talk about culture? While in modernity culture, and
thus the cultural policies associated with this understanding of it, was associated
with being educated, i.e. knowing, collecting, admiring, exchanging art produced
according to defined canons and legitimate hierarchies, preserving the patrimony
(including buildings, monuments, visual arts heritage, libraries); in the past few
decades that vision of a Eurocentric modernity has been challenged by a much
broader conception of culture and thus of cultural policies (Yúdice, La cultura como
recurso; García Canclini and Urteaga 2011).
The chapter will be divided in two parts. First I will refer to the specificity of
cultural policies in Latin America, i.e. how the circulation of ideas, regional pro-
cesses, and governmental positions on the state and its role in the cultural realm
 195

The Cultural Policy Turn 195

affected the shape and nature of cultural policies. Second, I will summarize some
of the most important contributions to the study of cultural policies and the cre-
ation of knowledge, concrete policies, and spaces of professional training made by
authors working within Latin American cultural studies.

The Politicocultural Dynamics of Cultural Policies in

Latin America
The 1980s and Their Impact on the Definition of Cultural Policies
As I have pointed out elsewhere (Wortman “Repensando las políticas culturales
de la transición”; “El desafío de las políticas culturales en la Argentina”), the recov-
ery and return of democracy as a political system after military dictatorships was
very closely connected to cultural issues. At least during Southern Cone military
dictatorships, the cultural field was explicitly threatened and its writers, artists, and
intellectuals persecuted, disappeared, and killed. The democratic governments that
followed place a special emphasis on culture and turned cultural policies into a
central component of the processes of re-​democratization. It was understood that
society had been separated from culture and art, since the latter had been associ-
ated with partisan politics and the ideologization of society. Thus the democratic
914
transition sought to recover, as a politically democratizing end, the interest on
cultural development as an issue involving the production and consumption of
artistic goods. The negative impact of the closing of the cultural field during the
dictatorships required, now in democracy, centering the attention in such a con-
ception of culture. Along those lines, it is worth remembering how many seminars
and conferences were organized in order to think culture and especially cultural
policies and their role in the transition to democracy, including the international
seminars on the topic done by CLACSO and those on cultural consumption
(Sunkel).
Up until the 1990s, as those authors working on cultural policies from the
viewpoint of cultural studies have oftentimes remarked, the concept of cultural
policy had, given the anti-​democratic experiences the region had lived, a centrally
political content that would later, in the 1990s, acquire a more economic tone
(Landi, as quoted in García Canclini Políticas culturales en América Latina; Wortman
“Repensando las políticas culturales de la transición”). Cultural policies, in general,
were thought to have a healing function in relation to the social fabric and had as
an objective, the formation of a new political culture. That the authoritarian cul-
ture of the dictatorships needed to be eradicated through the role played by cultural
policies was a widely shared belief at the time. The values that necessarily ground
cultural action had a political goal in their capacity to create institutional order.
Cultural actions had a transcultural objective in so far as they contributed to the
emergence of a more democratic social order and more horizontal social relations.
They were also associated with the issue of human rights. The task at hand was
916

196 Ana Wortman

to re-​found, materially and symbolically, a new democracy based on new social,

institutional, and social imaginary grounds (Wortman “Repensando las políticas
culturales de la transición”).

The Mythic 1990s: Culture and Economy

It is oftentimes stated that in the 1990s, in the context of neoliberalism and a
society of consumption, there were no cultural policies. The centrality of eco-
nomic discourse, along with the privatizing reordering of society that took place
in those years, turned the question of access to consumption of material goods, an
obsession. However, it was precisely around that time when the so-​called cultural
and creative sectors began to take on new forms, evident in those countries that
adopted the English model of social development. Intellectuals, who had intensely
debated these issues in the years prior, were now faced with the challenge of rede-
fining the role of the state, as well as the change in the population’s consumption
habits, and of doing so in a new context defined by the high ownership concen-
tration in the cultural industries. If in the 1980s the debate was centered on the
different meanings of the concept of democracy in a context culturally defined
by the modern separation between high and low culture, in the 1990s there are
significant questionings of those modern categories and divisions in a context
determined by the postmodernism debate (Wortman, Construcción imaginaria de la 916
desigualdad social). One additional new issue was the question of, why not consider
what the people were actually producing and consuming and then find its mean-
ing? What was the parameter for something to be considered part of the sphere of
relevance of cultural policies? It is through questions such as these that the issue of
cultural patrimony, and how to define it, emerged. If traditionally the patrimony
of the nation was constituted by objects, spaces, and goods charged with history,
in the new mindset valorizing creativity and extending it to everything that is
within the practice and the knowledge of a society, the concept of patrimony is
broadened to also include the definition of intangible patrimony. Creativity is part
of this broader concept of patrimony that includes everything from what society
enjoys in music, theater, film, to rituals, religious practices, festivities and ways of
cooking, eating, and celebrating. This new definition, encompassing a patrimony
that is both tangible and intangible, shows what a given society values in its cul-
ture, what differences do make a difference, within that society and in relation to
other cultures.

The Question of Financing of Cultural Industries in the Cultural

Policies of the 1990s
While the economic and institutional model for Latin American cultural policies
in the 1960s came from France (Mejía Arango) and Spain, with a strong associa-
tion of culture, politics, and democratic transition; the 1990s model came from
 197

The Cultural Policy Turn 197

Britain and the United States, countries in which cultural activity is based on
private initiative and sponsoring, instead of state funding. In this context, the topic
of corporate sponsoring became a significant part of the agenda, while multiple
forms of legislation for tax breaks meant to incentivize sponsoring of cultural
initiatives were considered by legislatures across the continent. The model was
Brazil, through the Sarney Law, later replaced by Law 8.313/​91 or Rouanet Law,
after its author, Sergio Rouanet, then the secretary of culture. In this regard, it is
interesting to recall a debate during José Ignacio Lula da Silva’s presidency. In it,
the effects of the Rouanet Law were questioned by those who thought it had
mostly strengthened high culture (opera, ballet, and classical music) to the detri-
ment of popular culture practices. Another familiar criticism of this law was that it
deepened regional and social disparities and inequities, since 80.3 percent of the
financing developed through the sponsoring mechanisms opened by the law were
concentrated in the southeast region of Brazil, the wealthiest in the country, with
43 percent of the Brazilian population (at the time, at 190 million people).
On the other hand, along the lines of rethinking the funding of culture and the
role of cultural industries in Latin American international cultural policies, a dom-
inant topic in the 1990s, Colombia was the site of emergence of the Convenio
Andrés Bello (CAB), an international cultural collaboration agreement between
eleven Latin American countries plus Spain.1 Within it, and under the direction
916
of Fernando Vicario Leal, the then Convenio officer in charge of culture, the
program Culture and Development was created. It aimed at deepening the knowl-
edge and the data on the economic and social dimensions of culture in order to
improve decision-​making in cultural policies. In 2000, and within this program,
the CAB and the Colombian ministry of culture organized “The Third Side of
the Coin,” a seminar on culture and the economy, that originated a full series of
studies on the issue under the umbrella title of Economic and Social Dimensions
of the Cultural Industries.2
Moreover, another important center for research on the cultural industries was
the Observatory of Cultural Industries in Buenos Aires. Over the years it has
generated important and path-​breaking approaches to the study of the economic
impacts of culture, as in the case of economists Jorge Marchini’s El tango en la
economía de la ciudad de Buenos Aires (2007).
In general, however, it can be said that Latin American cultural policies on cul-
tural industries responded to laws promoting governmental funding for industries
such as publishing and cinema. In fact—​after the neoliberal wave of the 1990s,
which eliminated state contributions to the film industry—​later years have seen an
increase in the laws providing state funding for this industry. The incentives come
in three forms: a tax deduction on the sums invested on national films by corpo-
rations or individuals; taxes on foreign films in order to create funds for national
film promotion; and screen quotas. Some of these legislations are: the Audiovisual
Law of Brazil, the Law of Colombian Cinema, the Law of Mexican Film and that
of Venezuela’s Film (Mejía Arango 115).
918

198 Ana Wortman

Important too in the area of the film industry is the Ibermedia program. It
originated as an initiative in the 1996 meeting of Iberoamerican presidents and it
has allowed Latin American cinema to recover the kind of vitality it enjoyed dur-
ing the mid twentieth century. The success of Ibermedia also allowed the design of
similar forms of cooperation in theater (Iberescena) and Museums (Ibermuseos).

New Concepts of Culture and Their Impact on Latin American

Cultural Policies: The Question of the Rights of Cultural Diversity
The end of the twentieth century was a watershed moment in connection with
the issue of how to think and produce cultural policies, the concepts of culture
underpinning them, and who are the actors who have a right to participate in
these processes. The question of cultural globalization and the crisis of the nation-​
state (Ortiz) coincided with a set of international events vindicating human rights
in connection with cultural rights. This went along with the crisis of nation-​
states and the emergence of multiple nationalities, oftentimes subordinated within
nation-​states as minoritarian identities. Multiple forms of protest and mobiliza-
tion of these new culturo-​political actors—​as was the case with indigenous social
movements, afro-​latinamerican cultures, women, youth—​along with the trans-
formation of communications under new digital media, promoted new and high
impact debates throughout Latin America. In this context, countries such as Peru, 918
Ecuador, and Bolivia redefined their constitutions and their forms of conceiving
citizenship, highlighting now a cultural dimension.
It is worth remembering that Latin American states were constituted as based
on an alleged culturally homogeneous nation that was supposed to be white,
Christian, and Spanish-​ speaking. Institutional arrangements were designed to
interpellate that constituency (Mejía Arango).
Bruno Müller encapsulates the question of the current Latin American scenario
on issues of cultural rights and national identities by highlighting the emergence
of newly structured plurinational states based on legislation that recognizes the
rights of indigenous groups. Using contributions from philosophy and political
theory, Müller discusses the relationship among rights, politics, the state, equality,
and freedom in social contexts defined by extreme inequality.While he recognizes
the need of the political left to find its footing in a new epochal climate that insists
on the differences among people—​a tendency that questions the forms of equal-
ity that defined both Western modernity and old real socialisms—​he also points
out that this tendency limits the resolution of old but always present problems of
social inequality. As result, a certain ethnicization of inequality obtains that does
not favor inclusion.
From the Canadian constitution of 1984 to the recent constitutions of Bolivia
(2009) and Ecuador (2008), some states recognize themselves as diverse, multi-
ethnic, and pluricultural. In the Argentine case—​perhaps as a result of the relative
weakness of cultural institutions, but also because the governing political party
 91

The Cultural Policy Turn 199

imagines itself channeling a profound political change—​this turn to the diverse

is very visible. During the Kirchner years (2003–​2015) the government devel-
oped an active policy on the meanings of national history. Both in terms of recent
national history as in relation to the more distant past, it created a long historical
view that allowed its project a long genealogy of transformation. This is also the
case in Venezuela and Ecuador.

The Question of Cultural Policies within Latin American

Cultural Studies
The development of Latin American cultural studies through the work of intel-
lectuals such as Néstor García Canclini and Renato Ortiz, allowed a regional
appropriation of metropolitan cultural and social theories, especially those
of Pierre Bourdieu, and later other anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai,
Mary Douglas, and Daniel Miller. The vast output of Latin American cultural
studies scholars was a key factor in the thinking and elaborating of cultural
policies. Perhaps belatedly, those were years of reading Bourdieu and others
who helped us add complexity to our understanding of how inequality was
deepened in our societies through symbolic means. They also helped see the
limitations of a simply materialist view of the issues and, especially, of con-
918
sumption. This rethinking involved a re-​envisioning of who were the targets
and beneficiaries of cultural policies. In “Gramsci with Bourdieu” (1984),
García Canclini questioned the idea of legitimate taste as exclusively defined
by the elites, as if the popular sectors only operated culturally at the everyday
level of consumption and free time to satisfy only their most immediate mate-
rial needs. García Canclini’s contributions along these lines (Políticas culturales
en América Latina) were very significant and stimulated a number of research
projects on issues such as how to understand the social practices that generate
the need for cultural policies in the first place; or how to deepen our knowl-
edge of the symbolic dimension of social life, traditionally given short shrift
within purely materialist perspectives. While Bourdieu widens the restricted
view certain materialisms had of how to study social practices, his theories
were also adapted and transformed by García Canclini (1988) and Ortiz in
order to think the situation in Latin America. Both argue that Bourdieu stud-
ied societies deeply stratified along the Eurocentric lines of clear demarcations
of legitimate culture.
Renato Ortiz, already under the influence of debates on globalization, questioned
the idea that the elites and their consumption patterns were the same across different
modern societies. He also relativized the validity of the concept of autonomous artis-
tic intellectual field in a European mold. For Ortiz the latter was a fiction that never
fully existed anywhere (Wortman 2009). As some disciples of Bourdieu, engaged
in newer research on cultural consumption, also point out: while it is possible to
associate high culture to the higher classes, not all high classes are consumers of
20

200 Ana Wortman

high culture (Lenoir). Through such contributions it was possible to denaturalize

an idea that had become common sense.
A critical view of the increasing differentiation of spheres of life—​a distinctive
facet of modernity leading to the constitution of an artistic intellectual field in the
West and to the idea of a legitimate culture associated to the bourgeoisie—​was
the basis of the concept of cultural democratization that animated the first cultural
policies in Latin America. There were also, first, significant advances in empirical
studies of consumption in the region, and second, a more complex view of culture
stemming now not just from sociology but from more interdisciplinary perspec-
tives. All of these developments sparked a new consideration of the foundational
grounds of our democracies and the related issue of how to design cultural pol-
icies. In this context, it is important to mention the contributions of George
Yúdice’s work (La cultura como recurso) to the many-​times-​revisited issue of the
concept of culture. Yúdice, under the influence of political theories founded on
the ideas of trust and social capital, proposes to abandon the traditional meaning of
culture—​associated with the unequal distribution of symbolic goods that acquire
part of their value from the fact that they are exclusive and far from the reach of
the popular classes—​in order to privilege an alternative concept grounded on
the life experiences of all subjects in their own contexts and the forms of praxis
thus developed. Thus, he puts forward the concept of culture as a resource, which
connects with a new idea of development. This concept has been clearly influen- 20
tial in the formulation of cultural policies valorizing cultural identities in Brazil,
Argentina, and Uruguay (Wortman “Procesos de globalización”; “Que ves cuando
me ves”).
Based on his fieldwork in Salvador de Bahia and Rio de Janeiro (in Brazil)
studying cultural organizations such as Afro Reggae and Olodum, on the one
hand, and others such as Viva Rio, on the other, Yúdice proposed a number of
reflections and research projects on self-​managed cultural organizations (Yúdice
La cultura como recurso).
In some later works by García Canclini and Urteaga and Yúdice himself
(Nuevas tecnologías), a new line of thinking on the cultural question, based now
on the concept of cultural management, emerges and makes possible a different
form of knowledge on culture in Latin America. This management is not exclu-
sively restricted to a certain understanding of the cultural state that intervenes
to strengthen institutions but is in fact animated by the agency of social groups,
barrio-​ based organizations, and civil-​ society institutions. These social groups
develop their own strength as institutions in the production and management
of a cultural resource such as music, dance, or theater. In this context, the artist
is no longer an outstanding individual because of his/​her quasi-​transcendental
creativity, always in need of cultural subventions, but, instead, a kind of cultural
entrepreneur who has to master skills like project-​management, finding a space,
promoting it in the media in order to create a viable cultural effort.The economic
dimension of the cultural good is here not opposed to the artist’s creativity and
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The Cultural Policy Turn 201

capacity to transcend, but, instead, integrated into the artist’s work (Wortman, “El
emprendedor cultural”).
In the context of the Argentine crisis of 2001 (Wortman “Procesos de glo-
balización”) and without having yet read Yúdice, it was possible to see the rise
of a form of cultural knowledge and practice grounded on those artistic and
managerial practices. This probably was also, at least partially, the result of the fast
circulation of the discourses on social economies presented at the World Social
Forum. Self-​managed cultural centers emerged as a way of organically allowing
the growth of artists and cultural producers, who had been trained in many formal
and informal settings for the production of culture and art. At the time—​and as
a result, in part, of the impact of new technologies as enablers of and spaces for
cultural production—​culture began to be seen as a relevant sphere for the genera-
tion of employment, part of cultural industries that had an impact on economic
development. I defined those new capacities as cultural policies of civil society
(Wortman “Procesos de globalización”) because they represented a new cultural
dynamics. In it, culture was part of job creation, itself a place for work and creative
entrepreneurship, and unrelated to the two models of state funding or private
philanthropy. Instead, those new capacities were the result of less formal initiatives
and creations by the agency of social groups and institutions that have persisted
until now. These also manifested new discourses on social reflexivity (Lash and
20
Urry), empowerment, and symbolic resources that gained force during the crisis
of 2001 and later took multiple and productive forms. This is the line marked by
more recent work by García Canclini and Urteaga on cultural initiatives by youth,
and Yúdice, on the network of Brazilian cultural collectives called Fora do Eixo
(Azevedo de Fonseca).
Cultural consumption can no longer be thought only from those fully institu-
tionalized places that offer and disseminate cultural goods (Wortman “Procesos de
globalización”). It is no longer simply a matter of venues for film, performance or
music offering massive outlets for cultural consumption of specific goods. Now
there are neighborhood-​based organizations, cultural centers, churches, repur-
posed empty buildings, bars, restaurants, plazas and all kinds of nonconventional
spaces, which have an important role as spaces of cultural production and diffusion.
In the context of severe economic, social, and institutional crisis, forms
of self-​managed social action that reinvigorate old anarchist traditions have
reemerged in Argentina. In a situation marked by social and economic despair,
the middle classes, hit hard by the crisis, take advantage of their cultural capital
and organize social enterprises that remain current to this day. Through differ-
ent trajectories—​many of them have persisted, some have disappeared—​all of
them revealed new forms of subjectivity and new modes in the functioning
of culture. Since the second half of the 1990s countless forms of social entre-
preneurship, in the form of networks that Castells has theorized, have emerged
from different sectors of civil society. In line with his ideas about a network
society, subjects tend to coalesce and connect in networks similar to those in
20

202 Ana Wortman

information and communications. In this manner, digital forms shape the social
link in ways that are clearly visible in culture and art. These changes have con-
sequences for the way in which cultural and social actors connect with the state
and with funding, more generally. There are many examples of new forms of
social creativity that have been implemented among the popular sectors that
question the association of one creative class with the aesthetized middle clas-
ses (Wortman “El emprendedor cultural”). In Argentina—​along the same lines
studied by Yúdice in northern Brazil and then promoted by Gilberto Gil while
in government—​a number of initiatives in the areas of art experiences, popular
culture, and citizenship building, were started.
This does not mean that the institutions of modernity have disappeared. As
García Canclini (“La cultura global es una ficción”) correctly states, cultural poli-
cies today must be thought at the intersection and combination of three pro-
cesses: first, classic institutions that reproduce the modes of organizing culture
that accompany the formation of modern nations (schools, museums, ministries of
culture in charge of popular culture, and mass audiovisual means run by the state).
Private means of communication are a second type of actors. Around the world,
except in places like Cuba or China, private ownership of mass communications
is the norm, including, in some cases, enterprises that were originally public and
were then privatized. These channels are often regulated by obsolete legislations
stemming from a pre-​digital epoch. Another factor in the development of the 20
means of communication (radio, TV, film, publishing companies, the press) and
their social influence, is the fact that they are increasingly subordinated to trans-
national economic logics, that are independent of the sphere of competence of
the state.
In the context of a new capitalist dynamic, the means of mass communication
have undergone a strong process of concentration of ownership and management.
This is how a number of highly integrated and concentrated communicational
groups, with heavy impact on the cultural industries, have emerged. Since the
1990s TV is produced in coordination with radio, the printed graphic press, and
other media. Strong neoliberal governments allowed the owners of the press to
also own TV and radio stations, and, later on, websites and channels. In this way,
and given their levels of consumption and influence, communication industries
became part of the debate on cultural policies.
There is a third type of actor. It is this dispersed and heterogeneous set of net-
worked communications: email, social networks, etc. that are questioning a variety
of forms of intellectual property and rethinking the meaning of what is public,
private, and communitarian.
We still do not have a sociocultural theory capable of encompassing the many
new forms of integration, disarticulation, and contradiction among these three
types of actors and modes of existence of social communication and culture
(García Canclini “La cultura global es una ficción”). Elsewhere I have discussed
the impact of these processes on Argentine and Brazilian cultural policies in the
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The Cultural Policy Turn 203

transitions to democracy and now (Wortman, “Políticas culturales de la sociedad

civil”). I show there, the influence of the paradigmatic change in the concept of
culture during the 1980s, affected by new ideas about cultural legitimacy, new
relations between society and state, new conceptions of the state in the midst of
globalization processes, the presence of multiple national and international NGOs,
and the new uses that states make of culture as a resource in order to further their
legitimacy.
In this increasingly globalized world, it may be appropriate to question: what
is the impact in Latin America of the forms, styles, and strategies developed in the
cultural arena by the countries of the First World? How do the ideas about what
the state “must do” circulate in the continent? What exactly was the nature of the
social and political turns in the 1990s? Do things always flow from north to south?
Or are those flows becoming multidirectional? What are the full consequences
of new technologies in the formulation and implementation of cultural policies?
How, when discussing the cultural offer, are cultural policies to think the question
of the public and what is public? When should they engage the denaturalization
of common sense?
Cultural studies has also been responsible for another growth area in the cul-
tural realm, this time associated to ethnic groups and their cultural rights to differ-
ence and the need for states to respond via cultural policies.
20
Recently, in an interview, García Canclini (“La cultura global es una ficción”)
returned to the concept of cultural democratization, which he had worked on in
one of the key and founding books in the discussions on cultural policies during
the 1980s in Latin America (1987). There, he already had concluded that, to think
cultural policies only in terms of access, was inadequate, since doing so was tanta-
mount to reducing the meaning of cultural democratization to only one concept
of culture, that of a high culture based on belle arts. Three decades later, García
Canclini insists that policies formulated within that paradigm have been unsuc-
cessful and questions, with a side glance to Bourdieu’s theories, whether it is truly
democratic to aspire only to the forms of equality stemming from wider access
to an unquestioned idea of culture. Should everyone, wonders García Canclini,
be interested in consuming what those with bigger cultural and economic capital
consume? Who in contemporary societies has the power to determine what is
culturally legitimate or illegitimate? Thus, he concludes by positing, once more,
the question of power at the heart of the discussion on cultural policy in the past
twenty-​five years.

Notes
1 The Convenio Andrés Bello is an intergovernmental organization focused on the edu-
cational, scientific, technological, and cultural integration of Iberoamerica. Starting with
a treaty subscribed in Bogotá in 1970 and replaced by another signed in Madrid in
1990, the CAB was created with the purpose of contributing to the equitable, sus-
tainable, and democratic development of the signing countries. The latter are Bolivia,
204

204 Ana Wortman

Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Spain, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican
Republic, and Venezuela.
2 Under the general guidance of Colombian researcher Germán Rey, the following stud-
ies were published: The Economic Impact of Cultural Industries in Colombia (2003), Impact of
Culture in the Chilean Economy (2003), Impact of the Film Sector on the Colombian Economy
(2003), The Dynamic of Culture in Venezuela and Its Contribution to the GDP (2005), Impact
of Culture in the Peruvian Economy (2005). See Mejía Arango.

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Azevedo da Fonseca, André. “O valor do “egocard”: afetividade e violênciasimbólica na
rede do Fora do Eixo.” Revista FAMECOS mídia, cultura e tecnología, vol. 22, no. 1, 2015,
pp. 94–​119.
Castells, Manuel. Comunicación y poder. Alianza Editorial, 2009.
García Canclini, Néstor. “Gramsci con Bourdieu, hegemonía, consumo y nuevas formas de
organización popular.” Nueva Sociedad, vol. 71, 1984, pp. 69–​78.
—​—​—​. Políticas culturales en América Latina. Grijalbo, 1987.
—​—​—​. “La cultura global es una ficción.” Revista Eñe, September 2013.
—​—​—​and Carlos Monetta, editors. Las industrias culturales en la integración latinoamericana.
Eudeba, 1999.
—​—​—​, Francisco Cruces Maritza, and Urteaga Castro Pozo. Jóvenes, cultura urbana y empren-
dimientos digitales. Ariel, 2012.
—​—​—​and Maritza Urteaga, editors. Cultura y desarrollo: Una visión crítica desde los jóvenes.
Paidós, 2011.
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Landi, Oscar: “Campo cultural y democratización en Argentina.” Políticas culturales en
América Latina, edited by Néstor García Canclini. Grijalbo, 1987, pp. 145–​175.
Lash, Scott and John Urry. Economías de signos y espacios. Amorrortu, 1998.
Lenoir, Rémi. “Bourdieu, 10 años después: legitimidad cultural y estratificación social.”
Revista cultura y representaciones sociales, vol. 6, no. 12, 2012, pp. 7–​30.
Marchini, Jorge. El tango en la economía de la ciudad de Buenos Aires. Observatorio de Industrias
Culturales. Subsecretaría de Industrias Culturales. Ministerio de Producción, 2007.
Mejía Arango, Juan Luis. “Apuntes sobre las políticas culturales en América Latina, 1987–​
2009.” Pensamiento Iberoamericano, special issue on “El poder de la diversidad cultural,”
vol. 1, no. 4, 2009.
Müller, Bruno: “O Sentido Político do Multiculturalismo: Um Estudo a partir da Esquerda
Sul-​Americana.” Anais do Fórum Universitário do Mercosul, vol. 1, no. 1–​15, 2011, pp. 1–​15.
Ortiz, Renato: Mundialización y cultura. Alianza, 1994.
Sunkel, Guillermo. “Una mirada otra desde el consumo.” Estudios y otras prácticas intelectuales
latinoamericanas en cultura y poder, edited by Daniel Mato. CLACSO, 2002, pp. 287–​294.
Wortman, Ana. “Repensando las políticas culturales de la transición.” Sociedad, Facultad de
Ciencias Sociales UBA, 1996, pp. 41–​63.
—​—​—​. “El desafío de las políticas culturales en la Argentina.” Estudios Latinoamericanos
sobre Cultura y Transformaciones sociales en tiempos de globalización, edited by Daniel Mato.
CLACSO, 2001, pp. 251–​263.
—​—​—​. “Viejas y nuevas significaciones del cine en la Argentina.” El consumo cultural en
América Latina, edited by Guillermo Sunkel. Convenio Andrés Bello, 2006, pp. 342–​363.
—​—​—​. Construcción imaginaria de la desigualdad social. CLACSO, 2007.
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—​—​—​. “Procesos de globalización y redefinición del campo artístico-​intelectual.” Entre la

política y la gestión de la cultura y el arte. Nuevos actores en la Argentina contemporánea, edited
by Ana Wortman. Eudeba, 2009, pp. 63–​73.
—​—​—​. “Que ves cuando me ves.” Observando los observatorios culturales de Argentina,
Brasil y Chile. Revista de Gestión y Cultura, no. 11, May–​June 2011, pp. 48–​51.
—​—​—​. “El emprendedor cultural: El auge de los posgrados sobre gestión cultural en
América del Sur, en particular en Argentina,” Indicadores Culturales 2012, Eduntref, 2013,
pp. 40–​47.
—​—​—​. “Creatividad para la inclusión social: políticas para reafirmar los derechos cultura-
les.” Por uma integracao ampliada no Sulamerica, edited by Ingrid Sarti, José Renato Vieira
Martins, Mônica Leite Lessa, and Glauber Cardoso Carvalho. FOMERCO UERJ, 2014,
pp. 192–​199.
—​—​—​.“Dilemas de la democratización cultural en Argentina y Brasil,” Indicadores Culturales
2013, Eduntref, 2014, pp. 147–​155.
—​—​—​. “Políticas culturales de la sociedad civil en la formación de nuevos públicos,”
Revista Perfiles de la Cultura Cubana, 2009, pp. 1–11.
—​—​—​. “La producción simbólica del poder kirchnerista: continuidades y rupturas en la
producción de imágenes del peronismo.” ¿Década ganada? Evaluando el legado del kirchner-
ismo, edited by Carlos Gervasoni and Enrique Peruzzotti. Mondadori, 2015, pp. 367–​389.
Yúdice, George. La cultura como recurso. Gedisa, 2003.
—​—​—​. Nuevas tecnologías, música y experiencia. Gedisa, 2007.

204
206

13
THE TRANSATLANTIC TURN
Bécquer Seguín

The present chapter explores the development of so-​called “transatlantic studies”

in Anglo-​American Hispanism. In the broadest terms, any study of peninsular
and Latin American works that sees their relationship as constitutive of a broader
cultural transformation may be called transatlantic. Nearly all works that make up 206
transatlantic studies, however, are anchored in one side of the Atlantic. One may
study literary themes of the transatlantic slave trade, for example, but the project
may focus on their appearance in Cuban or Spanish literary works. Nevertheless,
a transatlantic account would take on the task of making their study not only
speak to specialists in Cuban literature, but also to specialists in Spanish litera-
ture. Stemming the urge to search deep into the discipline’s past for its original
sources, this chapter instead takes what might be called a revisionist approach
that distinguishes comparative criticism of Spain and Latin America from work
that self-​consciously identifies as “transatlantic” in both subject and methodol-
ogy. Understanding the latter, more recent development is therefore the goal of
the present chapter. By the same token, the chapter also distinguishes criticism
from historiography. While several important works of historiography have cer-
tainly paved the way for much of transatlantic studies, that history falls outside the
scope of the present study apart from several contextual references.1 Limiting its
bibliography benefits this study in two important ways: it allows for identifying a
development particular to literary and cultural criticism as well as for explaining
its specific contribution to Hispanism. If the chapter that follows has the unfortu-
nate shortcoming of not developing any “close readings” (or even “distant read-
ings,” as Franco Moretti might have it), it is the hope that its historical overview,
distilling of important arguments, and critique of the present conjuncture might
make up for it.
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The Transatlantic Turn 207

Disciplinary Thawing
What many call transatlantic studies today largely resulted from the convergence of
two major fields within Hispanism, namely, Latin American and peninsular literary
studies. In ways that I hope the present essay might help clarify, Latin Americanist
scholars and peninsular scholars forged the field of transatlantic studies not only
in response to the social, economic, and political conditions of North American
higher education. Scholars representing each area of the Hispanic academy have
already substantially spelled out these structural reasons. One need not look further
than, for example, Joan Ramon Resina’s reflections on Hispanists during the Cold
War from a peninsularist perspective (“Cold War”), Walter Mignolo’s discussion
of the making of Latino/​a and Latin American studies from a Latin Americanist
perspective (“The Larger Picture”), or Sebastiaan Faber’s reconstruction, from a
transatlantic perspective, of the history of North America’s post-​Spanish Civil War
academy (“Fantasmas”). The social, economic, and political context out of which
transatlantic studies emerged is, by any account, absolutely fundamental to under-
standing its place within the discipline. (See Trigo.) But so too are its ideas and
theories. What I propose here, instead of repeating the aforementioned important
contributions, is to complement them by tackling a rather different endeavor.
I would like to provide an intellectual history, which by no means pretends to
be exhaustive, that follows what I see as the principle actors and the theoretical
206
strands they have jointly weaved together to make a significant part of the quilt
known today as transatlantic studies.
To the field of transatlantic studies, Latin Americanist scholars primarily con-
tributed postcolonial theory—​especially the subaltern inflection it took thanks
to the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group from the early 1990s. Though
undoubtedly influenced by early postcolonial works like Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1978), these Latin Americanists found their kin in the Ranajit Guha-​led Subaltern
Studies Group, which was founded circa 1982 together with the journal Subaltern
Studies. Apart from the name, Latin American subalternists adopted many of their
precursors’ critical terms and methodological imperatives. Among other assump-
tions, they questioned the stability of the inherited concept of “the nation,” a
move that would become crucial to the development of transatlantic studies. To
undermine the concept of the nation, read the group’s “Founding Statement”
from 1993, “is simultaneously a limit and threshold of our project. The ‘de-​
territorialization’ of the nation-​state under the impact of the new permeability
of frontiers to capital-​labor flows merely replicates, in effect, the genetic process
of implantation of a colonial economy in Latin America in the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries” (118). Put differently, the group’s project had as much to do
with the creation of new theoretical tools as with a methodological break from an
earlier Latin Americanism, which merely reproduced hierarchical power relations
that necessarily privileged the Old over the New World. Studying Latin America,
for these scholars, also meant studying Spain’s imperial project—​not because
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208 Bécquer Seguín

Spanish colonialism brought the two together under a convenient monolingual-

ism, but rather to recover a complex history hitherto ignored even by scholars
of Latin America. “The concept of the nation,” the statement continued, “itself
tied to the protagonism of Creole elites concerned to dominate and/​or manage
other social groups or classes in their own societies, has obscured, from the start, the
presence and reality of subaltern social subjects in Latin American history” (118;
emphasis in original).
Among Latin Americanists, colonial scholars were the first to adopt and trans-
form postcolonial theory.Walter Mignolo’s book The Darker Side of the Renaissance
(1995) set in motion a project to “decolonize” a field that had been forged and
was still determined by Eurocentric assumptions about the indigenous discourse it
encountered. “What I attempt to do is less to describe and narrate how the colo-
nization of languages, memories, and space took place and were implemented,”
explained Mignolo, “than to identify the spaces in between produced by colo-
nization as location and energy of new modes of thinking whose strength lies
in the transformation and critique of the ‘authenticities’ of both Western and
Amerindian legacies” (xv; emphasis retracted). Mignolo’s book develops the idea
of the “locus of enunciation” in order to focus the eye of literary and cultural
scholarship toward textual moments “where representations are produced instead
of the configuration of what is being represented” (333). Thus, while The Darker
Side of the Renaissance offers countless readings of texts by European colonists, it 208
combines concepts like Enrique Dussel’s “myth of modernity” with a postmod-
ernist theoretical focus on language exemplified by Jacques Derrida in order to
read these against the grain, in a decolonial key. These theories, Mignolo claimed,
helped scholars to better understand and identify indigenous resistance through
a study of European texts alongside studies of codices, maps, paintings, and other
Amerindian objects.
With respect to the narrative of transatlantic studies, there are several impor-
tant takeaways from the early transnational development of postcolonial theory in
Latin American colonial studies. First, colonialists recognized their own field of
study as constitutively transatlantic. It was impossible to understand the American
colonies, they argued, without addressing the contemporary peninsular circum-
stances. Second, the postcolonial theory these scholars developed significantly
refashioned social-​historical ways of reading resistance in the culture of Latin
America’s marginalized classes, exchanging guarantees on class, labor, and even
gender for premiums on Eurocentrism, ethnicity, and especially epistemology. And
third, the categories that guided (and still guide) decolonial “reading from below”
gave primacy to epistemology and constructed from it the idea that “colonial-
ity”—​the integration of European imperial order into forms of knowledge—​
structured relations from the colonial through the contemporary period. These
three facets would later give rise to a particular kind of transatlantic work perhaps
best exemplified today by recent studies such as Nadia Altschul’s Geographies of
Philological Knowledge (2012) and Lisa Surwillo’s Monsters by Trade (2014).
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The Transatlantic Turn 209

Although his interpretation of subaltern studies appears today to be the

dominant current in Hispanist postcolonial theory, Mignolo and other scholars
who emphasized decolonial thinking were certainly not the only ones to par-
take in the postcolonial wave in colonial Latin American studies. In a watershed
1991 review essay titled “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses,” the historian
Patricia Seed broadly summarized the transformation of colonial studies in the
following way: “In reflecting on the linguistic framework in which the politics
of colonial rule have been elaborated, writers have observed the limitations of
European political discourses as well as the way in which the polysemic character
of language has enabled natives of colonized territories to appropriate and trans-
form the colonizers’ discourses” (183). The broader focus of this turn, according
to Seed, thus had more to do with language than postcolonial theory per se.
Maintaining the emphasis on language, scholars such as Rolena Adorno rejected
certain tendencies of postcolonial theorizing. By 1991, Adorno, who helped
forge the transnational dimension of colonial studies, had already perceived
methodological blind spots in the incipient decolonial theoretical enterprise. As
she writes in a volume she coedited, titled Transatlantic Encounters (1991), “one of
the most compelling versions of the history of colonialism would be that which
the lives of the indios ladinos could reveal. Such an examination would surely
give the lie to the simplicity of patterns of accommodation and resistance so
208
easily constructed to explain Andeans’ lives” (259). Though the volume opened
with Adorno and coeditor Kenneth Andrien celebrating “new conceptual mod-
els, drawn from Andean experience” that broke with previous studies “attempt-
ing to utilize uncritically Eurocentric social science theories” (1), it closed with
Adorno’s skepticism toward the totalizing effects of grand theoretical apparatuses,
like Mignolo’s, which, in her view, subsumed and homogenized textual variability
under a blanketing theory of epistemic resistance.
Around the same time, scholars from other fields in Latin American studies
were retheorizing concepts indigenous to the literary field, such as “transcultura-
tion,” in ways that developed a transnational approach to studying Latin American
literature. Among other works, Mary Louise Pratt’s now canonical book, Imperial
Eyes (1992), threaded the postcolonial concerns of colonial scholars through to
the field of nineteenth-​century Latin America. As opposed to Fernando Ortiz and
Ángel Rama’s decidedly regional and Latin American uses of “transculturation,”
Pratt instead used the concept as a mirror with which to better grasp Europe’s
Orientalizing gaze. Her book studied the writings of travelers such as Alexander
von Humboldt in order to explore a surfacing “planetary consciousness” in which
Europe came to make sense of Latin America through works of natural history.
Whereas the field of colonial studies might be seen as transatlantic by its very
nature, the field of nineteenth-​century studies had cordoned off the literature and
history of Latin America’s various regions according to the national borders of its
newly independent states. Pratt’s book thus extended the insights of postcolonial
theory to point out the fact that Europe never veered its gaze from Latin America,
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210 Bécquer Seguín

even after independence. Furthermore, Pratt argued, “it is possible to reverse the
direction of the Linnaean gaze, or that of Defoe’s armchair traveler, to look out
at Europe from the imperial frontier” (36). In a move that echoes later theoretical
transformations within peninsular studies, Pratt took imperialism as the vehicle
and subject of a study that ostensibly considered European travel writing in the
Americas. The move not only distanced her account from earlier studies, which
treated travel writing in a vacuum largely void of economic and political history,
but it importantly brought postcolonial theory into the world of independent
Latin American states.
Nourished by this broad transnational inquiry in Hispanism, peninsular schol-
ars meanwhile contributed what has come to be called the “imperial turn,” an ini-
tially historical, then literary and cultural focus on the Spanish empire, especially
in the nineteenth century. Compared to the turn to studying Latin American sub-
alternism, whose rumblings began well before the group’s foundation in the early
1990s, peninsular scholars seemed to arrive late to considering Spanish culture
in its imperial context. (This is not to say, of course, that no one had studied the
Spanish empire until this point, but rather to point to a particular methodological
development that combined historiography, politics, and cultural studies.) Writing
in the 2005 volume, Spain Beyond Spain, which itself was fundamental in shifting
the focus away from the Spanish nation-​state in peninsular studies, Joan Ramon
Resina explained the historical context that marked the discipline leading up 210
to the 1990s: “U.S. departments of Spanish, which were predominantly Spain-​
oriented,” were “locked in the historicist and philological traditions.” As a result,
he continued, “Cold War Hispanism sidestepped historical materialism, feminism,
class, race, and minority issues, all of them congruous with the critique of Spain’s
imperial past” (72). Major works in peninsular studies during this time, such as
Susan Kirkpatrick’s Las Románticas (1989), drew from all of these domains—​but,
as Resina rightly points out, it would not be until much later that these kinds of
studies would receive the general critical attention they deserved.
Sometime in the mid to late 1990s, peninsular literary scholars took a cue
from historians and shifted their focus toward using Spain’s imperialism as prism
through which to rethink mainstays in peninsular culture. One can see the begin-
nings of this transition in a major 1991 conference in Medina del Campo on the
“historical projection of Spain in its three cultures” (Lorenzo Sanz).2 The confer-
ence focused on the construction of “Spain,” which addressed, among other top-
ics, both the impact ideas about Spain wrought on its colonial societies as well as
the inverse. Many participants sought to understand the projection of Spain in this
comparative key: papers included comparative studies of the poets Gaspar Núñez
de Arce and Rubén Darío (Calvo Carrilla); the scholars Marcelino Menéndez
Pelayo and Pedro Henríquez Ureña (Díaz Quiñones); and Miguel de Unamuno
and the José Carlos Mariátegui-​founded journal Amauta (Rovira). An idea that ran
through many of the papers was that, in order to understand the Peninsula, one
must also seriously consider its imperial reach. Another 1991 conference, convened
 21

The Transatlantic Turn 211

by Marina Pérez de Mendiola at the University of Wisconsin-​Milwaukee, helped

to solidify these initially comparative studies as an academic field unto itself. The
book that emerged from that conference, Bridging the Atlantic (1996), brought to
the fore the inseparability of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture. It
did so with studies that argued for the centrality, for example, of the idea “America
Is in Spain” for the construction of Spanish identity from the eighteenth to the
twentieth century (Fernández 32–​34), or for the “presence of Spanish traits and
culture” in Argentina, seemingly “the country in Spanish America with the least
degree of Spanish influences” (Katra 67). These and other studies in the volume
underscored a growing interest in dissolving previously erected disciplinary barri-
ers between the study of Spain and Latin America in ways that drew not only on
colonial but also postcolonial imperial ties.
Works such as Angel Loureiro’s essay, “Spanish Nationalism and the Ghost of
Empire” (2003), served to connect these transnational concerns about the histori-
cal construction of “Spain” explicitly with its imperial consciousness. A corrective
to narrow nationalistic narratives both in Spain and Latin America, Loureiro pro-
posed to “show the role played by Spanish constructions of Latin America in the
process of national re-​definitions and affirmations that have taken place in Spain
from the end of the nineteenth century” (65) through the early twentieth cen-
tury. Both liberal and conservative narratives, Loureiro argued, effaced their role
210
in constructing a rhetoric of Hispanism—​imperial loss for liberals, regeneration
for conservatives—​that would later allow Franco to rally Spaniards to its defense
in the name of fascism, Catholicism, and the Spanish nation. Among other things,
Loureiro’s work challenged shortsighted close readings that failed to consider
Spain in its imperial context. The example he and others provided paved the way
for the imperial turn in peninsular studies, leading to more ambitious interpreta-
tions of the literature of Spain alongside its actual or spectral empire.
Though published by the time the field of transatlantic studies was already
coming into its own, perhaps the quintessential example of this imperial turn is
Michael Iarocci’s Properties of Modernity (2006). Iarocci’s book revised long-​held
assumptions about Spanish romanticism through readings that situated imperial-
ism and anxieties about the country’s supposed “belated” entry into modernity at
the heart of its literature and culture. “Several of the insights of the postcolonial
framework can be brought to bear on the challenges of thinking about Spain,
about the historically peripheral status it has occupied within the narrative of
“modern Europe,” and about its implications for analyses of Spanish romanticism
and modern Spanish culture more generally” (42), he writes. Iarocci’s narrative
of Spanish modernity, here and elsewhere, borrows Walter Mignolo’s notion of
“imperial difference” to underscore Spain’s strange position as a “minor” impe-
rial power by the early nineteenth century. While Iarocci’s was not a transatlantic
narrative, it was one that remained sensitive to Spain’s peripheral location within
modern Europe as well as to its own imperial relationship with its colonial subjects
the Americas. More importantly, it was also one that adopted important concepts
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212 Bécquer Seguín

from Latin Americanist postcolonial scholars such as Mignolo and Enrique Dussel
that would later become fundamental to transatlantic studies.
Along with the imperial turn, the development of cultural studies significantly
contributed to priming peninsular scholarship for a turn to transatlantic studies.
Spanish cultural studies ascended during the same decade as Latin American post-
colonial studies, with the publication of important volumes such as Helen Graham
and Jo Labanyi’s Spanish Cultural Studies (1995) and the founding of the Arizona
Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies in 1997 and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
in 2000. According to Sebastiaan Faber, “the major accomplishment” of these
developments in the field “perhaps was the revealing—​and devastating critique—​
of the ideological substratum of traditional Hispanic philology: the cultural
nationalism that had informed it from the beginning of the century, which begins
with the notion that of the Hispanophone world as a homogenous, monolingual,
and, in the last instance, originally Castilian entity” (331). Scholars of peninsular
literature became increasingly aware of the nationalist disciplinary assumptions
that governed their work, and dispatching them meant finding methodological
nourishment from other fields.
The early 2000s witnessed numerous attempts to push the boundaries of com-
parative work from both the Latin Americanist and peninsularist directions. Books
from Latin Americanists such as Glen S. Close’s La imprenta enterrada (2000) and
from peninsularists such as Mario Santana’s Foreigners in the Homeland (2000), 21
while perhaps still operating within a comparative framework, began to theorize
the transatlantic space in its totality. In the opening pages of his book, which
considers Pío Baroja and Roberto Arlt together in an “anarchist imaginary,” Close
explains what led him to a comparison that, at the time, might have looked rather
heretical to scholars of either Spain’s Generation of ’98 or the Latin American
avant-​gardes of the 1920s and 1930s. “I thought I could simply follow clues and
surround the plotters in this novelistic conspiracy against the national literary tra-
dition,” he writes. “As it turns out, the conspiracy was not local but hemispheric”
(7). He continues, “If the risk of distortion in such a wide view is so great, greater
perhaps is that of myopia in our epoch of transnationality and deterritorialization”
(9). Implicit in Close’s reasoning is the idea that the undeniable extension and
political, economic, and social effects of globalization today make it impossible for
scholars to ignore its embryonic manifestations in the past. Globalization, in other
words, might be a helpful theoretical anachronism when it informs our work in
other ages precisely because, to echo Faber’s point, it questions dominant national-
ist narratives the inherited philological tradition largely naturalized.
Santana’s monograph on the impact of Boom literature in Spain likewise
departs from a comparativist perspective. Following David Herzberger’s call for
studies to compare the contemporary Spanish and Spanish American novel in
1980, Santana begins his book by asking,“What would happen if we were to make
the object of Spanish literary history not simply the literature of Spain, but also
the literature in Spain” (12; emphasis in original)? Santana explains that studies up
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The Transatlantic Turn 213

until the turn of the twenty-​first century often followed Max Henríquez Ureña’s
tracking of literary influence in his seminal essay from 1926, “El intercambio de
influencias literarias entre España y América durante los últimos cincuenta años
(1875–​1925)” [“The Exchange of Literary Influences between Spain and the
Americas Over the Past Fifty Years (1875–​1925)”]. In its stead, Santana widens
the scope of his project beyond exchanges among individual writers in order to
“account for processes that transcend individual biographies and condition the
larger system of aesthetic values and the social institutionalization of literature,” a
methodology whose “full potential can only be reached if applied to literary life
in its entirety” (13). His monograph thus attempts to add to several of these areas
that make up literary life: “the functioning of large-​scale literary production (the
so-​called mass literatures) and its interaction with that of legitimized, ‘artistic’ lit-
erature; the economy of publishing (printings, sales, and so on); the presence of
translated literature and its interference with, and appropriation by, Spanish liter-
ature; the interaction among Spain’s four literary languages” (13). Studying the
reception of supposedly alien literatures, Santana suggests, might offer another way
to undermine the scholarly reflex of simply considering literary history within
the conservative confines of the nation-​state. Important not only because it might
sharpen the image of literary production, this move to break with national para-
digms also brings critical attention to bear on exactly how ideas of the nation-​state
21
have shaped past scholarship.

Prevailing Paradigms
Sometime between the height of the debates over Latin Americanist subaltern
studies in the late-​1990s and critiques of the Spanish nation-​state in peninsular
studies in the mid 2000s Hispanists in North America began to conceptualize
their work specifically as transatlantic. As one can easily sense from this framing,
transatlantic studies has no definite starting point, no “founding statement,” no
before and after, and certainly no agreed-​upon definition of its critical terms or
theoretical parameters. The second half of this essay—​on the history of transatlan-
tic studies over the past decade and a half—​will begin with an exposition of the
field’s two dominant paradigms exemplified here by the work of Julio Ortega and
Walter Mignolo. It will end by taking stock of the present theoretical conjuncture
by offering critiques of both paradigms and suggesting, perhaps, a way out of their
oppositional deadlock.
Julio Ortega, of Brown University, has become one of the most outspoken pro-
ponents of transatlantic studies. Having organized several preparatory conferences
in the late 1990s, Ortega founded in 1999 the Transatlantic Project, which has gal-
vanized many around transatlantic studies as well as sponsored a handful of major
international conferences featuring scholars and writers from both Latin America
and Spain (332). His 2003 essay, “Post-​teoría y estudios transatlánticos” [“Post-​
Theory and Transatlantic Studies”], which opened an early issue on transatlantic
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214 Bécquer Seguín

studies in the journal Iberoamericana and has since been anthologized, lays out a
framework for the incipient field that many since have adopted in their work.3
Following other Latin Americanists, Ortega sees himself as working within a tra-
dition of postcolonial studies. Not unlike Rolena Adorno, however, Ortega seeks
to distinguish his work specifically from subaltern studies, which by that time had
become almost synonymous with postcolonial studies. As Faber has pointed out,
Ortega’s proposal for transatlantic studies has to do with a “return to the text” and
“the return of the Subject as the agent of memory,” or in Faber’s words, rethinking
transnational cultural history while at the same time “distancing [it] from the peak
of the high theory of the eighties and nineties” (333).Though Ortega sympathizes
with the critique of the traditional assumptions so-​called high theory was able to
question in North American Hispanism, its inability to question its own premises
and overcome its dominant position within the academy has shown that it has run
out of steam. According to Ortega, ours is a post-​theoretical age in which cultural
studies dominates the academic landscape. But cultural studies, Ortega argues, has
imposed a presentism on academic work that scholars must resist.
The presentism of cultural studies has even gone so far as to permeate postco-
lonial studies and its dominant subalternist group. Subalternist work, in Ortega’s
estimation, “sometimes was voluntarily presentist, and on occasion marked by
good professional conscience and the liberal paternalism of symbolic compensa-
tion” (“Post-​teoría” 111). For Ortega, subaltern studies had become political cor- 214
rectness by another name.While Ortega’s proposal for transatlantic studies rejected
the subaltern focus on theory and armchair politics, it also rebuffed earlier meth-
odologies of Hispanism, especially in peninsular studies. These remnants, presum-
ably of philology, made the “museum of the canon” and the “archive of origins”
(112) still captivate a significant group of scholars. Like the political correctness
that leads subalternists toward liberal paternalism, the canon and archive steer
peninsularists back down the path toward the cultural conservatism of traditional
Spanish philology. Neither conservative nor liberal, transatlantic studies, accord-
ing to Ortega, offers the kind of radical break with the past that North American
Hispanism needs.
Transatlantic studies, Ortega proposes, would forgo these traditional concerns
for a rich analysis of texts and, instead of following the “simplification introduced
by ‘globalization,’ [it would] redefine ‘globalization’ as a producer of differences”
(113). It would also elude another pitfall of subaltern studies, which is to per-
petuate a narrative of victimization. “If we situate ourselves in an intercultural
reading,” Ortega writes, “we could verify that the colonial subject did not always
illustrate victimization, but rather, many times, it is able to negotiate its own mar-
gins. This subject is not always confined to the narrative of whatever owner is on
duty or to an archive of genealogies” (114–​115). Language, for Ortega, throws a
wrench into a subalternist discourse that reads writers like Felipe Guamán Poma
de Ayala as always resistant yet bereft of agency. Subalternists must, in fact, with-
hold agency from colonial subjects in order to maintain the narrative of their
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The Transatlantic Turn 215

victimhood. The transatlantic studies that Ortega proposes would instead read
their “process of humanization” (115) and afford them more than mere cultural
agency. “The colonial world was Spain’s true modernity,” Ortega concludes, “a
paradoxical modernity, in effect, but soon a civilization of the political sign of
mixture” (115). Framing Spanish imperialism in this way, Ortega argues for an
understanding of modern Latin America and Spain as constitutively bound to one
another. One cannot study the colonies in a vacuum that relegates Spain to the
position of a specter. Transatlantic studies, presumably, would always consider both
the Peninsula and its early modern colonies side by side in order to understand
the imperial repercussions of writing, politics, and culture, whether originating in
Salamanca or Cuzco.
Ortega’s rejection of the philological fetish with origins, however, has signifi-
cant ramifications when it is mapped onto postcolonial or, more specifically, sub-
altern critiques of empire. In understanding modern Latin America and Spain
as constitutive of each other, he too quickly elides the imperial context of the
Conquest that brought Spaniards into contact with Mayan and Incan people. The
so-​called modernity that emerged from this encounter was paradoxical only in so
far as one ignores the political, economic, and social forces that brought it about.
Guamán Poma’s assertion of agency as an indigenous person under Spanish colo-
nial rule appears less paradoxical as soon as interpretations move beyond consid-
214
ering it an attempt to “reconstruct cultural memory and reestablish new mutual
spaces” (115), and instead read it as a way for an educated Quechua nobleman
to negotiate political and economic autonomy with King Phillip III of Spain.
By ignoring the moment of conquest, Ortega’s proposal for transatlantic studies
naturalizes a Spanish imperial dynamic that glosses over colonialism as neces-
sarily mixed or “mestizo.” Many myths used to justify economic, political, and
social hierarchies used the idea of “mestizaje” to quell what might have otherwise
been indigenous and proletarian uprisings. These myths, a memorable example of
which is José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race, 1925), replace past
grievances with future promises, erasing histories of oppression in the process
since they take elite mestizos as their starting point. It is clear that Ortega wants to
avoid the temptation to search for origin stories or narratives of Latin America’s
indigenous purity, uncontaminated by European contact and conquest. But one
need not assert the foundational place of mixture or mestizaje in order to do
so. Politically dubious and historically inaccurate, originary mestizaje, even in its
most metaphorical sense as a mere trope or theoretical tool, cordons off questions
that might otherwise productively interrogate the history of Spanish imperialism.
Moreover, it brackets a historical event for unconvincing reasons.
As he himself positions it, Ortega’s proposal for a transatlantic studies based
primarily on textualism and the subject as an agent of memory should be read
in contrast to a subalternist project that focuses on Eurocentrism and epistemol-
ogy. Though in its heyday Latin Americanist subaltern studies did not originally
conceive of itself as transatlantic, it underwent an important transformation in the
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216 Bécquer Seguín

mid 2000s that took up the mantle of the Atlantic world as its spatial and theo-
retical starting point. The work of colonial scholars such as Yolanda Martínez-​San
Miguel functioned as a hinge in order to pivot subalternist concerns into a trans-
atlantic framework. Scholars who today work in transatlantic studies, however,
seem to have brought with them the concerns of subalternism—​using concepts
like “coloniality of power,” “colonial difference,” and “global designs”—​without
having examined the extent to which these are applicable, for example, to penin-
sular writers, writers beyond the colonial period, or various artistic movements.
Without having previously established the whys and hows of its purpose, the criti-
cal payoff of using these subalternist terms in transatlantic studies remains suspect.
Furthermore, scholars both within and outside of transatlantic studies have not
sufficiently questioned the utility of the subalternist terms themselves.
Like Ortega, Walter Mignolo, of Duke University, emerged as a dominant
voice from the Latin Americanist engagement with postcolonial studies. Whereas
Ortega shared Adorno and others’ early disenchantment with the subalternist
development of postcolonial studies, Mignolo borrowed from subaltern studies
in order to help develop its “decolonial” offshoot. Thanks in part to the dissolu-
tion of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, his name, in particular, and
decolonial theory, in general, have today become nearly synonymous with what
remains of subalternism in Latin America. Mignolo himself is not often an explicit
proponent of transatlantic studies per se, though his work has been anthologized 216
in its volumes and journals. Mignolo’s comparative style, which often involves
contrasting forms of knowledge in Latin America and Europe, however, has made
his work especially influential in the field. The nature of this comparative style has
attracted many, who do consider themselves primarily to be transatlantic scholars
to decolonialism, to adopt it as their own and to transform it in turn.
Mignolo’s contributions to transatlantic studies—​via decolonialism—​hinge on
key dichotomous oppositions.The fact that the titles of two of his books—​perhaps
his earliest decolonial monograph, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, and his lat-
est, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011)—​share everything except for the
last term is no coincidence. Each book invokes the spectral character of a histor-
ical period recognized as fundamental for understanding the evolution of Europe
since medieval times. In both cases, the “darker side,” for Mignolo, is colonialism—​
or coloniality, his preferred term. It is thanks to colonialism above all—​often abso-
lutely so—​that Europe has been able to evolve economically, socially, politically,
and in other ways. This is one side of the coin. The other is that the very notions
of historical progress that even allow us to conceive of such European evolution
are flawed in and of themselves. “It is important for my argument to conceptual-
ize ‘modernity/​coloniality’ as two sides of the same coin and not as two separate
frames of mind,” Mignolo writes in another book, The Idea of Latin America (2005),
“you cannot be modern without being colonial; and if you are on the colonial side
of the spectrum you have to transact with modernity—​you cannot ignore it. The
very idea of America cannot be separated from coloniality: the entire continent
 217

The Transatlantic Turn 217

emerged as such in the European consciousness as a massive extent of land to

be appropriated and of people to be converted to Christianity, and whose labor
could be exploited” (6–​7). One of Mignolo’s aims is, thus, to upset the progressive,
European narrative of history that has given concepts such as modernity their aca-
demic, and even popular, purchase today. But another of his aims—​and of equal
importance—​is to recover forms of indigenous knowledge from Europe’s colonial
trappings. Using anthropology, literary criticism, and political theory, decolonial-
ism in Mignolo’s hands strives to illuminate Latin America’s supposedly unen-
lightened ideas in order to challenge our own way of thinking about its different
regions, histories, and cultures. As he will write later in the same book, “the colo-
nial wound […] leads to a pluriversality of paradigms that are no longer subsum-
able under the linear history of Western thought […] The explosions coming out
of the theoretical, political, and ethical awareness of the colonial wound make pos-
sible the imagination and construction of an-​other world, a world in which many
worlds are possible” (156; emphasis in original).
Mignolo’s explanations of decolonialism in this way appeared to present a
much-​needed critique to a progressive narrative of history. Though important
historical scholarship had turned away from treating history as a series of building
blocks, much of literary criticism in the 1980s still tacitly adopted such a view. At
least one major promise of decolonialism, in this sense, was to embrace a more
216
open-​ended approach that might give Latin America’s indigenous communities
their critical due, no longer judging them according to European concepts that
could not account for crucial aspects of their society. Ortega’s assertion of con-
stitutive mixing—​mestizaje—​conveniently ignores hierarchies of class and race,
just as it cannot account for much of Amerindian history and too conveniently
papers over the disproportionate devastation European conquest wrought on the
Americas. Still, Ortega is right to point to the problematic tendency of subal-
ternists to resort to a narrative of victimization. Mignolo, in particular, is guilty
of upholding a narrative of Amerindian purity that he claims is isolated from
Western epistemology. On this reading, scholars must abandon any hint of Western
concepts lest they want to oppress their indigenous or Latin American subjects.
Mignolo even grounds his idea of colonial difference, which underwrites much if
not all of his oeuvre, on two fundamentally contradictory claims. Mignolo “insists
that Amerindians did have writing,” write Scott Michaelsen and Scott Cutler
Shershow in their 2007 article “Rethinking Border Thinking,” “yet imagines the
writing they had as one that escapes all of writing’s problems and that exists in
the form of an untamed ‘voice’ not yet contaminated by the letter” (43–​44). Later
in his work, Mignolo extended his analysis beyond the colonial period to moder-
nity in Local Histories/​Global Designs (2000), a book from which transatlantic
scholars have significantly borrowed. To Mignolo’s attempt to view coloniality
in today’s globalized economy, Pheng Cheah retorts: the “exploitative develop-
ment in contemporary globalization operates not by racist techniques of exclu-
sion and marginalization, but precisely by including, integrating, and assimilating
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218 Bécquer Seguín

every being into the circuit of the international division of labor. This is done
by transforming them into reserve labor power” (11). Finally, Mignolo’s under-
standing of knowledge entails a form of embodiment that further advances the
victimization narrative in the guise of indigenous purity. The idea is as simple as
it is questionable: linguistic colonization by Europeans was an epistemological
process that violently replaced indigenous “complementarity” with Eurocentric
“dualism” and, today, in order to overcome the effects of colonial violence we
must find those suppressed, “originally good” embodied knowledges. The idea of
indigenous purity, egalitarianism, alterity, and nonimperialism is simply assumed,
never developed.
What seems clear from considering Ortega’s nonsubalternist and Mignolo’s
subalternist proposals for transatlantic studies is that both paradigms force upon
scholars an ethical, not an analytical decision. For Mignolo, that decision has to
do with being complicit in Europe’s imperial construction of modernity. Insofar
as one adopts academic concepts European epistemology has tainted, whether
Marxist, deconstructionist, historicist, etc., one’s work can be seen as, at the very
least, perpetuating Europe’s colonial status quo if not actively suppressing indige-
nous knowledge. Therefore, the scholar must make the ethical decision to suppos-
edly break with Eurocentrism and support indigenous knowledge in all of its
egalitarian, pure, other, and nonoppressive splendor, or the scholar can make the
unethical decision to continue perpetuating Europe’s power and hegemony over 218
the world, academic or otherwise. This ethical decision obviates the analytic one,
which might instead be preoccupied with developing the most illuminating and
systematic understanding of the colonial relationship.
In Ortega’s case the ethical decision is not as obvious as in Mignolo’s, but
nonetheless has the same effect. Rather than asking scholars to choose between
supporting indigenous resistance (historically, not actually, I might add) or uphold-
ing Europe’s colonial regime in modern times, Ortega poses the ethical ques-
tion instead as one of textuality, historical memory, and subjective agency. In
Transatlantic Translations (2006), Ortega explains that his goal is “to examine how
the new was perceived in terms of the already conceived, the different consti-
tuted by what was already known, and the unnamed seen through what had been
already seen” (9). But what he clearly implies by the “already” conceived, known,
or seen is Spanish, not Amerindian. Ortega’s proposed mestizaje paradigm cannot
account for the wide economic, political, and social discrepancies that shaped the
colonial encounter, much less its aftermath, and thereby betrays its presentation as
the egalitarian counter to a subalternist position that uncritically supports indig-
enous identity politics. Far from giving equal weight to both sides of the mixture,
the idea of hybridization Ortega supports would instead embed imperial divisions
of power into a transatlantic framework supposedly meant to expose them.
Though he is right to critique subalternists for their self-​attributed “enlight-
ened culturalist militancy [that] conceived the native as heroic or especially
endowed with wisdom, and presented him or her as a victimized ‘minority’ in
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The Transatlantic Turn 219

need of compensation,” Ortega proposes in its place a rather ahistorical, apo-

litical, and tradition-​oriented approach that attends to “a semantic field of rich
textuality” (9). His is philology without history, textual criticism without con-
text, discourse analysis without theoretical inquiry. In sum, Ortega’s proposal for
transatlantic studies merely dresses up Mignolo’s ethical decision in a different
vocabulary: one is either in favor of giving up on “the spirit of the sixties” (9),
otherwise known as critical theory, and returning to serious textual analysis or
in favor of continuing to belabor a historical episode—​whether the colonial
encounter or the 1960s—​that hybridity and intermixing have already resolved.
Ortega’s ethical choice inversely mirrors Mignolo’s. Mignolo supports a project
of trying to reclaim some kind of Amerindian purity, of categorizing the entire
history of modernity as based on a single idea, and of relentlessly supporting the
victim he has decided to name. Ortega, by contrast, is interested solely in impu-
rity or what he calls “intermixing,” in studying textuality devoid of historical
context, and of unabashedly claiming the mantle of the perpetrator symbolized
by the Spanish language. Though seemingly opposite in their orientation, Ortega
and Mignolo share a common ethical framework for pursuing transatlantic stud-
ies. Neither seems aware of, let alone interested in, dispensing with ethics as a
model for transatlantic critical inquiry.
Mignolo and Ortega are avatars for two dominant currents in transatlantic
218
studies today. The dichotomy they represent between subalternism and textual-
ism might be more broadly characterized as one between theory and nontheory,
with the latter term perhaps including work that might be deemed post-​or anti-​
theoretical. As different as the work they have produced and influenced appears
at first blush, however, Ortega and Mignolo, I hope to have shown, frame their
projects similarly via ethical decision-​making, and thus may be read as sharing
much more in common than in disagreement. A settling of ethical scores, nev-
ertheless, need not and should not be the goal of academic research. As much as
we might appreciate Mignolo’s and Ortega’s work—​and there is indeed much to
appreciate—​this striking similarity should deeply concern scholars of transatlantic
studies and other fields. This focus on ethics displaces the very political impetus
scholars such as Mignolo and Ortega claim for their work. Where politics histo-
ricizes, contextualizes, and struggles, ethics dehistoricizes, isolates, and ponders.
If transatlantic scholars look to make political interventions through their work,
then, it seems that in order to do so, political concerns must first replace ethical
ones.The replacement should consider historical, social, and economic conditions
not as an insignificant backdrop for proclaiming anachronistic allegiances, but
rather as the informative features of a foreground that is indispensable for study-
ing the texts of any epoch. Resorting to ethical decision-​making in transatlantic
studies, however, does nothing more than replay the perverse struggle within the
North American Hispanic academy between Latin Americanists and peninsular-
ists in the guise of breaking the deadlock. In these terms, transatlantic studies may
simply be nationalism through other means.
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220 Bécquer Seguín

There are numerous studies that take a very different approach to transatlantic
studies, one which does not reduce political, aesthetic, and interpretative questions
to binary ethical decisions meant to connote some kind of high-​minded political
advocacy. These books through no fault of their authors, however, unfortunately
fit our still too rigid walls separating otherwise constitutive fields within the disci-
pline of Hispanic studies. Much of this has to do with rigid institutional divisions
in universities and colleges that take time to overcome. Upon reading the first few
pages of any book in Hispanic transatlantic studies today, for example, one will eas-
ily be able to tell whether the author is a scholar of peninsular or Latin American
literature. One might imagine a day in the not-​too-​distant future when at least
some scholars in Hispanic studies are trained from their very first days in graduate
school in a transatlantic key, keeping some of the histories, politics, and literatures
of both Spain and Latin America in their purview as they set out to write their
dissertations. Nonetheless, the approach these and other scholars have taken—​
neither subsuming swaths of literature under a single explanatory category nor
cleansing literary interpretation of history, politics, and society—​has begun to the-
orize the transatlantic space itself.This welcome development—​theorizing its own
set of concerns instead of simply appropriating those from elsewhere—​suggests
that, beyond being a short-​lived academic fad or Hispanophilia by another name,
transatlantic studies has already occasioned a disciplinary and intellectual rear-
rangement of the North American Hispanist checkerboard. 20

Notes
1 For a sampling of some important work in the transatlantic historiography of the Iberian
Peninsula and Latin America, with a special emphasis on “Atlantic history,” see Martínez-​
San Miguel; Sanders; Herzog; Adelman; Ferrer; Altman.
2 Unless otherwise specified, all translations from Spanish are mine.
3 Here, I am thinking, for example, of scholars such as Beatriz Colombi, Christopher
Conway, and Kristine Ibsen, among others. See Colombi; Conway; Ibsen.

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Humanities Newsletter, November/​December 2006, pp. 9–​11.
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Close, Glen S. La imprenta enterrada: Baroja, Arlt y el imaginario anarquista.Translated by César

Aira. Beatriz Viterbo, 2000.
Colombi, Beatriz. Viaje intelectual: Migraciones y desplazamientos en América Latina 1880–​
1915). Beatriz Viterbo, 2004.
Conway, Christopher. “‘Próspero’ y el teatro nacional: encuentros transatlánticos en las
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by Julio Ortega and Celia del Palacio. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008, pp. 132–​157.
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Ureña.” Proyección histórica de España en sus tres culturas, Castilla y León, América y el
Mediterráneo, 2 vols. Juna de Castilla y León, 1993, vol. II, pp. 295–​312.
Faber, Sebastiaan. “Fantasmas hispanistas y otros retos transatlánticos.” Cultura y cambio social
en América Latina, edited by Mabel Moraña. Iberoamericana Veruvert, 2008, pp. 315–​345.
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Atlantic: Toward a Reassessment of Iberian and Latin American Cultural Ties, edited by
Marina Pérez de Mendiola. State U of New York P, 1996, pp. 31–​43.
Ferrer, Ada. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge UP, 2014.
Herzog, Tamar. Fronteirs of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Harvard
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Iarocci, Michael. Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of
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Ibsen, Kristine. Maximilian, Mexico, and the Invention of Empire.Vanderbilt UP, 2010.
Katra, William. “Spain in the Thought of the Argentine Generation of 1837.” Bridging
the Atlantic: Toward a Reassessment of Iberian and Latin American Cultural Ties, edited by
20 Marina Pérez de Mendiola. State U of New York P, 1996, pp. 57–​69.
Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. “Founding Statement.” Boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 3,
1993, pp. 110–​121.
Lorenzo Sanz, Eufemio, editor. Proyección histórica de España en sus tres culturas, Castilla y León,
América y el Mediterráneo, 2 vols. Junta de Castilla y León, 1993.
Loureiro, Angel G. “Spanish Nationalism and the Ghost of Empire.” Journal of Spanish
Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2003, pp. 65–​76.
Martínez-​San Miguel, Yolanda. From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American
Colonial Discourse. Bucknell UP, 2008.
Michaelsen, Scott and Scott Cutler Shershow. “Rethinking Border Thinking.” South Atlantic
Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 1, 2007, pp. 39–​60.
Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization.
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—​ —​ —​ . “The Larger Picture: Hispanics/​ Latinos and Latino Studies in the Colonial
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2
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14
THE GENDER AND SEXUALITY TURN
Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk

While it might be said that the early 1990s constitute an important moment for
studies on issues of gender and sexuality in Latin America, rather than a single
“turn,” another trope to help map the past quarter century in these areas might
2
be that of “twists.” Since gender and sexuality studies have followed sometimes
converging but sometimes very separate paths, it is not always possible to think
of them as developing with any synchronicity. Moreover, at different moments in
time, these areas have experienced dynamics among Latin Americanists in the US
academy that have not coincided with those of Latin American institutions. In the
past decade legal advances in LGBTQI rights have brought on new academic and
artistic explorations and challenges to revised orthodoxies. This essay attempts to
lay out some of general trends that have occurred over the past few decades, iden-
tifying the 1990s as a decade of major shifts that transpired gradually across time
and space, while also highlighting a few more recent twists.
Prior to 1990, even as sexism was deeply ingrained in the habitus of Latin
American and Latin Americanist scholarly institutions, a generational demo-
graphic change was occurring in which a large of influx of women was transform-
ing these spaces, and gradually legitimizing research focused on women writers,
women artists, women in politics, the everyday life of women, and many other
themes promoted around the rubric of women’s studies. In Latin America, the
bloody dictatorial regimes that had dominated the political scene in the 1970s and
1980s imposed rigid gender definitions and a system of censorship that banned
artistic and academic productions that offered alternative views of sexuality and
gender; in some national and regional contexts, this repressive atmosphere would
remain in place longer than in others.
There was also a small body of research being published on questions of
sexuality—​almost always, male homosexuality. This work was more often than
24

224 Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk

not, being carried out by activists and independent scholars, without any aca-
demic affiliation or endorsement. Indeed “gay studies” (often designated as “gay
and lesbian studies,” but, as mentioned above, attention to lesbians was almost
null) was tacitly if not openly disdained by many academics, and institutionalized
homophobia often made the topic of sexuality utterly taboo. Studies of some art-
ists and writers, known for having engaged in same-​sex sexual relationships, or
whose work quite obviously incorporated provocatively homoerotic elements,
were characterized during this period by awkward silences or bizarre phrasings
that maladroitly sidestepped homoeroticism or biographical detail.
The turn that began to take hold roughly in the early 1990s might be thought
of as poststructuralist in nature as it moved away from rigid or fixed definitions,
and instead sought out complexities, anomalies, variances, volatilities and indeter-
minacies. And while contributions to gender and sexuality theory in the 1980s
and early 1990s were many (some key figures: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel
Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Adrienne Rich, Julia Kristeva, Joan Scott, Jeffrey Weeks,
Teresa de Lauretis, Donna Haraway), in retrospect, we might understand the zeit-
geist of the moment through the work of a single theorist: Judith Butler. Butler’s
Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993) made a huge and immediate
impact on English-language readers in the Americas, and did not take long to
start circulating in Spanish with some translations of her work appearing as early
as 1992 in the feminist magazine Feminaria of Buenos Aires. Her books, however, 24
were not published in Spanish until the new millennium.
Butler’s two books articulated with great theoretical sophistication and preci-
sion an approach to and understanding of gender and sexuality that drew from and
dialogued with a range of existing lines of thinking (Foucault, Monique Wittig,
Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, among others), and
might be thought of as being at the center of an intellectual movement of sorts
that accomplished several things with an approximate simultaneity.
A straightforward result was a resounding impact on the field of women’s stud-
ies. The concept of gender, was already shaking up the field by expanding beyond
a focus on women. Sociological studies such as Nancy Chodorow’s influential
The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) and provocative essays such as “Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” by Adrienne Rich (1986) troubled the
field of women’s studies by challenging basic assumptions regarding womanhood.
It was becoming clear that women’s studies was built upon essentializing prem-
ises that could no longer easily be defended in psychological, sociocultural or
even biological terms, as Diana Fuss laid out with some fanfare in her Essentially
Speaking (1989).
Butler’s Gender Trouble began by taking up the writings of feminist scholars
whose work challenged the orthodoxies of women’s studies, including the work
of Simone de Beauvoir, a foundational thinker for the field who had famously
declared in The Second Sex (original French edition 1949), “One is not born,
but rather becomes, a woman,” drawing attention to the disconnect between
 25

The Gender and Sexuality Turn 225

biological sex and socially assumed gender. This particular line of thought had
been reintroduced into debates in the field of women’s studies, from the per-
spective of psychoanalysis, in 1980 by Monique Wittig in her essay “One Is Not
Born a Woman.” While psychoanalytic theory had been productive for women’s
studies—​for example, in the work of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous—​the
work of Wittig used psychoanalysis to challenge the heterosexist conventions of
the field. Butler built on the work of de Beauvoir, Wittig, and others regarding
gender’s constructed nature, but added a layer of complexity to the debates by
introducing the notion of gender performativity. Gender identity is not only not
the product of biological essences, nor is it a mere social construct; instead it is
an embodied practice, embodied specifically in everyday performances of gender
traits, which are learned and often unconsciously enacted, but which can also be
consciously performed in conformance with or in opposition to societal norms
and expectations.
Butler’s gender theory was widely read and persuasive to many. Responses
from traditional feminists, including those who insisted on the importance of
focusing attention on the plight of the materiality of womanhood in a still very
sexist world, were not sufficiently strong to curb Butler’s influence or the shift in
paradigm from women’s to gender studies. El Colegio de México, for example,
made a bold move in 1983 in founding its Programa Interdisciplinario de Estudios
24
de la Mujer; the founding of the Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género at
the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1992, however, marked a very
clear generational shift, incorporating from the start an interest on issues related
not only to women, but to gender in a much more robust way, and to sexuality.
That same year an “Área Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de la Mujer” was created
at the University of Buenos Aires but its denomination changed to gender when
it was established as the Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Género four
years later.
A second very powerful result of the work of Butler and other established and
highly respected scholars who took on issues of sexuality—​especially homosexu-
ality and other nonnormative orientations, desires and identities—​was a simulta-
neous legitimation of sexuality studies, and a radical transformation in approaches
to the sexual. Butler’s sophisticated theoretical grounding and the innovation in
her thinking gave her work a critical weight that was unusual for a little-known
critic. Her theoretical approaches to sexuality, along with those of Sedgwick,
Foucault, Wittig, and a handful of others whose writings began circulating with a
certain fury in the early 1990s, established what would become known as “queer
theory.” Butler’s discussion of gender performance dialogued significantly with the
work of Wittig and Michel Foucault, whose three volume The History of Sexuality
(English translations were published between 1978 and 1986, and Spanish transla-
tions between 1977 and 1987; original French editions had come out between
1976 and 1984) began circulating widely in the latter half of the 1980s, and sexu-
ality was a major underlying thematic throughout Gender Trouble, while Bodies That
26

226 Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk

Matter engaged very directly with the notion of the queer that was taking shape at
the time, most notably in the chapter titled “Critically Queer,” which was also fea-
tured in the inaugural issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 1993.
While legitimizing the study of sexuality, queer theory also significantly prob-
lematized the burgeoning field of gay and lesbian studies, which had by this time
made only very slight inroads into academic spaces. Queer theory was poststruc-
turalist in nature, and rejected notions of sexual (e.g., lesbian or gay) identity as
essence, instead seeing more productive approaches to sexuality through theo-
ries of performance, which allowed for all kinds of possibilities beyond the bina-
ries of male-​female, heterosexual-​homosexual. Foucault’s three volume History
of Sexuality, with its focus on regimes of norms further fueled this energy, which
inspired conferences, essay collections, new courses, and the founding of journals
such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, which sought to both ally itself
with the largely marginalized research that had been going on for years under
the rubric of lesbian and gay studies, while also incorporating the newer “queer
perspective,” which in the first issue the journal’s editors define as “fractious” and
“disruptive” (Dinshaw and Halperin iv).
Lesbian and gay studies was about defining and legitimizing what were assumed
to be stable identities (usually presented as “orientations” rather than “prefer-
ences”), while queer studies would be about defying all essentialized identity cat-
egories, especially those that become normative. Lesbian and gay studies sought a 26
legitimate place within the academic infrastructure (lesbian and gay history, les-
bian and gay literature, lesbian and gay culture), while queer studies often aimed
to destabilize disciplinary norms. A new generation of scholars would apply queer
theory not only to questions of sexuality, but would later consider its approach to
the questioning of norms in a wide range of contexts, including phenomenology
(Ahmed), nationalism and patriotism (Puar), and linear temporality (Freeman).
In the context of Latin American studies in the metropolitan (US and west-
ern European) academy, the gender and sexuality turn took hold gradually, with
an initial impetus from the publication of a handful of high-profile collections
of essays by both established scholars and a new generation of critics. Key texts
include: ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, edited by Paul Julian Smith
and Emilie Bergmann (1995); Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting the Power of
Latin American Gender Imagery, edited by Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stolen
(1996); Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, edited by Daniel Balderston and Donna
Guy (1997); Hispanisms and Homosexualities, edited by Sylvia Molloy and Robert
McKee Irwin (1998); Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino,
Latin American, and Spanish Culture, edited by Susana Chávez-​ Silverman and
Librada Hernández (2000) and Sexualidad y nación edited by Daniel Balderston
(2000). Monographs began appearing, as well, including influential books by both
social scientists: Roger Lancaster, Matthew Gutmann, Annick Prieur, Guillermo
Núñez Noriega, and humanists: Debra Castillo, Daniel Balderston, José Quiroga,
Jorge Salessi, James Green, and Emilio Bejel.
 27

The Gender and Sexuality Turn 227

A particularly influential figure in the introduction of gender and queer theory

into Latin American studies was New York-based Argentine literary critic Sylvia
Molloy. Aside from her coedited volume, listed above, which was based on work
presented at a milestone 1994 conference that she had organized in New York,
she published a number of essays that would be cited frequently, and would only
years later be collected into her anthology, Poses de fin de siglo: desbordes del género
en la modernidad (2012). Molloy’s mark goes deeper, however, as she was profes-
sor and academic adviser to many of the protagonists in this movement, includ-
ing Balderston, Quiroga, Salessi, Ben Sifuentes-​Jáuregui, Licia Fiol-​Matta, Robert
McKee Irwin, Óscar Montero, Gabriela Polit, and Gabriel Giorgi, among others.
Sylvia’s own work, drawn from her research on late n ​ ineteenth-​and early twen-
tieth-​century literature, introduced concepts such as the “pose” (“The Politics of
Posing”)—​in which Latin American sexual nonconformance was read, often with
great discomfort and defensiveness, as an imitation, a performance of foreign-
ness—​and a rigorous methodology of close reading, deeply informed by gender
and queer theory, in order to tease out both Latin America’s deeply ingrained
queerness, and the strategies employed to mark it as inconsequential to national
cultures and histories. Another seminal essay, “La flexión del género en el texto
cultural latinoamericano,” advocates specifically for a push into more uncom-
fortable territories regarding masculinities, queered nationalisms, against the grain
26
readings of canonical writers and historical figures.
A few years into the new millennium, notwithstanding stubborn remnants of
institutional sexism and homophobia (see Molloy, “La flexión”), times had clearly
changed, and research challenging gender orthodoxies and focusing on queer
culture or queer aspects of mainstream national cultures had mostly ceased to
be controversial. The prominent place given to discussions of gender, sexuality,
and queer theory in reference texts such as Dictionary of Latin American Cultural
Studies (Irwin and Szurmuk), Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American
Thought (Martínez-​San Miguel et al.), alongside terms such as nation, modernity,
mestizaje, globalization, aesthetics, and orality, is evidence that gender and queer
theory inflected approaches to Latin American studies had become central to
critical debates in the field.
In Latin America, the academy was in many ways more conservative and inflex-
ible with regards to issues of gender and sexuality, and much of the early impetus
for change came from highly respected scholars who were located partially if not
completely outside the academy, a position that gave them much greater freedom.
Marta Lamas, a distinguished anthropologist, was able to use the independently
published feminist journal Debate Feminista, founded in Mexico City in 1990,
to disseminate translations of important articles by metropolitan scholars such as
Joan Scott, Teresa de Lauretis, and Evelyn Fox Keller in 1992; Norma Alarcón in
1993; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 1994; Jeffrey Weeks and Elizabeth Grosz in
1995; bell hooks in 1996; and Doreen Massey and Judith Butler in 1998, along
with the work of Mexican scholars, including Carlos Monsiváis, Gabriela Cano,
28

228 Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk

Luis González de Alba, Julia Tuñón, Margo Glantz, Marisa Belausteguigoitia, and
many others, whose work, which incorporated these new approaches to gender
and sexuality, would not have been readily accepted by many established academic
journals in Mexico, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s. Lamas’s own writings
on gender, including several seminal essays published in Debate Feminista (e.g.,
“Cuerpo: diferencia sexual y género,” 1994; “Género, diferencias de sexo y dife-
rencia sexual,” 1999) and books (notably: Cuerpo: diferencia sexual y género, 2002)
played a central role both in introducing key concepts of gender and sexuality the-
ory to Mexican readers, and in suggesting the particularities of Mexican culture
that might lend themselves to their application or, on the other hand, significantly
problematize them.
Carlos Monsiváis (1938–​2010), Mexico’s foremost public intellectual of the
last decades of the twentieth century and the first of the new millennium, also
played a major role in legitimizing studies focused on gender and sexuality, or
inspired from gender or queer theory. A prolific writer and widely acclaimed
critic, he published essays specifically on issues of sexuality quite often in Debate
Feminista and other venues, and presented in countless public lectures, reaching
a broadly interdisciplinary audience of both academics and more general readers
and aficionados of both elite and popular culture and history. Monsiváis, whose
work covered a dauntingly wide scope, and was characterized by a sharp wit,
deep historical knowledge, and an astute critical eye, became a required reference 28
on just about any topic on Mexican history and culture. His writings on gender
and sexuality, including essays outlining genealogies of homophobia in Mexico,
highlighting the challenges to sexual norms in the work of important Mexican
writers such as Salvador Novo, and recording the acts of militancy of such figures
as Nancy Cárdenas, deeply influenced the work of the next generation of gender
and sexuality scholars in Mexico, including Gabriela Cano, Rodrigo Laguarda,
Antonio Marquet. Gloria Careaga, and Claudia Hinojosa.
French-​born Nelly Richard was another key figure in effecting the gender
and sexuality turn in Latin America. As the editor of the independently produced
Revista de Crítica Cultural in Chile from its launch in 1990 until its demise in
2008, she worked to foment research and debate in Chile in a number of areas,
with gender and sexuality featured prominently among them. Her 1993 mono-
graph Masculino/​femenino: prácticas de la diferencia y cultura democrática made a notable
impact as Richard became known as a prominent critic and theorist throughout
the Americas in the 1990s.
In Brazil, the prolific Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda edited the anthology
Tendências e impasses: o feminism como crítica da cultura (1994), bringing major met-
ropolitan gender-​studies scholars including Gayatri Spivak and Donna Haraway
to Brazilian readers. That same year she was a protagonist in the founding of the
Programa Avançado de Cultura Contemporânea at the Universidade Federal do
Rio de Janeiro, which became a key site for scholarly innovation in the humani-
ties and social sciences in Brazil. She later published Horizontes plurais: novos estudos
 29

The Gender and Sexuality Turn 229

de gênero no Brasil (1998) and Relações de gênero e diversidades culturais nas Américas
(1999), her work fomenting a major gender and sexuality studies turn in Brazil.
While this turn, manifesting itself in many cases in a proliferation of critical
work on national histories, literatures and cultures, as well as a direct connec-
tion to activism on issues related to gender and sexuality, locally, nationally, and
transnationally, took on different forms and saw different moments of acceleration
and varying degrees of resistance across Latin America, by the early 2000s, despite
persistent acts of institutionalized sexism and homophobia (seen, for example, in
the expulsion in 2013 of the annual “Ciclo Rosa” event from the campus of
the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, despite vociferous protests from
faculty and community: see “Cancelan Ciclo Rosa en la Javeriana por presiones
del catolicismo” (El Tiempo, August 13, 2013)), the gender and sexuality turn was
evident throughout the hemisphere, across the disciplines, as can be seen in this
sampling of anthologies: Todo sexo es político: estudios sobre sexualidades en Argentina
(Pecheny et al.); Estudios sobre sexualidades en América Latina (Araujo and Prieto),
published in Ecuador; Sexualidades en México: algunas aproximaciones desde las per-
spectivas de las ciencias sociales (Lerner and Szasz); the Colombian collection Otros
cuerpos, otras sexualidades (Serrano Amaya); and, from Brazil, Sexualidades pelo avesso:
direitos, identidades e poder (Barbosa and Parker).
While the above genealogy exhibits some tendencies that would seem to imply
28
a relationship of academic imperialism, by which—​only once a line of thinking
was established as a metropolitan school of theory—​would it then be imported
and adopted in Latin America, the dynamic is somewhat more complicated than
that. There was, in fact, a parallel receptivity to gender and sexuality theory in the
north and the south. It just took a little longer to mobilize institutionally in the
south. This can be seen in the professional trajectories of scholars such as Norma
Mogrovejo, whose 1990s dissertation research on lesbian activism in Mexico met
with significant resistance in the Mexican academy and whose research depended
substantially on support from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City
University of New York, or Gabriel Giorgi, who left Argentina, also in the 1990s,
to study with Sylvia Molloy in the United States. Interestingly, the particular con-
figurations and trajectories of queer theory have recently been questioned, both
from the north and from the south.
In the United States, the notion of intersectionality, which refers to overlapping
(intersecting) modes of oppression and discrimination, served to critique queer
theory, which had for the most part not adequately taken into account questions
of racial or ethnic difference. Arguments were made, often quite eloquently, that
queer theory’s lack of concern with race and racialization ended up bolstering
racial hierarchies. Latino queer studies scholar Michael Hames-​García, recalls his
early experiences with queer theory, as follows: “The message seemed clear: peo-
ple of color were to provide raw experience for white academics to theorize” (19).
This early tendency in queer theory’s institutionalization occurred despite some
very early interventions by scholars of color who did take into account questions
230

230 Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk

of race in their critical discussions regarding sexuality. Notably Gloria Anzaldúa’s

seminal Borderlands/​la frontera, published three years prior to Butler’s Gender Trouble,
interrogates not only national borders but also those of language, ethnicity, and
sexuality. This book was highly influential in establishing border studies as an
interdisciplinary field of study, but in the context of the rise of queer theory, it was
overshadowed by the work of Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Leo Bersani, and others.
The politics of language, central to Anzaldúa’s work, exemplified in her steadfast
allegiance to bilingualism, kept her removed from the central tradition of queer
theory both in the United States and in Latin America.
A smoldering discontent gradually began to surface among scholars of color,
evident in the work of such figures as José Muñoz. In his Disidentifications: Queers
of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), he proposes strategies of conscious
misalignment with, as opposed to radical opposition to, the mainstream from both
sexual and racial margins as a means of negotiating and transforming US cultural
and social norms and conventions, and mechanisms of marginalization and exclu-
sion. The work of Muñoz and other scholars such as Juana María Rodríguez, José
Quiroga, Alicia Arrizón, Lázaro Lima, and Laura Gutiérrez insisted on addressing
what Rodríguez calls “the spastic contradictions and wild paradoxes of bodies and
sites, identities and spaces intersecting […] exemplified by the juxtaposition of ”
the terms “queer” and “latinidad” (9), terms meant to reflect positions of subjec-
tivity built upon complex genealogies and dynamics of colonialism, imperialism, 230
racism, sexism, and homophobia.
A growing body of work, realized by Latina/​o and other ethnic studies scholars
in the United States, that sought to theorize gender and sexuality from an inter-
sectional perspective that took issues of race and class deeply into account came to
assume its own rubric, “queer of color critique” (see Ferguson). This perspective
was often articulated in terms that were specifically decolonial, but not necessar-
ily transnational. It is interesting to note that while mainstream gender and queer
theory inevitably traveled and made a significant impact in Latin America, queer
of color critique has gained much less traction. While several US-​based scholars
have drawn significantly from Anzaldúa, for example, in their decolonialist inter-
ventions in Latin America and dialogues with Latin American scholars (see, for
example, Mignolo, Grosfoguel), intersectionality has not been a key theme in their
work, which has tended to focus much more on issues of race and class than on
those of gender and sexuality. Interestingly, while the central tradition of queer
criticism in the United States travels, the critiques of these texts by people of color
are often read as provincial in the international context.
Thus, the Latin America-based scholars that have begun seeking out autoch-
thonous approaches to gender and sexuality theory, for example those working
under the rubric of not queer but rather cuir theory, have mostly positioned their
work in relation to the metropolis, without taking into account what are, in effect,
critiques of metropolitan epistemologies of gender and sexuality that are realized
not from outside the metropolitan academy, but rather from within it. And while
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The Gender and Sexuality Turn 231

these latter views may be oppositional and even radical, the sites of articulation
of scholars such as Muñoz (New York University) or Rodríguez (University of
California, Berkeley) can hardly be considered marginal. On the other hand, the
circulation of their work outside the United States and in Spanish or Portuguese
has ben minimal.
Instead Latin America-based scholars have turned to local genealogies. The
early research and writings of activist intellectuals such as Argentine Néstor
Perlongher, Chilean Pedro Lemebel, or Brazilian Luiz Mott began articulating
locally focused but radically critical interrogations around issues of gender and
sexuality from as early as the 1980s, from the precariousness of South American
dictatorships and early postdictatorship eras. Perlongher’s O negocio do miché:
prostitução viril em São Paulo, a study of male prostitution in Brazil that ques-
tioned mainstream paradigms of hetero-​homo, masculine-​feminine, much in the
same way that queer theory approaches would in the 1990s was first published
in 1987. Lemebel, in collaboration with Francisco Casas, began staging radical
public performance interventions, bringing interrogations of gender and sexu-
ality, and making public statements regarding issues of public health and prosti-
tution, into institutional spaces, where they garnered enormous publicity in the
waning years of the Pinochet dictatorship (the late 1980s)—​although his first
collection of crónicas was not published until 1995. Luiz Mott’s highly contro-
230
versial reworkings of Brazilian colonial history, such as his O sexo proibido: virgens,
gays e escravos nas garras da Inquisição (1988) informs the contemporary work of
Argentine Carlos Figari (“Semióticas queer”), as part of a process of what Figari
has called the “cannibalization” of queer theory by Latin Americans under a
rubric that has become known as “sexual dissidence,” in a conscious distancing
from metropolitan positions (“Queer Articulations”). The terminology of sexual
dissidence is also taken up in Chile by the Colectivo Universitario de Disidencia
Sexual, which maintains an online journal called Disidencia Sexual, featuring an
archive titled “Teoría Cuir” that articulates such positions as “It is important
when cuir starts to get spelled with a ‘c,’ when it is no longer necessary to look
only to the north to write and to deploy politics of sexual disobedience.” This
quote (translation ours) comes from a review by Cristeva Cabello, “Ya no leo a
Butler, leo a valeria flores,” of the fanzine, “Desmontar la lengua del mandato,
criar la lengua del desacato” (valeria flores). Flores, an Argentine writing from
Chile, identifies herself as a feminist positioned outside national metropolitan
circuits, publishing (when in Argentina) instead from the Patagonian province
of Neuquén. Likewise, Sayak Valencia, who also endeavors to rethink gender,
bodies and sexuality from her particular local milieu of Mexico’s northern bor-
der city of Tijuana, from a perspective that she identifies as transfeminist, insists
upon undertaking this project from a “cuir” (and not a “queer” perspective).
Her decolonial approach, framed as a critique of capitalism, looks to local epis-
temologies, practices and politics that seeks to draw out new theories that dia-
logue with but do not depend upon the knowledge production of the global
23

232 Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk

north. The Chilean trans artist “Hija de Perra” [daughter of a bitch] claims to be
a new Southern Cone Latina “who never sought to be identified taxonomically
as queer and who now, according to new knowledges, studies, and reflections
of gender theorists from the north, fits perfectly within this classification that
proposes that botanical name for my extravagant and scandalous species as a
minority” (quoted in Arnés).
While the particular race politics articulated in US-​based queer of color cri-
tique may not translate anywhere else, and the intently southern focus of Latin
American “teoría cuir” and “disidencia sexual” may not care about diffusion to the
north, it is interesting that these two decolonial approaches to queer theory, both
of which make strong cases for questioning the hegemony of what has become
the metropolitan queer theory canon have had little if any contact with each
other. Nor have their particular trajectories coincided as race has not emerged as a
key term of interrogation for cuir theory, nor has queer of color critique expressed
significant interest in thinking transnationally.
There have been some diplomatic efforts by such scholars as Marisa
Belausteguigoitia, a Mexican feminist scholar who earned her Ph.D. at the
University of California, Berkeley, then returned to Mexico to direct the Programa
Universitario de Estudios de Género (PUEG) at the National Autonomous
University, where she has established productive transnational dialogues, which
have seen some interesting fruits. Under her direction, PUEG launched peda- 23
gogical and publication programs that unveiled the deep connections between
racial and sexual inequalities, and highlighted the importance of the US–​Mexico
border. Anzaldúa’s work, central to her program, was finally published by PUEG
recently after meeting years of resistance in Mexico. The newly published key-
words reference, Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical
and Institutional Trajectories, of which Belausteguigoitia is coeditor (with Martínez-
San Miguel and Sifuentes-​Jáuregui), includes an essay on “Queer/​Sexualities” by
New York based Puerto Rican critic Licia Fiol-​Matta, with a response (“Queer
Articulations”) by Argentine scholar Carlos Figari, whose perspective is distinctly
Latin American.
Agendas on sexuality in Latin America have been concerned with advancing
rights, and also with issues of capitalism, and bodies with a profound critique of
modernization and liberalism. Since 2010, same-​sex marriage has been legalized
in four South American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay)
and civil unions are recognized in Chile and Ecuador. Same-​sex marriage is legal
in Mexico City and nine different states, with courts required to perform same-​
sex marriages when petitioned in every state. Transgender people can choose
names and gender identities in most countries in South America, and in general
advancements in terms of adoption and family rights for same-​sex couples is sub-
ject to liberal legislations. The only countries with unrestricted access to abortion,
however, are Guyana, Guiana, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay. The case can be
made that in Latin America the heyday of feminist criticism in the United States
 23

The Gender and Sexuality Turn 233

was spent under repression and that queer criticism had an easier time of estab-
lishing itself in the academy, very often undermining the importance of feminist
antecedents. In this same spirit, it might be argued that rights associated with
queerness, from sex-​change operations to hormonal treatments, are more liberally
available than safe abortions.
A radical critique of state violence has brought forth an interest in exam-
ining the connections between liberalism, modernization and capitalism and
extreme violence against bodies. Examples of such critiques appear in the latest
works of Jean Franco, Ileana Rodríguez, and Rita Segato. Bodies are central to
the agenda of these studies and a new generation of critics heavily invested in
LGBTQI activism has centered bodies as objects of abjection, state intervention,
and pleasure.
The influence of the work of Spanish feminist philosopher Paul (formerly
Beatriz) Preciado is clear in this conjuncture since his1 work, beginning with
Manifiesto contra-​sexual (2003), clearly articulates the sites of struggle. Beatriz
Preciado, a cis-​woman documented in Testo Yonki her transformation through the
self-​inoculation of testosterone during a period of three months. Preciado com-
bines autobiographical texts in which she records the self-​administration of tes-
tosterone and sexual encounters with a theoretical development of what she calls
“the pharmacopornographic regime” which she describes as “the processes of a
23
biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-​technical (pornographic) government of
sexual subjectivity.” Preciado’s work draws heavily from Deleuze and Guattari and
also from Haraway.
Other scholars have combined their thinking on gender and sexuality with
an attention to cosmopolitanism. Brazilian Silviano Santiago, in alignment with
what have become known as “epistemologies of the south” (Santos), has looked
at the sociopolitical localization of South American theoretical developments and
has insisted on politics of alliance in opposition to what he perceives as a frontal
attitude of division in the US practices of outing. Santiago’s interest in the “como-
spolitismo do pobre” [cosmopolitianism of the poor] highlights the multiplicity of
experiences both of exclusion and of pleasure available. Gabriel Giorgi revises the
notion of cosmopolitanism “in light of the gender and sexual politics that it sub-
tends” (Giorgi and Garrido 261). A key player in debates on biopolitics and post-
humanism, Giorgi has also focused on how the animal “explores new modes of
contiguity; in the end it suspends an order of individuations” (17, translation ours).
Giorgi’s readings are informed both by queer theory and the work of Giorgio
Agamben and Roberto Esposito, two critics whose work bridges the memory and
the gender/​sexuality turns in Latin America.
These latter twists perhaps serve to show that the gender and sexualities turn
has consolidated in both metropolitan Latin American studies and through-
out Latin America. These localized appropriations are recent and evolving,
and their influence will undoubtedly spur additional twists and turns in the
coming years.
234

234 Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk

Note
1 While Paul Preciado, whose work advocates for a radical gender-neutral s​tance, prefers
to be referred to with masculine rather than feminine pronouns, since these earlier works
were published under his former name, Beatriz, we use feminine pronouns in references
to this body.

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 237

15
THE AFFECT TURN
Laura Podalsky

Let me begin on a perverse note by saying I’m not sure that there has been an
“affective turn.” It’s true that several books and articles have been published that
address the role of emotion and/​or affect in Latin American culture (e.g., Peluffo;
236
Gonzalbo Aizpuru et al.; Beasley-​Murray; Podalsky; Moraña and Sánchez Prado;
Kantaris and O’Bryen; Arellano; Reber).1 Nonetheless, the disciplinary scope
of these studies is rather limited as most work on emotion and affect by Latin
Americanists has taken place in the fields of literary studies, cultural criticism, film
studies, and, to some degree, anthropology. This contrasts sharply with the way in
which geographers (Thrift), anthropologists (Lutz and Abu-​Lughold), and even
political scientists (e.g., Marcus) analyzing dynamics in other parts of the world
have addressed the topic—​often times under the rubric of “emotion.” And whereas
US historian Peter Stearns has discussed the emergence of “American cool” as
an “emotional style” in the mid twentieth century and Barbara Rosenwein has
explored the constitution of “emotional communities” in the Middle Ages, Latin
American(ist) historians have expressed little interest in investigating the history
of emotion in the region until fairly recently. In sum, if there has been an affec-
tive turn within Latin American studies, it has traveled along a particular set of
routes and has not signaled a seismic shift akin to the “linguistic turn,” as much as
a growing acknowledgment of the role of emotion, affect and/​or sensorial flows
as generative forces in larger sociocultural and political processes.
With that disclaimer in mind, this essay will begin by tracking lines of inquiry
that have led Latin Americanist scholars (in some disciplines) to “think affect”
as a means by which to illuminate Latin American sociocultural dynamics—​
placing particular emphasis on the factors motivating such investigations. The
following section will discuss potential shortcomings of this “affective turn” as
238

238 Laura Podalsky

it has been practiced up to the moment; and offer some suggestions about what
has yet to be done. As a whole, the essay positions itself as a metacritical inter-
vention that draws on and departs from earlier work that mapped the competing
theorizations of affect and emotion (Moraña “Postscríptum”, 313–​322; Podalsky
9–​15; Thrift).

Points of Departure
In large part, Latin Americanist inquiries about affect (and emotion) have arisen
around three different problematics. The thickest engagement has been driven
by efforts to diagnose sociocultural, political, and economic configurations in
the late ​twentieth-​and early twenty-​first centuries—​as part of efforts to analyze
the psychosocial afterlife of repressive dictatorships and armed conflicts (Franco;
Manz; Richard); and/​or as part of the examination of new economic structures
and dynamics, broadly characterized as neoliberalism and globalization (Trigo;
Poblete).Within this node, some scholars have turned their attention toward affect
as a means to understand the continuities between periods marked by political
change (from dictatorship to democracy). Calling into question distinctions based
on the nature of state power, such studies also undercut facile distinctions between
repression and liberation. A second cluster of scholarship has emerged around
the role of affect in the constitution and maintenance of particular collectives. 238
Encompassing studies on queer cultural production as well as social movements
and political activism in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, these
disparate efforts have turned to affect as a response to the perceived shortcom-
ings of other concepts (identity, ideology) to theorize the cohesion of particular
groups of people. Through the examination of particular case studies, some of
these works propose that affective ties and/​or a sense of belonging (rather than
claimed attributes and articulated beliefs) is/​are what holds together particular
groups and mobilizes them to act as a collective (Beasley-​Murray; Muñoz). The
third and smallest body of research has focused on emotion in earlier historical
periods—​most notably its role in politics and social order during the colonial
period and in nation-​building projects in the nineteenth century. The pioneering
work of Mexican-​based historians Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru and her colleagues
began to be published in the late 2000s. More recently, US-​based social historians
have tackled the issue of emotion to better understand processes of social control
in colonial Mexico that cannot be explained by state actions or social codes (e.g.,
honor) alone (Villa-​Flores and Lipsett-​Rivera). For their part, literary scholars
have begun to reassess sentimental fiction from the 1800s to understand how
novels have called on their readers to feel part of a larger (national) community
that is felt as well as imagined (Peluffo). The conceptual shift from affect (often
used in studies of the contemporary moment) to emotion (in scholarship on early
periods) is significant and will be addressed later on. For now, it is simply impor-
tant to note that despite the many differences between all three lines of inquiry,
 239

The Affect Turn 239

they share an understanding of the sensorial as a meaningful cultural, social, and

political force, whether in propelling a particular economic system (late capitalism
of late twentieth and twenty-​first century), uniting a social collective, or bolster-
ing a given sociopolitical order or state-​formation (in the colonial period and the
nineteenth century).

Reconceptualizing Authoritarian Legacies and Neoliberal

Promises
One could say that the turn toward affect began as an attempt to address the
complex legacies left by state-​sponsored terrorism and/​or years of civil war that
took place in the late twentieth century in countries from Argentina and Chile
to Guatemala, El Salvador and Perú. Political and economic concerns have been
at the forefront of scholarly inquiry (e.g., the nature of so-​called transitions to
democracy, the shifting forms of capitalist expansion), along with important
work revolving around the issue of cultural memory.Yet other approaches have
been sought to address the pervasive embodied psychosocial effects of those
years. Starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the years of intense violence
waned, anthropologists were particularly keen to acknowledge how communi-
ties were responding to genocidal campaigns carried out against them. In some
238
cases, this took the form of studying a particular community’s grief and tracing
the ways in which public actions gradually began to “link … the individual
to the collective process of coping with fear, stress, and recovery” (Manz 301).
In others, there was an effort to recognize how alternate (indigenous) beliefs
about the interface between mind and body influenced the painful aftermath
of rape as experienced by both the victim and her community (Theidon, as
cited in Franco 89–​90).
Although these studies certainly responded to recent traumatic events within
Latin American countries, they were also part of a larger shift within anthropol-
ogy as a field. In her excellent essay “Coming to Our Senses: Anthropology and
Genocide” (2002), medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-​Hughes argued that
“an anthropology of suffering has emerged as a new kind of theodicy, a cultural
inquiry into the ways that people attempt to explain, account for, and justify the
presence of pain, death, affliction, evil in the world” (375). For Scheper-​Hughes,
whose much-​debated 1992 book Death without Weeping addressed the “lack of grief
and of maternal remorse” for infant deaths among poor women in northeastern
Brazil (1999: 146), the ethnographic attention to the pain of others in the contem-
porary moment has led to self-​reflection on anthropology’s disciplinary practices
throughout the twentieth century wherein “one part of mankind treated the other
as an object” of distanced inquiry (351). While her critique resonates with those
made by James Clifford, George Marcus, and others in the mid 1980s, the terms of
her intervention—​as a “[c]‌oming to our senses”—​implicitly interrogate the limita-
tions (and costs) of rational methods as the sole means of inquiry. In this regard,
240

240 Laura Podalsky

Scheper-​Hughes recognizes that the “anthropology of suffering” involves vexing

questions about the ethical stakes in “attempts to make meaningful the suffering
of others” (154)—​of acting not only as witness, but also of transcriber/​translator
of the pain of individuals and groups.
Addressing the aftermath of state-​sponsored terrorism was taken up some-
what differently by literary, film, and performance studies scholars who examined
the ways in which varied forms of cultural production (from testimonios, novels,
documentaries, and fiction films, to installations and performance pieces) in the
1980s–​early 2000s attempted to represent and mediate authoritarian legacies of
violence, pain, and suffering. In these fields, there was a deep interest in recogniz-
ing emergent textual devices for registering traumatic experience. Many of these
critics have seen the deliberate formal gaps of these films, novels, and testimonios as
an acknowledgment that any and all attempts to represent the violent past are nec-
essarily insufficient. The worth of such texts lies, according to this line of thought,
in their ability to make the past present for contemporary viewers and readers in
visceral ways that impede facile attempts to cordon off further public debate about
state-​sponsored terrorism and its aftermath.
In her most recent book Cruel Modernity (2013), Jean Franco widens the histor-
ical scope of such analyses to address not only the affective repercussions of such
ferocious dictatorial repressions but also the underlying motivations that preceded
their enactment. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Giorgio Agamden and 240
Darius Rejali, she argues that extreme violence is a feature of modernity that,
while not unique to Latin America, finds in the region particular manifestations
rooted in colonial systems. Although emotion and affect are not the ostensible
focus of her study, they emerge as a recurrent leitmotiv in her arguments about
the colonial legacies undergirding contemporary acts of extreme brutality and the
psychic and social repercussions of such acts, as well as in her explorations of the
ethics of literary, photographic, and filmic texts that attempt to represent atroci-
ties. She argues convincingly that the monstrous nature of military actions (slam-
ming children against trees, raping women and then mutilating their reproductive
organs, eating the bodies of dead enemies) exceed any “tactical advantage” and
thus can only be explained as the outgrowth of a long history of dehumanizing
dispossessed peoples (frequently rural, indigenous populations). Franco traces this
lack of empathy and disregard for the humanity of (certain) others to the colonial
period and in the racism “instilled with the Conquest, which left an inheritance of
guilt and above all fear that the old gods would return” (7). In her account, these
deep-​seated affective legacies became reanimated and mobilized in the twentieth
century during uneven modernization processes, and became coupled with the
anxiety and uncertainty of privileged sectors about their ability to harness eco-
nomic and political structures in effective imitation of US and European models
of modernity. The “professionalization” of state police and military forces created
the means by which to mold together that amalgamation of old fears and new
anxieties; and to channel them into repressive programs of actions meant to wipe
 214

The Affect Turn 241

away impediments to Western-​style development. Franco’s identification of the

multiple roots of contemporary violence is not entirely new, nor is her insistence
that the scale and intensity of the brutality is constitutive of modernity (rather
than exceptional or aberrant) entirely unique. Rather, what is noteworthy about
her account is the acknowledgment of the vital roles of affective forces in larger
sociocultural dynamics—​i.e. her characterization of them as productive intensities,
rather than as epiphenomenal outcomes.
Although ostensibly focused on other issues, studies such as Franco’s Cruel
Modernity (2013), Gundermann’s Actos melancólicos (2007), and Richard’s Cultural
Residues (2004) all comment on the affective charge of cultural texts, seeing it
as a vital means of registering the unrepresentable density of past experience as
well as of intervening in contemporary public debates. In this light, it is use-
ful to recognize how those works emerged alongside others (often by the same
scholars) that demonstrated equal, if not greater, concern over the role of affect
in the “management of memory” by postdictatorial regimes and the coincident
rise of neoliberal platforms and policies. Providing a refracted version of Fredric
Jameson’s proposal about the contemporary “waning of affect” as an outgrowth of
late capitalism, writers like Beatriz Sarlo (as well as Franco and Richard) expressed
grave concerns about the intensification of media flows and a nonstop “culture
of immediacy” that serve as a tactics of forgetting and “a necessary counterpart to
240
neoliberal reforms, a means to fuel consumerism and depoliticize the citizenry”
(Podalsky 18). Thus they wrote penetrating attacks on what they perceived as the
new sensorially laden (ergo thought-​less) sociocultural configurations that rewired
the interface between subject and technology to prioritize and automatize visceral
reactions. Sarlo and Richard spoke of sensations being “manufactured” by the cul-
ture industries into a network of threads that attempted to suture over the traumas
of dictatorship.
Although less focused on authoritarian legacies, other scholars have shared this
concern for how the “administration of affect” has become a favored tactic of
contemporary capitalism—​for example, as a means to extract greater productivity
from undocumented labor (whether day laborers, or restaurant workers) (Poblete
68–​70).To some degree, in analyzing nodal points of fear, distrust, resentment, and
anxiety as well as micro-​regimes of terror, this work has precursors in the essays of
cultural critics like Susana Rotker, Jesús Martín-​Barbero (cited in Poblete 72), and
Rosanna Reguillo who, in the early 2000s, examined how discourses about fear
and terror (particularly those circulated by newspapers and television) contributed
to social atomization and spatial consolidation of class polarizations in urban envi-
ronments (e.g., the rise of gated communities in the 1990s in many Latin American
cities).Yet, unlike those earlier studies focused on discursive frameworks and flows,
the recent scholarship has been more attentive to how sensorial dynamics func-
tion within a regime of biopolitics—​i.e. “how power works directly on bodies, in
the everyday life that once appeared to be a refuge from politics” (Beasley-​Murray
xiii). Of particular interest has been the exploration of how affective dynamics
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242 Laura Podalsky

relate to comings-​apart of the social and underwrite contemporary (late) capitalist

expansion. Abril Trigo has offered a particularly lucid analysis of this problematic:

Today, under the regime of global, flexible, combined accumulation, a [new]

global imaginary has been imposed [upon us] replacing older ideologies and
national imaginaries with a new political-​libidinal economy in which the
cathexis of desire (the investment of affective, libidinal energy) is captured
by capital and the logic of commodities.
(39; author’s translation)

In the article,Trigo argues that even as this new regime promotes a “feeling of lib-
erty,” we are facing “the exploitation of the power/​force of desire via the manipu-
lation of affect” (44).

Reconceptualizing the Constitution of Contemporary

Collectivities
In contrast to the aforementioned studies that see the channeling of sensation as an
exercise of power in service of the workings of capital, a second cluster of scholarly
works holds out the potential of affect in terms of other sorts of mobilizations.
Many of the these efforts conceptualize the term in line with a feminist rethinking 24
of the body and its epistemic possibilities—​i.e. acknowledging the body as a site of
knowing otherwise—​and with an understanding of “affect as a form of embod-
ied knowledge and practice” (Bosco 346, citing Thrift 60). In this light, while not
characterized as necessarily counterhegemonic, affect becomes a means to rethink
the contestatory dynamics of nondominant groups in ways that avoid stultifying
debates about identity, class consciousness, or ideological formations. In devel-
oping this alternate approach, queer studies scholars have turned to the notions
of “structures of feeling” or “archives of feeling.” Taken from the work of British
scholar Raymond Williams, the former can be understood as an emergent socio-
cultural configuration that functions as a collective response to given sociohistor-
ical conditions, in this case, white and heteronormative strategies of containment
(Negrón-​Muntaner 63, citing Bordowitz; Muñoz “Being North”; Cvetkovich 1–​
7). The latter refers to “ephemeral and personal collections of objects” “invested
with emotional, and even sentimental value” as well as the “practices that surround
their production and reception” which serve as the basis upon which to acti-
vate memory and “alternate modes of knowledge” (Cvetkovich 7–​8). José Esteban
Muñoz positions affect in terms of practices and performances wherein certain
enactments by/​of minoritarian groups are deemed excessive by dominant sectors
(77–​78). Pointing to the melancholic music of Cuban performer Bola de Nieve
and Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs), Muñoz argues that
performances of such work do not re-​present (queer) Latino/​american experi-
ences of repression so much as provide the means by which circuits of belonging
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The Affect Turn 243

and recognition are constituted and reconfirmed (“Being North”). For her part,
filmmaker and scholar Frances Negrón-​Muntaner locates structures of feeling
not only as/​through performance, but also in the formal maneuvers of alterna-
tive films and videos like Mérida Proscrita (Raúl Ferrera-​Balanquet and Enrique
Novelo-​Cascante, 1990) and Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (Ela
Troyano, 1993) (63–​64). Among other things, she points to their invocation and
reworking of “culturally specific form[s]‌of sharing with the world” such as the
bolero that serve as “vehicle[s] for making [queer] desire public” (70). The appro-
priation of a romantic musical form that “seduce[s] the listener not by virtue of
its discursive truth but its elusiveness” becomes a means to “verif[y] personal suf-
fering and render […] it culturally legitimate (or even sublime)” (71). Implicit in
her argument is the suggestion that the deployment of the bolero within the films
provides a necessary supplement to narratives focused on the personal journeys of
gay and lesbian artist-​protagonists as they navigate “geographical dislocations” and
patriarchal, heteronormative conventions. Operating beyond the representational
register (i.e. beyond what is “said” by the lyrics; what is depicted through the plot;
what is visualized on screen), the bolero exists through excess, “giv[ing] voice to
an irrationality that the singing voice/​subject cannot explain … or [does not] have
adequate words for” (71).
Such approaches contrast with those mentioned earlier—​most notably, by
24
veering away from the analysis of representation, and toward a consideration
of mode of address and relational circuits. The analysis of textual maneuvers (or
representational conventions) becomes subordinate to acknowledging alternative
interpretive protocols in discussions of how and why queer artists appropriate
narrative modes (melodrama) and musical forms (the bolero) known for their
sensational excess. In so doing, such scholarship offers a less determinist per-
spective on the sociopolitical functioning of mass culture’s sensorial appeals and,
more significantly, locates affect as a function of relational circuits that are not
(entirely) fixed.
Whereas Muñoz and Negrón-​Muntaner have been particularly interested in
the role of affect in generating networks of belonging among Latino/​American
gay, lesbian, and queer subjects, other studies underscore how affective dynamics
subtend the formation and maintenance of collective sociopolitical action in the
contemporary moment. Geographer Fernando Bosco contends that the “regular
mobilization of affective bonds among members of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo”
has allowed them to “sustain collective action and mobilization over a long period
of time” in contrast to other groups whose interventions are more temporally
circumscribed (342–​343). Other studies address the role of affect as an emergent
dynamic in other situations where the existing bonds between members of the
group are tenuous—​for example, how precarious labor situations, on occasion,
can generate cross-​race alliances “rooted in an alternate, [mutually binding] affect”
(Poblete 68). In all of these examples, we might see the scholarly attention to
affective dynamics as a recognition of and response to the failure of traditional
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244 Laura Podalsky

leftist politics (and/​or our misunderstanding of it), the rise of politics otherwise
(e.g., of tactical interventions rather than revolutionary campaigns), and to debates
over the long-​term efficacy of such forces.
The fullest theoretical account of the political potential of affect (of which
I am aware) is the chapter “Escalón 1989: Deleuze and Affect” in Jon Beasley-​
Murray’s 2010 book Posthegemony in which he employs the concept (in conjunc-
tion with the notion of habitus) to redress the shortcomings of existing theories
of civil society (as well as cultural studies’ approaches to populism and politics).
In line with the theorizations of Spinoza, Deleuze, and Massumi, he characterizes
affect as “an index of power” that can be harnessed to instantiate order, but never
entirely contained. According to Beasley-​Murray, affect “always takes place between
bodies, at the mobile threshold between affective states as bodies either coalesce
or disintegrate, as they become other to themselves” (128). Thus, while acknowl-
edging how affect can be captured, he is particularly attentive to what spills over
or exceeds containment as a means to theorize insurgency. He uses the case of
the guerrilla group Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN)
in El Salvador to provide an alternate account of militancy, arguing, like Bosco,
that ideological investments are insufficient to inspire and sustain participation
over prolonged periods. Operating between 1980 and 1992, the FMLN became
increasingly mobile and disperse after the first few years of fighting as a means of
outwitting the better-​funded armed forces of the state. In this process, its members 24
were sustained less by a “specific set of [shared] beliefs” than by the new ways of
being demanded by clandestine operations. According to Beasley-​Murray, it was
this joy of “becoming-​other”—​i.e. of moving away from “individualized subjec-
tivities … [and toward] depersonalized community”—​and of “new ways of being
together” that motivated and nourished guerrilla members (133, 139, 141). This
paradigm reimagines sociopolitical mobilizations in terms of immanence rather
than in terms of opposition crystallized through discourse (see also O’Bryen).

Recognizing the Role of Emotion in the Past

Although most efforts associated with the affective turn diagnose the contem-
porary moment (i.e. the late twentieth and early twenty-​first century), there has
been some scholarship on earlier periods by both literary scholars and histori-
ans. Exemplifying the former, Ana Peluffo was interested in understanding how
nineteenth-​century literature served to promote a shared sense of national belong-
ing. Her inquiry into the sociocultural and political ramifications of sentimental
novels led to a more encompassing interrogation of the role of emotion in literary
canonization and gender politics. As noted earlier, historians have veered into the
terrain of the affective only recently, motivated by a desire to understand sociocul-
tural dynamics that cannot be attributed merely to legal regulations and explicit
social norms. Carried out under the rubrics of sentiment and emotion, these two
lines of scholarship acknowledge the importance of historicizing emotion and its
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The Affect Turn 245

role in society. In other words, they recognize that emotions are socially recognized
phenomena; that how they are “identified” and understood may change over time;
and that the relationship between emotion and reason, as well as social norms
about who, when, where, and how emotions can be expressed are contingent
rather than universal.
For example, Peluffo’s insightful Lágrimas andinas demonstrates how the late
nineteenth century was a particularly transformative period in the gendering of
certain emotions as sentiment became increasingly associated with the feminine.
Her study offers a revisionist take on Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido that
begins by interrogating horizons of expectation, reminding us that what might
be read today as the novel’s hyberbolic emotion and provoke laughter on the
part of the contemporary reader “evoked tears in the nineteenth century” on the
part of both male and female audiences (28–​29). Noting that “19th-​century read-
ing protocols [were] radically different from those in the contemporary era,” she
argues that the novel drew on well-established literary and cultural traditions that
celebrated the moral weight of expressing (proper) emotions publicly (39). Thus,
she anchors her analysis of the novel’s sentimentality to the literary horizon in
which it was produced/​read and to the sociohistorical conditions that delineated
potential parameters of shared feeling. Situated within a historical horizon with a
high mortality rate—​particularly in the aftermath of the War of the Pacific (1879–​
24
1883), “readers turned to [sentimental] literature with its obsessive meditations on
tragedy, sickness, loss and death as a means to process on a cultural level those trau-
matic events” (51). Of equal importance for the novel’s tale of indigenous suffering
(embodied by Marcela) and creole piety (embodied by Lucia) was its reliance on
the Christian call to love thy neighbor in the form of caring, charitable acts (74).
Beyond its contribution toward complicating our understanding of literature’s
emotional appeals, Peluffo’s study also makes an important metacritical interven-
tion by demonstrating how, by the early twentieth century, assessments of literary
value increasingly began to disparage such sensorial demands on the reader—​an
argument that has clear relevance for today’s critical horizon (discussed in greater
detail below).
Peluffo’s book finds an interesting counterpart in recent scholarship on the his-
tory of emotions by Latin American(ist) historians. Emerging in the late 2000s with
the work of Gonzalbo Aizpuru and her colleagues in Mexico, these efforts have
differed from earlier historical studies on mentalités, sensibilidades nacionales as well
as from others on gender relations, kinship, and sentimental education in the colo-
nial period. As noted by Javier Villa-​Flores and Sonya Lipsett-​Rivera, there is now
a “systematic and much more methodical analysis of the emotions found in the
archives and an engagement with other disciplines in order to understand them”
(3). Leaving open the possibility of the universality of emotions per se, historians
nonetheless are examining how the discourses used to describe those embodied
states “fit the standards of feeling and expression of the time” (2) as well as how the
social value of emotions (such as grief) has changed over time (Holler 20). To do
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246 Laura Podalsky

so, many of the essays in Villa-​Flores and Lipsett-​Rivera’s 2014 Emotions and Daily
Life in Colonial Mexico examine the way in which social institutions—​namely, the
Catholic Church and the state—​helped to shape the emotional life of the colony
by providing models and expectations about proper expression and behaviors. For
example, sermons on Christ’s suffering and visual images of his bleeding body
encouraged parishioners to express sorrow (within certain bounds) as a pathway
to God while visual representations of the Virgin Mary as Mater Dolorosa exem-
plified (proper) maternal grief (Holler 23–​24). For its part, the state validated
emotional responses that resonated with dominant systems of belief about, for
example, gender relations and patriarchal order. This can be seen in court cases
in which defendants described their actions (e.g., murdering a family member) as
a visceral response to a perceived transgression (e.g., a wife’s complaints over her
husband’s drunkenness). In sanctioning (rather than punishing) such behaviors, the
state recognized the husband’s anger as a righteous reaction to his wife’s insubor-
dination according to Catholic precepts set down by St. Augustine (Villa-​Flores
and Lipsett-​Rivera 1–​2). Through the study of court cases and theological works,
historians have begun to outline how the management of emotions was important
part of the “dynamics of colonial domination” (3).
While attention to institutional dynamics allows historians to address the his-
tory of emotion systematically (by examining a wealth of documentary evidence
left by court and church officials), scholars have recognized that emotions were 246
not simply circumscribed in a top-​down fashion. Several cite the potential pro-
ductivity of mining Rosenwein’s notion of “emotional communities”—​or social
groups (as defined by familial ties, labor relations or oficios, and practices) “that
adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value—​or devalue—​the
same or related emotions” (7)—​as the basis of a more dynamic model for socio-
emotional circuits. Unfortunately, the acknowledgment of the fruitfulness of this
model has not led to specific case studies—​perhaps because of the difficulty of
finding new sources (beyond church and state documents) and/​or crafting new
methods. What has had a more immediate impact on Latin American (colonial)
historians is the work of William Reddy (a scholar of French history) who has
been instrumental in understanding “emotional statements and gestures” as tac-
tics—​i.e. as forms of social intervention rather than as merely a report on the
speaker’s feelings (5). This has allowed historians to trace the possibility of some
level of agency—​for example, by noting how individuals or groups might “appro-
priate” established emotional scripts when navigating state or church networks. As
Villa-​Flores and Lipsett-​Rivera mention in the introduction to their anthology, an
attorney might “couch […a creole] defendant’s emotions to fit the standards of
feeling and expression of the time” (2). And, Indian plaintiffs might do the same, at
least by the mid to late colonial period, once they had learned “how to read [non-​
Indians’] emotional displays” and begun to recognize colonial expectations about
indigenous emotional range and behavior. Indians could frame their testimonies
to underscore a Spanish official’s lack of composure (and thus, unsuitability for
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The Affect Turn 247

governance) and to depict their own humility in such a way as to “acknowledge

their place in the colonial hierarchy” (Fisher 171, 179, 192).
Such studies exemplify the cultural turn that has been taken by many Latin
American(ist) historians, an awareness of the distinction between feelings (as
embodied experiences) and their representation, and the potential utility of
notions of “performance” and “colonial mimicry” for interpreting the depiction
of emotion in colonial documents. While demonstrating the influence of literary
and cultural theory (and studies) on history as a discipline, the above-​mentioned
essays also point to how historical studies can make significant contributions to
scholarship on affect and emotion being carried out by those in other disciplines.
Most notably, historians can help to temper overly broad assertions about the
singular role of the sensorial in contemporary society by making visible the exis-
tence of emotional “regimes” and their vital role in the exercise of power in earlier
periods. Whether the recognition of the usefulness of Reddy’s (and Rosenwein’s)
work demonstrates a full-​fledged “emotional turn” within Latin American histo-
riography is less certain given the relative paucity of existing scholarship.

Potential Dead Ends, Bumps in the Road and Going Off Track
Even while acknowledging the productivity of the affective as a line of inquiry,
246
some scholars have raised concerns—​on the one hand, about a tendency to cel-
ebrate affect as a “practice that in itself functions as a tool of emancipation” (a
charge of which I am skeptical); and, on the other, about its limitations for his-
torical inquiry (a critique which I find persuasive) (Sánchez Prado 2). In terms of
the former, many studies on the topic recognize the dangers of overly optimistic
accounts of affect. As Kantaris and O’Bryen note in the introduction to their vol-
ume, “(affective) flows … cannot be so easily decoupled from the … hydraulics
of power” (37–​38; see also O’Bryen 246). Even Beasley-​Murray, a key proponent
of the usefulness of the concept does not equate affect with liberatory potential.
Charting the Escher-​ian interface between empire and multitude (later cited by
O’Bryen), Beasley-​Murray insists that while “[a]‌ffect is a ‘disposition to change’ …
change may also be for the worse” (165).Thus, in my mind, the scholarly embrace
of affect (and emotion) as a line of inquiry has not produced an acritical stance or
a facile celebration of the liberating possibilities of sensorial dynamics.
Indeed, while affect is now positioned as a meaningful (and even constitutive)
part of sociopolitical processes, there is still a scholarly tendency to equate sensorial
dynamics with manipulation and to ignore (or dismiss) their epistemic possibilities.
In recalling the studies by Richard, Sarlo, and Franco mentioned earlier, it’s use-
ful to underscore that their critiques of the contemporary “culture of immediacy”
expressed concern about (rather than interest in) affective flows (Podalsky 6–​7). To
a large degree, the reticence emerges from the valorization of “critical distance”
as a hallmark of scholarly inquiry in the humanities as well as the social sciences
and may have influenced the study of emotion in ways seldom acknowledged by
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248 Laura Podalsky

the scholars themselves. Scheper-​Hughes takes up this very issue in “Coming to

Our Senses.” Her metacritical reflections on anthropology underscore how the
discipline’s self-​characterization as a more objective assessment of the human con-
dition existed alongside (depended on) the disavowal of genocide as well as the
“less dramatic, permitted, everyday acts of violence that make participation (under
other conditions) in genocidal acts possible” (369). She suggests that the origin of
this “oversight” lies in early anthropologists’ disinclination to bolster Eurocentric
notions of superiority and to (further) stigmatize non-​Western societies by noting
the practice of mass killings prior to their contact with Europeans. However, the
tendency quickly morphed into overlooking the “the genocidal actions of Western
colonizers, modern police state, and other political and military institutions of mass
destruction” (348–​349). Scheper-​Hughes’s account suggests that as anthropologists
sought to maintain their distance, they ignored basic ethical imperatives in the
name of scholarly inquiry and also became blind to the mundane beliefs, practices,
and affective states that underwrite and make possible large-​scale brutality against
“others.”
Other anthropologists suggest that the inclination to turn away from the affec-
tive was a product of the discipline’s inheritance of a sociological framework that
encouraged researchers to identify social structures as those which distinguished
societies from each other. Joanna Overling and Alan Passes stress this very issue
in the introduction to their edited book on The Anthropology of Love and Anger: 248
The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. Noting that the investigation of
emotions “constitutes a relatively new field of study in Amazonia,” they argue that
their approach helps to overcome “a prejudice inherent in Western political, legal,
social and moral theory” (and inherited by anthropology and moral philosophy)
that distinguishes between the public/​rational and the private/​affective and thus
influences how “we” translate “other peoples’ reasoning about the world of the
social” (ix, 3). In their case, the acknowledgment of emotion as central to the way
in which Amazonian peoples conceptualize themselves (and thus, as an essential
lens for ethnological study) is predicated on disciplinary self-​reflexivity.
Metacritical awareness about the epistemological shortcomings of intellectual
pursuits (understood as rational, distanced) has led scholars in other disciplines to
offer challenges to previous approaches to emotion. In this regard, Villa-​Flores,
Lipsett-​Rivera and Holler cite Rosenwein’s critique of the “‘developmentalist’
model of human emotion” forwarded by earlier historians (such as Johan Huizinga
and Norbert Elias) who suggested that emotions were “disciplined by the forces
of modernity” (14n21, 20, 40n6). As Fisher notes, such arguments were appealing
for a number of reasons, including their apparent confirmation of a “comfortable,
progressive view of history, that accentuated the differences between the mod-
ern and the premodern” (190). As Latin Americanist historians grappling with
the challenges of addressing the history of emotion in that region, they hope to
avoid teleological models that depend on pre-​established equivalencies between
emotional self-​restraint and the modern. In the field of literary studies, Peluffo’s
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The Affect Turn 249

Lágrimas andinas questions the process of literary canonization (based on a devalu-

ing of sentimental fiction) at the aegis of male authors and critics, while also
problematizing the efforts of feminist critics whose valorization of the work of
female authors depended upon staving off or ignoring its sensorial appeals (24–​
25). However, such self-​reflections on disciplinary practices are fairly rare and the
underlying suspicion of emotion (as always-​already too much) is still widespread.
A second (and, in my mind, more apt) critique of the affective turn in Latin
American studies relates to what it has told us and, moreover, what it can tell us
about the past. In terms of the first issue, and as noted earlier, there is a paucity of
in-​depth explorations of the sensorial in earlier historical periods even though the
“question of historicity of emotion” is absolutely vital to a more nuanced under-
standing of its sociocultural and political potential (Sánchez Prado 2). Aside from
the above-​mentioned works by historians and Peluffo’s Lágrimas andinas, there are
only a handful of other essays by literary scholars and cultural analysts—​among
them, Andrea Noble’s analysis of how the public display of emotion by recognized
figures such as Pancho Villa positioned Mexican onlookers as a postrevolution-
ary community of feeling in the early twentieth century. Such studies add to
our understanding of the (constitutive) role of emotion in sociopolitical processes
and the presence of emotional “scripts” or “systems of feeling” (Noble 267) that
regularize horizons of possibility for public as well as private social interactions.
248
Yet, we need many more case studies, fresh approaches, and renovated methods.
Furthermore, literary scholars and cultural critics should move beyond the analysis
of representation (of how particular novels, essays, plays, and films depict emotion)
by recognizing that this is merely one register through which cultural productions
“make sense.” We need to dedicate more of our efforts toward understanding
reading/​viewing protocols (how texts and performances interpellate their read-
ers or viewers on a sensorial level) as well as horizons of reception (in line with
Peluffo and Noble’s research). In terms of the latter, it will be essential to develop
partnerships with historians to fashion thick and nuanced understandings of emo-
tional regimes in particular periods as well as the changing social value of given
emotions and the very meaning of “sadness,” “love,” and any number of named
states of feeling in different historical periods. By establishing an interdisciplinary
dialogue, cultural analysts and historians can also craft a more full-​bodied account
of the micro-​circuitries of sense-​making—​for example, of how cultural practices
contribute to the establishment of localized emotional communities. To do so,
historians will have to locate new sources other than theological and philosophi-
cal tracts and criminal records (Holler 19) and fashion alternate methods; this will
allow us to move beyond the documentation of dominant prescriptive norms to
the practices that support, contest, and navigate them.
That said, there is a limit to what such studies can reveal about the sensorial
dynamics in earlier periods—​if we allow for the possibility that affect might refer
to something that is not equivalent to its discursive containment (in short, that
feelings may exceed name-​able categories such as sadness, woe, melancholy).This
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250 Laura Podalsky

prospect is clearly central to scholars, like myself, who draw on the Deleuzian-​
Massumian conceptual framework that defines affect in terms of intensities that
flow between bodies via utterances, media streams, and performances, only to
be “captured” at sites of reception; and to emotion as the “socio-​linguistic fix-
ing of the quality of an experience” and to “the conventional, consensual point
of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions,
into narrativizable action-​reaction circuits, into function and meaning” (Massumi
27–​28; Podalsky 166n51). In this scheme, it becomes extremely difficult (perhaps
impossible) to craft an historical account of affective flows, as they cannot be
found “in” documents. After all, written documents (whether novels, philosoph-
ical tracts or court records) register the arrest of sensorial intensities and their
“insertion” into existing communicational networks. Indeed, as Beasley-​Murray
notes, “[n]‌arrative history [itself] is the by-​product of a process that selects, con-
fines, and captures an affective flow that is in fact unpredictably mobile and in
continuous variation” (131).
Existing efforts by most historians and literary scholars to examine the sen-
sorial in earlier periods do not seem to recognize these sorts of distinctions nor
their historiographical consequences.2 Despite initial efforts to identify how the
meaning of particular emotional categories changes over time and how emotional
statements and gestures could be used tactically, there is little acknowledgment of
the potential fruitfulness of tracing embodied sensation as experienced in the past. 520
Beasley-​Murray recognizes the methodological difficulties of doing this, and prof-
fers a partial solution by calling for “[a]‌ffect to be reread back through emotion,
and so reinserted into history and politics” (131–​132). He follows this method
himself in his case study of the FMLN by relying on the testimonios of militants
to trace their “becoming-​guerrilla” as a radically transformative experience.While
reading their descriptions of liminality and mobility as registers of immanence and
of the sensorial flows that “enabled new ways of being together,” he also parses
how the former guerrillas understand given emotional states such as happiness
(e.g., as the “joyful passion” of killing one’s enemy) (140–​141; 144–​145). His goal,
in part, is to demonstrate the importance of sensorial flows and resonances (rather
than a shared ideological platform) in constituting and maintaining the cohe-
siveness of guerrilla forces.3 Yet, this approach (of reading affect through traces left
in written texts) does not overcome the impasse; it is an insufficient method for
grasping embodied intensities and, to employ Beasley-​Murray’s own phrase in a
way perhaps unintended by the author himself, “something always escapes” (132).
This leads me to a shortcoming of existing work on affect and emotion—​
namely, the relative lack of substantive examination of how sensorial dynamics
(or relays) take place. In my mind, this is not an insurmountable roadblock—​at
least not in terms of the analysis of the contemporary period. As noted above,
we need to go beyond the analysis of the representation of emotion in particu-
lar texts (whether film, novels, newspapers, popular magazines, or television pro-
grams) and even beyond our reliance on texts as (mediated) means to understand
 251

The Affect Turn 251

the sociocultural configuration of affect (e.g., the use of testimonies as records

of sensorial experience). These are clearly important methods. Nonetheless, they
need to be supplemented (and perhaps supplanted) by the examination of the
interfaces between bodies in the most ample sense. For example, in addition to
analyzing discursive frameworks (i.e. how emotion and sensation are narrated), it
is important to examine the mode of address—​particularly in terms of how cul-
tural productions interpellate their audiences on a sensorial level. This can be done
by investigating reading protocols that invite us to cry at the death of a beloved
character; or by analyzing spectatorial protocols by which films invite viewers to
sit on the edges of their seats.
If broadened beyond the analysis of representation, formal analysis can help us
understand the role of cultural production as a vital relay point in the circulation
of affective flows, but that method is clearly not enough. When speaking about
varied audiovisual and written texts (oral and video testimonies, memoirs, letters,
journals) as well as monuments, rituals, and performances as “archives of feel-
ing,” Cvetkovitch underscores the importance of going beyond the analysis of
the “texts themselves” to examine “the practices that surround their production
and reception” (7). In addition to larger-scale reception studies (perhaps blending
sociological approaches with discourse analysis), ethnographic methods may offer
another means to do this—​allowing us to understand affective relays and scalar
520
shifts that can occur between bodies, whether at a local theater, a street perfor-
mance or via Twitter and fotologs.
Of course, participant observation might illuminate many other arenas beyond
cultural production. Geographer Fernando Bosco relied on this method as an
essential component of his analysis of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Given his
contention that “emotions are largely non-​representational and are not found in
discourse alone,” he could not rely solely on archival data (newsletters, organiza-
tional and personal correspondence, and scrapbooks) to get at the sensorial tac-
tics (what he and others have labeled “emotional labor”) underlying this social
movement (344). His interviews with the women along with his own observa-
tions about their actions form the basis of his main contentions. Among other
things, he argues that perceived emotional proximity (maternal suffering) was vital
in developing a sense of belonging among women who lived in different parts
of Argentina; that the women utilized emotion in strategic ways during public
demonstrations of pain and sorrow in the 1970s, as well as in their familiar inter-
actions in the late 1990s; and that emotional networks “contribute to the main-
tenance of collective action and, specifically, to the internal cohesion of either
formal social movement organizations or more informal groups of activists” (346,
350–​351, 352). In addition to revealing how such networks sustain activism over
time, Bosco’s study also exemplifies how ethnographic methods can chart scalar
shifts—​i.e. how feelings experienced as personal can become mobilized into col-
lective actions, and how such mobilizations tied to specific places (plazas) sustain
a sense of (emotional) proximity despite physical distance. I am certain that there
52

252 Laura Podalsky

are other important methodological possibilities—​just as I am sure that without

thickening our explanations of how affect circulates, we cannot fully account for
its sociocultural/​sociopolitical work or significance.
In line with the aforementioned, the future productivity of the affective turn
will depend on scholars’ ability to chart new terrain. Beyond looking toward the
horizon for new objects of study, we need to generate new methods that rely on
creating substantive partnerships with fellow researchers in other disciplines and
on augmenting our own methodological toolkits. More sustained debate about
the contributions and limitations of different theoretical paradigms—​an issue to
which this essay can only allude—​is also necessary. Finally, the full potential of
these elements to thicken and complicate existing studies on affect and emotion
will only be possible through a more self-​reflexive engagement with the episte-
mological consequences of scholarship conceived as dispassionate inquiry.

Notes
1 Having written this essay before the publication of some works (Reber) and having
discovered others late in the process (Gonzalbo Aizpuru et al.; Arellano), I could not
adequately recognize their contributions beyond brief acknowledgements.
2 Andrea Noble is one of the few who do. She notes that “there seems to be a gap between
historical work on the emotions, where ‘affect theory’ does not tend to be registered, and
‘affect theory’, where historical approaches are conspicuous by their absence” (250n1).
3 Beasley-​Murray’s model might offer a suggestive point of departure for historians inter- 52

ested in repositioning concepts like emotional regimes and emotional communities.

Instead of examining them as realized configurations, it might be (more) useful to privi-
lege the tracing of their emergence, to identify the processes by which embodied intensities
become harnessed or fail to become harnessed. In this way, we might account for allegiances
and mobilizations that cannot be attributed to the animating and disciplining power of
ideology; and how everyday routines or habits can “secure social order” (187–​203).

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UP, 2015.
Beasley-​Murray, Jon. Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. Duke UP, 2010.
Bosco, Fernando J. “The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights’
Activism: Embeddedness, Emotions, and Social Movements.” Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, vol. 96, no. 2, 2006, pp. 342–​365.
Cvetkovch, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke
UP, 2003.
Fisher, Andrew B. “Keeping and Losing One’s Head: Composure and Emotional Outbursts
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2014, pp. 168–​197.
Franco, Jean. Cruel Modernity. Duke UP, 2013.
Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Pilar and Aurelio González. Amor e historia: La expresión de los afectos en
el mundo de ayer. El Colegio de México, 2014.
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—​—​—​, Anne Staples, and Valentina Torres Septién. Una historia de los usos del miedo. El
Colegio de México/​Universidad Iberoamericana, 2009.
Gundermann, Christian. Actos melancólicos: Formas de resistencia en la posdictadura argentina.
Beatriz Viterbo, 2007.
Holler, Jacqueline. “Of Sadness and Joy in Colonial Mexico.” Emotions and Daily Life in
Colonial Mexico, edited by Javier Villa-​Flores and Sonya Lipsett-​Rivera, U of New
Mexico P, 2014, pp. 17–​34.
Kantaris, Geoffrey and Rory O’Bryen, editors. Latin American Popular Culture: Politics,
Media, Affect. Tamesis, 2013.
Lutz, Catherine A. and Lila Abu-​Lughold, editors. Language and the Politics of Emotion.
Cambridge UP, 1990.
Manz, Beatriz. “Terror, Grief, and Recovery: Genocidal Trauma in a Mayan Village in
Guatemala.” Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, edited by Alexander
Laban Hinton. U of California P, 2002, pp. 292–​309.
Marcus, George. The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics. Penn State UP, 2002.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press,
2002.
Moraña, Mabel. “Postscriptum. El afecto en la caja de herramientas.” El lenguaje de las emo-
ciones: afecto y cultura en América Latina, edited by Mabel Moraña and Ignacio Sánchez
Prado, Iberoamericana/​Vervuert, 2012, pp. 313–​337.
—​—​—​and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, editors. El lenguaje de las emociones: afecto y cultura en
América Latina. Iberoamericana/​Vervuert, 2012.
Muñoz, José Esteban. “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Rolo Bracho’s ‘The Sweetest
52 Hanover (and Other STDs)’.” Theatre Journal, vol. 52, no. 1, 2000, pp. 67–​79.
—​—​—​.“‘Being’ North,‘Feeling’ South: Queer Latino Performance, Affect, and Belonging.”
Paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association, Las Vegas, October 7–​9, 2004.
Negrón-​Muntaner, Frances. “Drama Queens: Latino Gay and Lesbian Independent Film/​
Video.” The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts, edited by Chon A. Noriega and Ana López.
U of Minnesota P, 1996, pp. 59–​78.
Noble, Andrea. “The Politics of Emotion in the Mexican Revolution: The Tears of Pancho
Villa.” Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect, edited by Geoffrey Kantaris
and Rory O’Bryen, Tamesis, 2013, pp. 249–​270.
O’Bryen, Rory. “Affect, Politics, and the Production of the People: Meditations on the
Río Magdalena.” Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect, edited by Geoffrey
Kantaris and Rory O’Bryen, Tamesis, 2013, pp. 227–​248.
Overling, Joanna and Alan Passes, editors. The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics
of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. Routledge, 2000.
Peluffo, Ana. Lágrimas andinas: sentimentalismo, género y virtud republicana en Clorinda Matto de
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Poblete, Juan. “La productividad del afecto en un contexto post-​social.” El lenguaje de las
emociones: afecto y cultura en América Latina, edited by Mabel Moraña and Ignacio Sánchez
Prado, Iberoamericana/​Vervuert, 2012, pp. 55–​72.
Podalsky, Laura. The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema:
Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Reber, Dierdra. Coming to Our Senses: Affect and an Order of Things for Global Culture.
Columbia UP, 2016.
Reddy, William. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of the Emotions.
Cambridge UP, 2001.
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Richard, Nelly. Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition. U of Minnesota P, 2004.

Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Cornell UP, 2006.
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. “Regimes of Affect: Love and Class in Mexican Neoliberal
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—​—​—​. “Un-​doing: Social Suffering and the Politics of Remorse.” Remorse and Reparation,
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—​—​—​. “Coming to our Senses: Anthropology and Genocide.” Annihilating Difference: The
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Villa-​Flores, Javier and Sonya Lipsett-​Rivera, editor. Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial
Mexico. U of New Mexico P, 2014.

524
 25

16
THE POSTHEGEMONIC TURN
Abraham Acosta

Over the course of the past twenty years, and with considerable trepidation over
the full though as yet largely undetermined political and intellectual implica-
tions, critics have begun asserting that Latin America, if not already the planet in
524
its entirety, has entered a posthegemonic age. From John Beverley’s Subalternity
and Representation (1999), Alberto Moreiras’s The Exhaustion of Difference (2001),
Gareth Williams’ The Other Side of the Popular (2002), Brett Levinson’s The Ends of
Literature as well as Market and Thought (2001, 2004) to most recently Jon Beasley-​
Murray’s aptly titled book Posthegemony (2010), these works each mark provoca-
tive and ever-​relevant attempts at coming to terms with the increasing discordance
between contemporary theories of state power and the intensified historical con-
tradictions brought about by the neoliberal restructuration of the nation-​state, a
geopolitical form which we no longer seem to recognize in Latin America and
whose critical realities we can no longer ignore. This shift in the contemporary
grounds of modern political organization does not necessarily suggest that the
nation-​state no longer exists or has become obsolete, because it hasn’t; it appears
to still serve a vital function to global capital. Nor should arguments critical of
this shift convince us into thinking that the nation-​state represented some kind of
ideal form of social organization that was ultimately betrayed and corrupted by
an evil global capitalism, for there was never a time in the history of the nation-​
state where it was not already entwined in conflicts with communities over land,
labor, and wages.What critics are remarking through this idea of a posthegemonic
historical era are the cumulative economic and juridical effects deriving from a
series of concerted US-​backed interventions in various Latin American countries
such as Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, and Chile 1973 that resulted not only
in successfully undermining the region’s ability to curb US imperialism in the
hemisphere, but now more recently, and on a much larger scale through economic
256

256 Abraham Acosta

incentives with transnational corporations and multinational trade agreements,

has provoked a profound and far-​reaching transformation in the very nature and
structure of state sovereignty in its relationship with global capital.
By posthegemony, therefore, one understands not only this decentering of
the nation-​state form under conditions of contemporary neoliberalism, but con-
sequently the need to fundamentally rethink current theories of state political
power in order to offer a more adequate accounting of its social, political, and
cultural effects. One predominant theoretical model in particular stands out as
warranting a critical reassessment: the notion of hegemony itself. As developed
in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks from the 1930s, the notion of hegemony
refers to political power shared between elite and allied social classes and char-
acterized principally as a system of ruling over the subordinate classes through a
combination of leadership, coercion, and consent. That is, through domination as
well as through ideology (see Williams “Social Disjointedness and State-​Form”).
In other words, the ruling classes may indeed be the ruling class, but hegemony
itself only obtains when the rest of the population is interpellated by a normative
explanation of reality and willingly allow themselves—​that is, consent—​to be gov-
erned under those terms. But hegemony is always only ever tentative—​never final
or complete—​for alliances, like ideological interpellation, are always temporary
and ever-​shifting. And yet, what appears as a limitation of hegemony is in effect its
strength, for this power structure is inherently flexible and able to adapt and main- 256
tain control in most predicaments of social and economic unrest. Consequently,
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has itself proven instrumental in formalizing the
internal political dynamics and contradictions that inhere in the modern nation-​
state model, and particularly in Latin American studies for it enabled a much more
nuanced understanding of the ways in which Latin American nation-​states expe-
rienced their independence from Spain in the nineteenth century as well as their
revolutionary and national-​popular period throughout much of the early twen-
tieth. But beginning in the late twentieth and into the twenty-​first century, from
the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, counterrevolutionary subversions
in Central America, to the incessant and ever-​spiraling currency crises, interna-
tional bailouts, and trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, state power in
the region no longer wields itself in the same way, if at all. As if the very dynamic
and processes attributed to hegemony had undergone irrevocable alteration and
were now unrecognizable. Or as if, as some argue, Gramsci was wrong all along,
hegemony was never secured through ideology in the first place, and we are only
now coming to grips with this.
In either case, posthegemony itself names the present critical conjuncture
wherein the notion of hegemony is found to no longer hold as an adequate inter-
pretive model to understand the current organization of political power and the
nation-​state structure of governmentality. What we are therefore bearing witness-
ing to is a profound and irrevocable reconfiguration of social and cultural fields,
the results of having economic rationality become the sole arbiter of sovereignty,
 257

The Posthegemonic Turn 257

governance, and social ordering. More specifically, we are seeing the critical debili-
tation of the nation-​state as a culturally and politically binding model of social
organization, the withering of once hegemonic categories which provided lin-
guistic, ethnic, and cultural coherency, and a general paucity of critical language
needed to account for this shift with any specificity. Disciplinarily, as it relates to
the study of Latin America, the implications of this debate are far-​reaching and
signal a watershed moment for critical thought on the region. Indeed, the debate
over posthegemony may be putting the centrality and relevance of once canoni-
cal texts in literary and cultural study for Latin America into question. Broader
works such as Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada (1984), and Néstor García Canclini’s
Culturas híbridas (1990) and Antonio Cornejo Polar’s Escribir en el aire (1994), but
also, and most decisively, critical works that aim to position literature, the modern
nation-​state, and questions of hegemony under scrutiny like Roberto González
Echevarría’s Myth and Archive (1990), Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions (1991),
as well as Francine Masiello’s The Art of Transition (2001) are finding themselves
increasingly on false footing and may have to make room for an urgent reconcep-
tualization of once favored political, cultural, and theoretical frameworks for the
hemisphere.
In effect, the question of posthegemony instead demands critical inquiry from
radically different assumptions from those just a few years ago.The integrity of the
256
state, for instance, or of the state’s hegemonic hold over the population, can no
longer be assumed within literary and/​or cultural analyses that rely upon distinc-
tions between national, regional, and/​or minoritarian identifications, or between
elite and subaltern groups. The axis has now been inverted: it is the nation-​state’s
very lack of effective sovereign authority against globalized capital that now creates
the need for new frameworks for literary and cultural analysis. Gareth Williams,
for instance, opens The Other Side of the Popular referring to the “uneven and
incomplete and ongoing passage from national to postnational cultural and politi-
cal paradigms” resulting from their “profound and far-​reaching redefinition and
restructuration in the face of increasingly transnational realities,” adding, “the pro-
found economic and sociocultural transformations of the past thirty years, together
with the recent emergence of the so-​called neoliberal order, denote a radical shift
and a fundamental weakening in the foundations of the modern nation-​state” (1).
John Beverley, for his part, while he ultimately refuses to abandon the concept of
the nation-​state, cannot but admit to the fact that the nation-​state has reached a
breaking point, for which his book co-​written with Marc Zimmerman, Literature
and Politics in the Central American Revolutions (1990) obtains as an unfortunate
historical testament. Nevertheless, in his book Subalternity and Representation, one
can see a staunch Beverley doubling down on the nation-​state’s still determinant
capacity in neoliberal times,

To move beyond the nation-​state as a point of reference for left politics …

however, seems “ultra-​leftist.” Unless it is possible to imagine a new form
258

258 Abraham Acosta

of hegemony which no longer depends on the territoriality of the nation,

hegemony is still to be won, or lost, at the level of the nation-​state and/​or
the local state. To put this another way: hegemony still has to pass through
the nation-​state at some point or another.
(152)

Beverley here asserts quite simply that the only way beyond the nation-​state is
nevertheless through it. That is, barring any fundamental reformulation to the
notion of hegemony itself, the state remains the same as before, as if the nation-​
state and hegemony ultimately mean the same thing and are therefore cotermi-
nous. Of course Beverley is simply begging the question, for this is precisely what
the notion of posthegemony is obliging: a reconceptualization of political power
after the eclipsing of the nation-​state in neoliberal times, or what Beasley-​Murray
suggests “is more than what comes after hegemony’s patent demise [but rather]
a critical examination of the epoch in which hegemony apparently held sway”
(236). Others, like Brett Levinson, have argued that we have not yet even begun
the work of thinking beyond the nation-​state, and not because we are unwilling
but as yet incapable of imagining it. He argues,

Although few would deny that recent global developments demand a

rethinking of the contemporary nation-​state and, possibly, of the entire his- 258
tory of the state-​form, such a revaluation is easier said than done. Indeed,
current efforts to recast the state through theories of transnationality or
globalization tend to recuperate the traditional nation-​state (often as part
of a notion of internationalism) as their ground, hence to reassert the state
form as the indispensable horizon of all political inquiry—​either to subvert
of embrace it. It is as if the state form holds the same sway over politics that
metaphysics holds over philosophy: the instant a project escapes the state’s
clutches is the moment it most firmly falls into the state’s grasp.
(123)

As such, and as challenging as it may be, what is going by the name posthe-
gemony, if it is be productive in any kind of meaningful way, must no doubt
begin with a reassessment of once predominant and pervasive political categories.
Williams once again puts the question thusly:

If we understand globalization as an epochal resituating and redesigning

of everything related to the word “we,” along with all the conceptual and
political legacies and forms of social arrangement that have accompanied
that word throughout modernity, then words such as “nation,” “territory,”
“power,” “control,” “freedom,” “war,” “life” etc. no longer mean what they
used to and are therefore in need of reevaluation.
(“On Global War” 8)
 529

The Posthegemonic Turn 259

What Williams means to suggest here is that the entire critical vocabulary devel-
oped around understanding the nation-​state in its various processes, dynamics,
and contradictions is now unworkable and requires a new theoretical discourse
to account for these tectonic shifts in geopolitical spatiality. And yet the above-​
mentioned critics are not alone in this observation, as they all form part of a larger
conversation documenting these modifications in the global political order. The
present moment therefore brings us to a pivotal intellectual conjuncture wherein
we are seeing work produced by various scholars devoted to offering a critical
account of these radically unmoored contemporary cultural and political condi-
tions. And so it is to a more specific and comparative reflection with these multiple
accounts of posthegemonic thought that I wish to devote the rest of this essay.
However, before I move on to discuss them, I would first like to contextualize the
present conjuncture within the broad theoretical claims of affect theory, particu-
larly as elaborated by cultural critic Brian Massumi. Now it must be noted that
I am not the first to claim the relation between affect and posthegemony: Beasley-​
Murray’s Posthegemony represents a critical and sustained engagement with affect,
Massumi’s in particular. While I will have more to say about Posthegemony later in
the essay, in this section I will take this opportunity to reflect upon a different tack
within Massumi’s thought that more broadly taps into contemporary intellectual
concerns. I feel Massumi’s epistemological and disciplinary justification for affect
258
theory is one that is not easily dismissed and one that aptly circumscribes, very
productively in my opinion, the terms and stakes of the question of posthegemony
as it is being conceived in Latin American studies. In short, one might even hazard
that affect has emerged as the contemporary master discourse within which the
entire posthegemonic debate is unfolding.
Before we proceed, I think it is important to first go over some of Massumi’s
principal claims regarding the notion of affect itself as well as some of the larger,
theoretico-​disciplinary stakes that both condition and emerge from his thought
as crystallized in his oft-​quoted formulation: “affect holds a key to rethinking
postmodern power after ideology. For although ideology is still very much with
us, often in the most virulent of forms, it is no longer encompassing. It no lon-
ger defines the global mode of functioning of power” (42). In other words, if on
Massumi’s reading ideology is conceived along the same terms under affect theory
as the nation-​state is under posthegemony, then it very well may be that posthe-
gemony and affect have a lot in common and emerged simultaneously to respond
to very distinct though interrelated theoretico-​political problems. And what if it
is this very conjuncture between affect and the posthegemonic that defines the
contemporary era?
In his book Parables for the Virtual (2002), Massumi introduces the notion of
affect and lays out the theoretical and disciplinary conditions that underwrite it.
Through a series of oppositionally conceived and interlaced terms, which he con-
ceives not as binaries but as dynamic unities (and this is important), he lays forth
the logical necessity of thinking affectively as a means to better account for the
260

260 Abraham Acosta

material conditions of the present.The first of which, and certainly the most foun-
dational and central to these debates, is the distinction he traces between position
and movement. His argument is the following: that conventional critical methods
focus only on either the ideological, discursive, or subjective positioning of identi-
ties, with no attention paid to the bodily movements that condition it. He asserts,

“The Body.” What is it to the Subject? Not the qualities of its moving
experience. But rather, in keeping with the extrinsic approach, its positioning.
Ideological accounts of subject formation emphasize systemic structurings.
The focus on the systemic had to be brought back down to earth in order
to be able to integrate into the accounts the local cultural differences and
the practices of resistance they may harbor. The concept of “positionality”
was widely developed for this purpose. Signifying subject formation accord-
ing to the dominant structure was often thought of in terms of “coding.”
Coding in turn came to be thought of in terms of positioning on a grid.The
grid was conceived as an oppositional framework of culturally constructed
significations: male versus female, black versus white, gay versus straight, and
so on. A body corresponded to a “site” on the grid defined by an overlap-
ping of one term from each pair. The body came to be defined by its pin-
ning to the grid.
(2) 260

Given what Massumi takes to be cultural theory’s privileging of position over

movement, he questions whether this theoretical substructure has ever really been
able to secure for itself a sufficiently radical form of critique. Arguing,

Aren’t the possibilities for the entire gamut of cultural emplacements,

including the “subversive” ones, precoded into the ideological master struc-
ture? … How can the grid itself change? … The idea of positionality begins
by subtracting movement from the picture. But this doesn’t change the fact
that what defines the body is not movement itself, only its beginnings and
endpoints. Movement is entirely subordinated to the position it connects.
These are predefined … The very notion of movement as qualitative trans-
formation is lacking. There is “displacement,” but no transformation; it is as
if the body simply leaps from one definition to the next.
(3)

With this critique of position’s priority over movement, and through what admit-
tedly just amounts to an inversion of their roles (I’ll have more to say about this
later), Massumi attempts to reconfigure the nature of the field of intelligibility by
inverting the hierarchy and emphasizing a primacy that is now ascribed to move-
ment. And this primary quality of movement is not limited to the singular body’s
capacity to transition indeterminately between states of being, but also as a means
 216

The Posthegemonic Turn 261

to conceive of the movement implicit between social identifications, or as he calls

it, the grid.

Position no longer comes first, with movement a problematic second. It is

secondary to movement and derived from it. It is retro movement, move-
ment residue.The problem is no longer to explain how there can be change
given positioning. The problem is to explain the wonder that there can
be stasis given the primacy of process. Another way of putting it is that
positionality is an emergent quality of movement … If passage is primary
in relation to position, processual indeterminacy is primary in relation to
social determination. Social and cultural determinations on the model of
positionality are also secondary and derived. Gender, race, and sexual orien-
tation also emerge and back-​form their reality. Passage precedes construc-
tion. But construction does effectively back-​form its reality. Grids happen.
So social and cultural determinations feed back into the process from which
they arose.
(7–​8)

So if movement is primary, and movement conditions positionality, then move-

ment itself is what generates and retroactively founds the field of intelligibility
260
wherein positionalities ultimately emerge and become situated. In short, the social
order is NOT the guarantee and alibi of power, but rather is its retroactive installa-
tion (or “back-​forming”). But there is still more to this distinction. It is that while
movement is not just primary in the relation between positions, understood as
“realities that pass into each other as a continuity under qualitative transforma-
tion” (8), it is also primary in the sense that movement is ontologically prior to
positionality itself.

Indeterminacy and determination, change and freeze-​framing, go together,

they are inseparable and always actually coincide while remaining disjunc-
tive in their modes of reality. To say that passage and indeterminacy “come
first” or “are primary” is more a statement of ontological priority than the
assertion of a time sequence. They have ontological privilege in the sense
that they constitute the field of emergence, while positionings are what
emerge … It is social in the manner “prior to” the separating out of indi-
viduals and the identifiable groupings that they end up boxing themselves
into (positions in gridlock) … One of the things that the dimension of
emergence is ontogenetically “prior to” is thus the very distinction between
the individual and the collective, as well as any given model of interaction.
(8)

That is, movement also signals a moment prior to differentiation, prior to

oppositional distinction. Not dedifferentiation, but undifferentiation. This
26

262 Abraham Acosta

distinction is crucial. It is, in other forms what Homi Bhabha in Location of

Culture (1994) calls cultural difference (as opposed to cultural diversity) and
what, more specifically, Alberto Moreiras (The Exhaustion of Difference) charts
as a critical means for arriving at such a plane, what he calls “second-​order”
Latin Americanism.
And so it is from this foundational distinction between position and move-
ment that Massumi’s entire conceptual edifice hinges, most notably his well-​
known analytic couplets “extensivity”/​ “intensivity” and “emotion”/​ “affect,”
each of which are defined in quantitative and qualitative opposition to the other.
That is, whereas Massumi employs “extensivity” to mark measurable, divisible,
quantifiable movement or activity of bodies or between bodies, “intensity” is
enlisted to trace minimal levels, or quanta, of movement otherwise unindex-
able, unquantifiable, and unassimilable via traditional narratological, discursive,
or semiological p​ ositioning models. And consequently, building off of this for-
mer coupling, “emotion” is employed to signal again “subjective content, the
sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience … qualified intensity, the
conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and
semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-​reaction circuits, into
function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized” (27–​28). If emo-
tion is qualified discursive activity fully commensurate within the reigning field
of intelligibility, affect, for its part, and fully coterminous with intensity, is con- 26
ceived as equally “unqualified,” “unclassifiable” and “unassimilable” experience,
“not ownable or recognizable and [therefore] resistant to critique” (27–​28, 33).
Thus, through Massumi, affect serves as the figure that accounts for the logically
presupposed, if tacit and unindexible, experience of bodily activity that both sub-
stantiates and back-​forms the relationships between positions and identifications,
such as mind/​body, volition/​cognition, but also virtuality/​actuality and activity/​
passivity.
Understood in this way, we can begin to see why Massumi’s reading of affect
comes as a timely and relevant backdrop upon which to situate this discussion
on posthegemony. After all, what is the neoliberal restructuration of the nation-​
state if not a protracted and compounded series of processes and passages? In
other words, through such always-​already processual categories as dependence,
revolution, development, modernization, which incited Ranajit Guha to reflect
upon the “historic failure of the nation to come to its own” (5) as well as other
self-​disjunctive designations acutely understood in Latin America such as transición
[both from and to democracy], apertura [foreign trade], and proceso de reorganización
[military coup], the nation-​state has served in the contemporary era as the par-
adigmatic figure to index position and movement. Additionally, it appears that
posthegemony’s juridical and spatial conjuncture is itself replicated at a formal
level in Massumi, for he argues, “Since the positional model’s definitional frame-
work is punctual, it simply can’t attribute a reality to the interval, whose crossing
is a continuity (or nothing). The space of the crossing, the gaps between positions
 263

The Posthegemonic Turn 263

on the grid, falls into a theoretical nobody’s land” (3–​4). In other words, if what
we glean from Massumi’s pronouncements is an attempt get out from under the
consequences and implications of certain established, normative, conventions gov-
erning the centrality of positionality in contemporary theoretical thought, and
if for Massumi affect itself “holds the key to rethinking postmodern power after
ideology,” then how is affect and its concern with movement and passage brought
to bear in critical posthegemonic reflection?
A key instance of which can be found, interestingly, in Alberto Moreiras’s
work on posthegemony, for it provides a very interesting juxtaposition with the
framework laid out by Massumi. As one can see, Moreiras’s most recent efforts at
framing a theoretical language to talk about the substructure or the underside of
political thought is not too far removed from Massumi’s larger concern with posi-
tion and movement. Consider Moreiras’s opening lines in Línea de sombra (2006)
wherein he elaborates on the posthegemonic nature of the figure of the nonsub-
ject of the political:

que en el mundo hay más que sujeto y objetos, y que la instancia suscep-
tible tanto de agencia como de patencia, activa y pasiva y más allá de ambos
órdenes, que voy a llamar el no sujeto de lo político debe ser tomada en
cuenta para cualquier conceptualización de pensamiento.
26
(7)

And he goes on:

La he tratado de buscar como un zahorí busca agua con un palo en ejercicio

de lectura a contrapelo de determinados textos o autores del siglo veinte, en
su mayoría proponentes de filosofía política, pero ni siquiera necesariamente
los más señalados, ni siquiera necesariamente los más decisivos. Procedo
con modestia impuesta e inevitable desde la intuición, creo que teórica-
mente inarticulable, de que hay en nosotros y más allá de nosotros algo que
excede abrumadoramente a la subjetividad, incluyendo a la subjetividad del
inconsciente.
(8)

In these passages we get a glimpse into the resonances between Moreiras’s critical
project and the overarching theoretical structure laid out by Massumi. Most par-
ticularly, of course, is Moreiras’s inquiry into what obtains in addition to subjects
and objects as well as other self-​disjunctive states of being—​“agencia/​patencia,”
“activa/​pasiva”—​including consciousness and the unconscious.These are proposi-
tions seemingly asking about the very limitations of positionality and the “move-
ment residue” Massumi himself also takes up under the name of affect. Compare
the above passages by Moreiras with Massumi’s thoughts on the affective under-
standing of nonconsciousness.
246

264 Abraham Acosta

The vast majority of the world’s sensations are certainly nonconscious.

Nonconscious is a very different concept from the Freudian unconscious
(although it is doubtless not unrelated to it). The differences are that repres-
sion does not apply to nonconscious perception and that nonconscious
perception may, with a certain amount of ingenuity, be argued to apply to
nonorganic matter. Whereas the feeling of the relation may be “too small”
to enter perception (it is infraempirical), the relation it registers, for its part,
is “too large” to fit into a perception since it envelopes a multiplicity of
potential variations (it is superempirical). A radical empiricism, if it is to be a
thorough thinking of relation, must find ways of directly, affectively joining
the infraempirical to the superempirical.
(16)

Note for instance not only how in Massumi the notion of the nonconscious is
conceived to be able to apply even to “nonorganic matter,” that is say even to those
other-​than subjects and objects that Moreiras himself posits as a condition of pos-
sibility for thinking the nonsubject of the political. But furthermore, we must also
not fail to note the obvious echoes of the prefix “infra” that Massumi enlists to
talk about “intensities” which both affectively fall below indexible, structurating
levels of conscious determination, and which obtain as the very figure that names
Moreiras’s inquiry. 246
In even more recent work by Moreiras, as the notion of infrapolitics begins
to take more definite and recognizable shape, one continues to detect other cer-
tain congruities with those at play within Massumi’s model. In a recent article,
Moreiras speaks of infrapolitics as a “call for a transformation of the gaze, for some
kind of passage to some strange and unthematizable otherwise of politics which
is also, it must be, an otherwise than politics,” and reminds us, in rather affective
terms that “politics cannot exhaust, and does not exhaust experience,” suggesting
therefore that “experience exceeds or sub-​cedes politics, and it can therefore be
thematized and studied infrapolitically” (12–​13). By “passage,” of course, we may
do well to understand what Giacomo Marramao himself intends in The Passage
West as that which “draws together the continuous and discontinuous, the pro-
cess and the turning point” (24). In many ways it seems, infrapolitics and affect
are being conceived within similar and formally consistent formations. Massumi
we remember asserts that it is indeed movement, and not position, which is
ontologically primary. Under Moreiras’s formulation, infrapolitics is ascribed
the same primordial quality in relation to politics, or what he calls the “ethico-
political determination.” He argues, “Infrapolitics would be a region of practi-
cal reason, a phronetic region perhaps, prior, that is, ontologically prior to any
ethico-​political determination.”1 Position-​movement; politics-​infrapolitics. If for
Moreiras hegemony obtains as a crosshatching of ethical and political position-
alities, then infrapolitics emerges as the critical practice that renders visible the
movement, difference, or self-​disjunction that emerges within (or prior to) the
 256

The Posthegemonic Turn 265

ethicopolitical determination. Or as Moreiras maintains, “infrapolitics, as a field

of reflection or a site for reflection, reflects on the sub-​cess of politics, that is, not
politics as sub-​cessed, rather the active infraexcess of the political, whatever under-
flows politics as we know it” (“Infrapolitics” 14). In other words, the “sub-​cess”
and “infraexcess” of politics, that which is both too small and too large to register
but which nevertheless conditions the field of emergence, is exactly the stuff of
which affect is conceived.
Now, whereas this snapshot between infrapolitics and affect may appear as
somewhat of a coincidence whose ultimate stakes it may be difficult to discern
at the moment, for Jon Beasley-​Murray the juxtaposition with Massumi’s work
should not present difficulty at all. After all, Massumi’s conceptualization of affect
forms an explicit part of Beasley-​Murray’s theoretical approach, and it is precisely
from such a critical framework that he could open his book with a pronounce-
ment such as “There is no hegemony and never has been,” for what he is advanc-
ing here is the proposition that hegemony theory never had any firm interpretive
hold over the nature and functioning of political power in the first place and
instead aims to use concepts such as affect, habit, and the multitude in order to
provide a fundamentally different account of power and social ordering, one no
longer based on the consent, coercion, or ideological interpellation of an other-
wise rational subject. As he argues,
246
But we have always lived in posthegemonic times: social order was never in
fact secured through ideology. No amount of belief in the dignity of labor
or the selflessness of elected representatives could ever have been enough to
hold things together. The fact that people no longer give up their consent
in the ways in which they may once have done, and yet everything carries
on much the same, shows that consent was never really at issue. Social order
is secured through habit and affect: through folding the constituent power
of the multitude back on itself to produce the illusion of transcendence and
sovereignty.
(ix)

Now of course it is important to note that for Beasley-​Murray the subject of

this political account is not the individual but the multitude, which is also not to
suggest a collection of individuals but rather a “preindividual” social mass “rooted
in affect and habit” (228). The multitude is also something altogether different
from the “people,” the latter being the privileged, institutionally generated iden-
tification within hegemony. On this distinction Beasley-​Murray cites from Hardt
and Negri:

The multitude is a multiplicity, a plane of singularities an open set of rela-

tions, which is not homogeneous or identical with itself and bears an indis-
tinct, inclusive relation to those outside of it. The people, in contrast, tends
26

266 Abraham Acosta

toward identity and homogeneity internally while posing its difference from
and excluding what remains outside of it
(103; in Beasley-​Murray 235)

In short, we have always lived in posthegemonic times, because “there are no indi-
viduals nor a people and never have been,” but are rather only a heterogeneous
and motley multitude that is beholden to nothing.
This is no doubt a very provocative position but things are not so straight-
forward. As we see, the previous passage begins with the phrase “We have always
lived in posthegemonic times.” “Always,” he affirms. Such a statement immedi-
ately and most dramatically distinguishes his account from others who derive their
formulations from otherwise historically and geopolitically situated contexts, such
as Carlo Galli, and even Hardt and Negri themselves.2 That is, Beasley-​Murray’s
account posits the idea of the multitude as some primordial and fundamental polit-
ical predisposition to which he ascribes a rather universalizing, entirely imma-
nent, and even instinctual quality: that behind the modern political fictions of
the individual and the “people,” it was only ever the multitude, and it has never
been, nor ever could be, conducted ideologically, but always only affectively, always
habitually. As he states, “the multitude is simultaneously historic presupposition,
future goal, and present constitution” (247).Yet while the notion of the multitude
demonstrates exceptional analytic power and creates the possibilities for any num- 26
ber of contemporary critical perspectives and approaches, the concern here is that
Beasley-​Murray’s somewhat ahistorical formulation of power—​“we have always
lived in posthegemonic times”—​is ultimately not consistent with Massumi him-
self. Recalling a passage cited earlier we see that even for Massumi ideology (i.e.
hegemony, position) very much was the predominant structure of power, even if it
no longer is: “For although ideology is still very much with us, often in the most
virulent of forms, it is no longer encompassing. It no longer defines the global
mode of functioning of power. It is now one mode of power in a larger field that
is not defined, overall, by ideology” (42). This is a fundamentally different account
of ideology than one that suggests “there is no hegemony and never has been.” In
other words, the difference between Beasley-​Murray’s statement “We have always
lived in posthegemonic times,” with Massumi’s “ideology is no longer encom-
passing,” and “no longer defines the global mode of functioning of power” is not
insignificant, for the former risks arresting the latter formulation’s critical poten-
tial to account for historical shifts in the nature and structure of political power
meanwhile reducing it to an anthropological, ahistorical positionality (“man” as
always-​already, and only ever, multitude). On one (“Massumian”) reading, it speaks
to the ambivalence obtaining between affect’s primordial, a priori status (or imma-
nence) and the retroactively established field of emergence hegemony establishes as
its own guarantee of legitimacy; on another, it suggests simply that the discordance
between these two theories of power is itself ultimately ideological. What may
be at stake here is whether it is more critically productive to discard consent (and
 267

The Posthegemonic Turn 267

hegemony and ideology as well as the assumption of a rational subject) altogether

or to consider the possibility that consent is not exclusively obligated to reason
in any historical or theoretical way and may therefore be obtained in myriad,
affective, forms. In either case, what we must not fail to recognize is that while
we may entertain affect theory’s claims to more accurately and better describe
the ultimately nonrational functioning of the natural world than previously held,
affect theory is just as historical as the other previous formulations it is trying to
displace, and is therefore as ideologically bound to an historico-​epistemological
order as everything else. For as we know, ideology is precisely the set of assump-
tions we don’t realize are conditioning the conclusions to which we ultimately
arrive. Thus, no degree of assurance can ever discount the possibility, laid out ear-
lier by Levinson, that affect may still yet not be outside of the ideological: “the
instant a project escapes [ideology’s] clutches is the moment it most firmly falls
into [its] grasp.”
Yet there is still an even larger problem here, and this is not just Beasley-​
Murray’s but Massumi’s as well: it is that affect might ultimately not be con-
cerned with anything beyond position and movement. For Massumi, position
and movement, like his other well-​known couplets extensivity/​intensivity and
emotion/​affect, are not binaries but rather “dynamic unities,” “intervals,” or “con-
tinuities” that span the full spectrum between qualified and unqualifiable bodily
26
interactions, and on this reading affect’s primary interest is not to overturn these
dynamics but merely to invert their poles and emphasize the qualitative trans-
formation that the movement between them reveals. Affect requires positions in
order to be traced, even completely fictive ones; it simply cannot reveal itself to
thought without them. That is, an affective reading of posthegemony, in tracing
the “self-​disjunctive coincidence of a thing’s immediacy to its own variation” that
obtains between movement and position—​or in this case coercion and consent or
reason and psyche—​ultimately maintains the integrity of the dynamic unity that is
the hegemony relation. In other words, affect necessarily naturalizes the positions
that it takes as preconditions for tracing movement. That which “has always and
again escaped” and is “resistant to critique” (35, 28) is said to simply reside within
or as movement itself, in short, not outside of or beyond position-​movement, nor
outside of or beyond coercion-​consent as dynamic unities. Affect, it therefore
could be argued, is ultimately a counterhegemonic reading strategy that really
only aims to displace positional theoretical models, but not the larger overarch-
ing structure of the hegemonic relation itself: position-​movement, ethics-​politics,
coercion-​consent.
One should therefore avoid reading the posthegemonic as a simple relation
that presupposes any outside or beyond to hegemony, or ideology, or to politics,
and/​or positionality, without losing what may be its most critical and productive
quality for future political thought. That is, the posthegemonic may amount to
more than just the realization that there never was (or no longer is) any deter-
minant social order to be had (hegemony, consent, reason), but rather, and more
268

268 Abraham Acosta

radically, the historical confrontation with the wager that the antithetical relation
established through these debates (ideology-​affect, ethics-​politics) is only ever
confirmation of a persisting and effective hegemonic installation grounded in yet
other terms. Such a possibility is expressed most clearly in Giorgio Agamben’s
formulation of sovereign exception, “the nonlinguistic is only ever to be found
in language itself ” (50). The wager here is that, when it comes to these antino-
mies, there may ultimately be no outside of hegemony, no other side to ideology,
and certainly no origin to affect; not because alternative accounts of power are
wrong but rather because there is nothing to guarantee that established accounts
do not overdetermine and condition the former’s emergence as simply the latter’s
constitutive outside. In other words, it is not ideology (nor position) alone that is
hegemonic, but rather ideology and affect (position and movement) together that
constitute the hegemonic relation, and posthegemony both names this juridical
short-​circuiting as well as the process of thinking through its political and cul-
tural implications.
Once gain, Williams proves highly instructive. Consider, for instance, Williams’
posthegemonic reading of the antinomic foundations of the nation-​ state as
understood through the key notions of nomos (order, hegemony) and anomie
(normlessness):

Hegemony’s constitutive outside is its anomic negation (its necessary enemy 268
and therefore friend), a negation that remains at all times internal to hege-
mony’s self-​unfolding and extension. Hegemony in this sense is constitutive
of a certain conception of the political in which there can be absolutely no
event or disjunction, for an event occurs only at a distance from the sym-
metrical reasoning of the friend–​enemy relation; at a distance, that is, from
knowledge, reason, calculation, and truth. Hegemony in relation to this con-
stitutive (and therefore internal) externality is already, and only ever, a turn
and a return to the self-​constitution of hegemonic reason, of the sovereign
One, whereupon the enemy is assigned a single place as a constitutive rela-
tion to the friend (hegemony). The anomic constitutive outside is only ever
constitutive of nomos.
(“Decontainment” 167)

According to Williams, anomie isn’t just some neutral, accidental, exteriority to

the nomic realm, it constitutes a most intimate, familiar, and necessary relation
with it; an inclusive exclusion. Anomie is “at all times internal” to and “only ever
constitutive” of hegemony; it does not exceed the functions of hegemony. Of
course, this does not therefore suggest that all positions (e.g., nomos, friend) are
therefore immediate, self-​present, and self-​identical to themselves. Quite the con-
trary, nomos isn’t any more embodied or immanent than is anomie. Rather, the
nomos/​anomie and friend/​enemy relation belies a foundational intimacy between
them that makes any assertion of difference qualitatively meaningless.
 269

The Posthegemonic Turn 269

A posthegemonic reading such as Williams’ does not appeal to an affective

relation between nomos and anomie or friend and enemy; it is not a relation
predicated on, and bound to, position and movement as internal limits. Rather it
traces a posthegemonic beyond to both position and movement onto the larger
formal sovereign structure they themselves represent as primordial categories of
epistemic arrangement.Williams does not seek to recenter an entire field of emer-
gence around some assumed ontologically primordial anomie as if this would be
able to offer anything meaningful at all; the tracing of any moment to and from
anomie, or within anomie itself is literally quite meaningless of an enterprise, for
it only ever appears in and works for the hegemonic model within which one
is inscribed. And the reason is quite plain, for the point here is that for Williams,
there is ultimately no such place as anomie. No place, that is, that is not already
and fundamentally marked by the nomic decision that conditions and overde-
termines it. Williams refers to nomos and anomie as “most intimate friend[s]‌and
brother[s]” (168), Agamben might say something like “anomie is only ever to
be found within nomos itself.” In short, there is neither position nor movement
within posthegemony, but it itself signals a beyond to both. This is the critical rev-
elation that posthegemony offers us, and this is the point of departure for further
reflection on the question, for posthegemony not only represents the latest epoch
of savagely unfettered capital, nor of the substitution of one epistemological model
268
for its competitor, but represents ultimately, according to Williams “a wager for
the promise of a thinking of the political” which amounts to nothing less than
“the reevaluation of the principles of freedom, equality, and justice” (“On Global
War” 4).

Notes
1 “A Hypothesis on Practical Reason,” Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective (Blog),
September 24, 2014, https://​infrapolitica.wordpress.com/​2014/​09/​24/​a-​hypothesis-​
on-​practical-​reason-​by-​alberto-​moreiras/​ (accessed June 15, 2017).
2 In Political Spaces and Global War (2010)—​originally published in Italy in 2002—​Carlo
Galli’s reflections on this question are entirely historical: “In the global age, modern
political spatiality—​the State, with its right and ability to enclose an internal sphere with
order and security … has ceased to be fully in effect, challenged as it is by the power
of economic flows and the needs of capital, which demand a new politics and which
no longer allow the State to be the operative center of political reality and its inter-
pretation … All the important spatial axes on the basis of which the State constructed
itself—​internal/​external, public/​social/​private, particular/​universal, center/​periphery,
order/​disorder—​have become obsolete … Globalization is the epoch in which the State
no longer protects its citizens from external turbulence” (157–​8). And also we have
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who in their work in Empire also foreground this
historical assessment: “we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of
economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of
production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule—​in short, a
new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these
global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world … Our basic hypothesis
270

270 Abraham Acosta

is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and suprana-
tional organisms united under a single logic of rule.This new global form of sovereignty
is what we call Empire … The declining sovereignty of nation-​states and their increas-
ing inability to regulate economic and cultural exchanges is in fact one of the primary
symptoms of the coming Empire” (xi–​xii).

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270
27
INDEX
Adorno, Rolena 11, 209, 214, 216, 220
aesthetics 10, 21, 24, 146, 152–​5, 165, 227,
248, 253
affect 237
Alabarces, Pablo 8, 50, 63
Alarcón, Norma 227
Altschul, Nadia 208, 220
Anthias, Penelope 133–​5, 140
Anzaldúa, Gloria 12, 115, 124, 167,
174, 230–​2
archives of feeling 242, 251
Atencio, Rebecca 22, 29
autonomy 58, 128, 130, 133–​5, 141, 42,
215, 271
Avelar, Idelber 15, 28–​9, 184–​6, 192
Balderston, Daniel 226–​7, 234
Balibar, Etienne 179–​81, 192
Beasley-​Murray, Jon 2, 13, 57, 59, 63–​4, 88–​9,
93–​4, 110, 184–​8, 192, 237–​8, 241, 244,
247, 250, 252, 255, 258–​9, 265–​7, 270
Beauvoir, Simone de 224–​5
Bergmann, Emilie 178, 226, 236
Beverley, John 29, 59, 60, 63, 80, 84–​6, 93,
187–​8, 192, 255, 257–​8, 270
biopolitics 102–​3, 107, 233, 236, 241
Birmingham School 55, 97, 99
Blaser, Mario 137–​8, 141
Bonilla, Heraclio 17
Buarque de Hollanda, Heloísa 12, 162, 167,
228, 234
buen vivir/​living well 107, 134, 140
Burt, Jo-​Marie 18
Butler, Judith 12, 147, 151, 224–​5, 227,
230–​1, 234
Cabrera, Marta 18, 28–​9
Cadena, Marisol de la 129, 138, 141, 143, 27
173, 176
Calveiro, Pilar 20, 23, 27, 29
Canessa, Andrew 131, 136, 141
Carri, Albertina 21
Castillo, Debra 162, 226, 234
Césaire, Aimé 101, 121–​4
Chauí, Marilena 54
Chávez-​Silverman, Susana 226
Chodorow, Nancy 224, 234
citizenship 9, 16, 27, 40–​2, 47–​8, 57–​9, 61,
83, 96, 104, 128, 131, 133, 136, 139, 144,
168, 172, 198, 202
Cixous, Hélène 183, 225
Close, Glen 212, 221
Collective Memories of Repression
Project (Argentina) 16
coloniality 9, 81–​4, 94, 101, 105, 109,
111–​17, 119–​27, 137, 142–​3, 150, 173,
175, 177, 208, 216–​17, 221, 235
coloniality of power 82–​3, 94, 105, 109,
137, 173, 216
cultural inclusion 44, 82, 131, 148, 198
culture and development 197
decolonial 9, 12, 59, 77, 81, 89–​90, 92, 147,
161, 168, 172, 175, 178, 182, 188, 208, 209,
216–​17, 220, 230–​2, 235; option 81–​4, 87,
127, 221; turn 111–​17, 120–​7, 174
 273
decoloniality 9, 82, 111–​17,
119–​20, 124–​6
decolonization 9, 23, 30, 83–​4, 111–​24,
126, 133, 135, 137, 140, 143
deconstruction 11, 73, 75, 77, 80, 84–​6,
88–​90, 98, 105, 179–​91
Degregori, Carlos Iván 18, 29
demetaphorization 189, 191
Derrida, Jacques 6, 11, 67, 73–​9, 88,
179–​83, 189–​92, 208, 224
difference 51, 132, 139
Dussel, Enrique 8, 65–​70, 75, 77–​8, 82,
84, 94, 105, 108, 113–​15, 123, 125–​6,
208, 212
Echeverría, Bolívar 97
emotion 162, 237–​8, 240, 244–​53
empire 269–​70, 108, 125–​7, 190, 210–​11,
215, 220–​1, 247
equivocations 72, 137, 174
Erazo, Juliet 134–​5, 141
ethnic studies 68, 116, 123–​4, 141–​3, 230
extractivism 133, 139, 141
Faber, Sebastiaan 212, 214, 221
Fabricant, Nicole 128, 131, 133–​4, 140–​2,
27
150, 159
feminism 10, 98, 121, 127, 135, 141–​2, 161,
164–​77, 183, 210, 228, 234–​5
Figari, Carlos 231–​2, 234, 236
FLACSO-​Chile 22
Fonseca, Claudia 60–​3
Ford, Aníbal 53–​5, 63
Foucault, Michel 6, 77–​8, 101, 104, 107–​8,
131, 155, 163, 183, 224–​6, 235
Franco, Jean 59, 63, 162–​3, 177, 233,
238–​41, 247, 252
Friedlander, Judith 129, 141
García Canclini, Néstor 35, 53–​4, 56–​8, 96,
105, 163–​4, 194–​5, 200–​3, 257
gender studies 10, 161, 165–​7, 225, 228
Giorgi, Gabriel 227, 229, 233, 235
Gordon, Lewis 11, 114–​16, 126
Gramsci, Antonio 13, 53–​5, 88, 104, 162,
199, 204, 256, 270
Green, James 226, 235
Grupo de Memoria Histórica (Historical
Memory Group, Colombia) 19
Gulbenkian Commission 101, 107
Gutmann, Matthew 226, 235
Hale, Charles R 131–​2, 142
Haraway, Donna 13, 167, 224, 228, 233
Index 273
Hardt, Michael 102, 108, 265–​6, 269–​70
hegemony 182, 188, 190–​2, 218, 232,
256–​8, 264–​9
Hemispheric Institute of Performance and
Politics 157, 159–​60
Hinojosa, Claudia 228
Hispanism 78–​9, 109, 206–​7, 210–​11, 214,
222, 226, 235
hooks, bell 167, 227
human rights 7, 9, 14, 16–​17, 19–​21, 26–​7,
101, 128, 130, 136, 141, 143, 157, 195,
198, 252
Huyssen, Andreas 14, 24–​5, 28–​9
hybridization 6, 8, 56–​7, 104, 218
Iarocci, Michael 211, 221
ideology 1, 52, 88, 90, 101, 182–​90, 238,
252, 256, 259, 263, 265–​8
imperial turn 210–​12
indigeneity 10, 17, 111, 128–​36, 138,
140, 142–​3
infrapolitics 9, 73, 75–​7, 102, 264–​5, 270
intersectionality 6, 12, 128, 135–​6, 139–​40,
142–​3, 229–​30
Irigaray, Luce 183, 225, 235
Irwin, Robert McKee 12, 110, 204, 223,
226–​7, 235
Jelin, Elizabeth 15–​16, 24–​6, 29–​30
Kristeva, Julia 183, 224
Lamas, Marta 12, 162–​3, 165, 227–​8, 235
Lancaster, Roger 226, 235
Landsberg, Alison 23, 30
Latinamericanism 60, 63, 80, 85–​6, 89,
93–​4, 187–​8, 192
Lauretis, Teresa de 224, 227
Lemebel, Pedro 231
lesbian and gay studies 226, 229, 234
liberalism 45, 47, 82, 97, 107, 121, 132–​3,
139, 142–​3, 232–​3
Loureiro, Ángel 211, 221
Ludmer, Josefina 63–​4
Lugones, María 114, 135, 142, 173, 177
Martín-​Barbero, Jesús 53–​5, 155, 163, 241
Martínez-​San Miguel,Yolanda 216, 227
mass culture 23, 30, 51–​2, 55–​7, 61, 98,
162, 243
Massumi, Brian 13, 244, 250, 259–​60,
262–​7, 270
memory 7, 10, 14–​31, 58, 71, 77–​8, 101
mestizaje 57, 129, 215, 217–​18, 227
247
274 Index
Mignolo, Walter 11, 78, 81, 109, 111–​12,
114–​15, 119, 124, 126, 137, 142, 207–​9,
211–​13, 216–​19, 221, 230, 235
modernity/​coloniality 112–​16, 137,
175, 216
Molloy, Sylvia 12, 226–​7, 229, 235
Monsiváis, Carlos 12, 162, 227–​8
Moraña, Mabel 9, 84, 238
Moreiras, Alberto 78, 87–​91, 93–​4, 179,
187, 192, 255, 262–​5, 269–​70
Mott, Luiz 231, 235
Muñoz, José 153, 230–​1, 243
natural resources 10, 128, 133, 139–​40
Negri, Antonio 13, 102, 108,
265–​6, 269–​70
neoliberal multiculturalism 10, 128,
131–​2, 139
neoliberalism 6, 13, 23–​4, 27, 33, 42–​3,
46, 50, 57, 59, 64, 91, 94, 103, 107,
130–​1, 139, 143, 193, 196, 238,
256, 271
nomos/​anomie 268
Novo, Salvador 228
Núñez Noriega, Guillermo 226
O’Bryen, Rory 237, 244, 247, 253
O’Donnell, Guillermo 15, 28, 30
ontologies 137–​9, 174
Ortega, Julio 11, 213–​19, 221
Ortiz, Renato 56, 58, 64, 109, 163,
198–​9, 204
otherness 66, 69–​70, 129
Otros Saberes Project 157
Peluffo, Ana 237–​8, 244–​5, 248–​9, 253
peninsular studies, 210–​11, 213–​14
Pérez de Mendiola, Marina 211
Pérez, Emma 115, 124
performance 10, 57, 98, 240, 242–​3,
247, 249–​53
performativity 10, 146, 152, 154, 159, 225
Perlongher, Néstor 12, 231, 236
Perreault, Tom 133, 142
Pino, Ponciano del 18, 23, 29
Poblete, Juan 1, 32, 47–​8, 184, 194, 238,
241, 243, 253
populism 9, 52, 56, 62, 94, 100, 102,
104, 244
post-​subalternism 9, 87
Postero, Nancy 9, 128, 141–​2
posthegemony 12–​13, 87–​91, 93, 186, 188,
192, 244, 252, 255–​9, 262–​3, 267–​71
postidentitarian 97
postnational 37, 40–​1, 97, 257
postpolitical 97
Povinelli, Elizabeth 132, 138–​9, 143
Pratt, Mary Louise 162, 164, 178,
209–​10, 222
Preciado, Paul (formerly Beatriz)
233–​4, 236
Punto de vista (Argentina) 15
queer of color critique 12, 230, 232, 234
queer theory 225–​33, 235
Quijano, Anibal 82–​3, 94, 101, 105, 109,
111, 114–​15, 119, 121, 127, 137, 143
Quiroga, José 226–​7, 230, 236
Radcliffe, Sarah 131, 134, 136, 143
Resina, Joan Ramon 210, 222
Revista de Crítica Cultural (Chile) 15,
165, 228
Rich, Adrienne 224, 236
Richard, Nelly 12, 15, 22, 28, 30, 107, 110,
153, 160, 162–​5, 178, 184, 186, 193, 228,
236, 238, 241, 247, 253
Richards, Patricia 132, 143
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia 59, 64, 110, 136,
247
143, 157, 162
Rodríguez, Ileana 27, 40, 60, 233
Rothberg, Michael 23, 30
Rousseau, Stéphanie 135, 143
Rubin, Gayle 224
Rush, Peter D. 22, 30
Salazar Borja, Gabriel 18, 29
Salessi, Jorge 226–​7, 236
Sánchez Gómez, Gonzalo 18
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio 249
Sandoval, Chela 114–​15, 120–​1, 124, 127
Santana, Mario 212–​13, 222
Santiago, Silviano 233, 236
Sarlo, Beatriz 15, 23, 30, 55–​6, 58, 64, 110,
163, 241, 247
Scheper-​Hughes, Nancy 239–​40, 248, 254
School of the Americas 20, 95
Scott, Joan 224, 227
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 224–​5, 230
self-​determination 134
sensorial: appeals 243, 249; demands 245;
dynamics 241, 247, 250; flows 12,
237, 250
Sifuentes-​Jáuregui, Ben 227, 232
Simic, Olivera 22, 30
Smith, Paul Julian 226, 236
 257
Speed, Shannon 130, 136, 143
Spivak, Gayatri 59, 64, 78, 84–​6, 89, 94,
105, 110, 167, 227–​8, 270
Stern, Steve 16–​17, 30
structures of feeling 242–​3
Sturken, Marita 23, 25, 30
subaltern studies 6, 9, 40, 48, 59, 68, 81,
85–​8, 93–​4, 106, 185, 207, 209, 213–​16,
221, 270
subalternism 9, 11, 80, 84, 86–​7, 185, 210,
216, 219
Surwillo, Lisa 208, 222
Taylor, Diana 28, 30, 146–​52, 155–​7,
159, 160
Teoría cuir 12, 231–​2
territory 6, 28, 36, 40, 131, 133–​4,
142, 258
theater 146, 148, 152–​3, 155–​6, 160, 251
transatlantic studies 11–​12, 107, 206–​8,
211–​16, 218–​20
transculturation 57, 105, 222
transitional justice studies 22
transnationalism 6–​8, 33, 35–​49
247
Index 275
trauma 4, 15, 20, 102, 103, 150, 241,
245, 252–​3
Trigo, Abril 107–​8, 110, 164, 177–​8, 207,
222, 238, 242, 254
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC, Peru) 18, 28
Valencia, Sayak 231, 236
Van Cott, Donna Lee 131, 143
Vannini, Margarita 27
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 137–​9, 143,
174, 176
Weeks, Jeffrey 224, 227
Williams, Gareth 9, 13, 57, 59, 64, 80, 93–​4,
184–​6, 193, 255–​9, 268–​9, 271
Wittig, Monique 224–​5, 236
women’s studies 165–​8, 176, 223–​5
Wynter, Sylvia 111, 114–​15, 118, 124, 127
Yezer, Caroline 23, 29
Yúdice, George 164, 194, 200–​2
Zambra, Alejandro 21, 31