Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Juan Poblete - New Approaches To Latin American Studies - Culture and Power-Routledge (2017)
Juan Poblete - New Approaches To Latin American Studies - Culture and Power-Routledge (2017)
Juan Poblete - New Approaches To Latin American Studies - Culture and Power-Routledge (2017)
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:
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.
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
NEW APPROACHES
TO LATIN AMERICAN
STUDIES
Culture and Power
ii
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors ix
Acknowledgments xv
viii Contents
Index 272
ix
CONTRIBUTORS
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.
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).
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.
xii Contributors
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.
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/).
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
Introduction 3
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:
Introduction 5
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.
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
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
12
Wisconsin P, 1996.
CEPAL. Inestabilidad y desigualdad: la vulnerabilidad del crecimiento en América Latina y el Caribe.
United Nations, 2015.
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
Postmodern Challenge. Wesleyan UP, 2005.
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.
Rouse, Roger. “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism.” Diaspora,
vol. 1, no. 1, 1991, pp. 8-23.
Stiglitz, Joseph. The Price of Inequality. W. W. Norton, 2013.
Ticineto Clough, Patricia and Jean Halley, editors. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social.
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
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.
16 Michael J. Lazzara
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
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.
20 Michael J. Lazzara
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.
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
24 Michael J. Lazzara
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
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
References
Atencio, Rebecca J. Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil. U of Wisconsin
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
28
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.
30
30 Michael J. Lazzara
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
Future Dynamics of Memory Studies—A Roundtable.” Memory Studies, vol. 5, no. 2,
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-
ación.” Unpublished essay.
———. Sobre la violencia revolucionaria: memorias y olvidos. Siglo XXI Editores, 2009.
Zambra, Alejandro. Formas de volver a casa. Anagrama, 2011.
30
32
2
THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN
Juan Poblete
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
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.)
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.
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
38 Juan Poblete
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.
40 Juan Poblete
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).
44 Juan Poblete
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
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
48
50
3
THE POPULAR CULTURE TURN
Pablo Alabarces
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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:
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
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
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.
64
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
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
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
68
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
70
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.
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).
72
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:
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.
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
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
76
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
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
78
80
5
THE SUBALTERNIST TURN
Gareth Williams
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.
82 Gareth Williams
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).
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
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
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.
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.
89
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
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
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
96 Mabel Moraña
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.
98 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
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
012
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
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
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
References
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. Continuum, 2005.
———. Philosophy and the Event. Translated by Louise Burchill. Polity, 2013.
Bartra, Roger. The Cage of Melancholy. Translated by Christopher J. Hall. Rutgers UP, 1992.
Bello, Andrés. Selected Writings. Edited by Iván Jaksić, translated by Frances M. López-
Morillas. Oxford UP, 1997.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Burawoy, Michael, “Open the Social Sciences: To Whom and for What?” Portuguese Journal
of Social Science, vol. 6, no. 3, 2007, pp. 137–146.
Castro-Gómez, Santiago, editor. La reestructuración de las ciencias sociales en América Latina.
CEJA/Pensar, 2000.
———. “The Social Sciences, Epistemic Violence, and the Problem of the ‘Invention of
the Other’.” Translated by Desiree A. Martin. Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 3, no. 2,
2002, pp. 269–285.
———. Historia de la gubernamentalidad: Razón de Estado, liberalismo y neoliberalismo en Michel
Foucault. Siglo del Hombre/Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2010.
——— and Eduardo Mendieta, editors. Teorías sin disciplina: latinoamericanismo, poscoloniali-
dad y globalización en debate. Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 1998.
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. Monthly Review P,
2000.
018
Reynoso, Carlos. Apogeo y decadencia de los Estudios Culturales: una visión antropológica.
Gedisa, 2000.
Richard, Nelly. The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and
Poetics of Crisis. Translated by Alice A. Nelson and Silvia R. Tandeciarz. Duke UP, 2004.
—— —. “Intersecting Latin America with Latin Americanism: Academic Knowledge,
Theoretical Practice, and Cultural Criticism.” The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader,
edited by Ana del Sarto, Alicia Rios, and Abril Trigo. Duke UP, 2004, pp. 686–706.
Rincón, Carlos. El cambio en la noción de literatura. Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1978.
———. La no-simultaneidad de lo simultáneo: postmodernidad, globalización y culturas en América
Latina. Universidad Nacional, 1995.
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia and Rossana Barragán, editors. Debates post-coloniales: Una intro-
ducción a los estudios de la subalternidad. Ediciones Historias, 1997.
Rodríguez, Simón. Inventamos o erramos. Monte Ávila Editores, 1982.
Said, Edward. “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors.” Critical Inquiry,
vol. 15, no. 2, 1989, pp. 205–225.
Sarlo, Beatriz. Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930. Nueva Visión, 1988.
———. Scenes from Postmodern Life. Translated by Jon Beasley-Murray. U of Minnesota
P, 2001.
Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. Pela Mão de Alice: O Social e o Político na Pós-Modernidade.
Afrontamento, 1994.
———, editor. Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies.Verso, 2007.
———. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers, 2014.
Spivak, Gayatri. Outside the Teaching Machine. Routledge, 1993.
Szurmuk, Mónica and Robert McKee Irwin, editors. Dictionary of Latin American Cultural 10
Studies. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2012.
Thompson, Edward P. The Making of the English Working Class.Victor Gollancz, 1963.
Trigo, Abril. “Global Realignments and the Geopolitics of Neo- Hispanicism.”
Rethinking Intellectuals in Latin America, edited by Moraña, Mabel and Bret Gustafson.
Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2010, pp. 327–352.
Valenzuela Arce and José Manuel, editors. Los Estudios Culturales en México. CONACULTA/
FCEc, 2003.
———. Sed de mal: Feminicidio, jóvenes y exclusión social. COLEF, 2012.
———. Nosotros: Arte, cultura e identidad en la frontera México-Estados Unidos. CONACULTA,
2012.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. Open the Social Sciences. Stanford UP, 1996.
Walsh, Catherine, editor. Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial: Reflexiones latinoamericanas.
Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar/Abya-Yala, 2005.
———. “Interculturalidad, colonialidad y educación.” Revista Educación y Pedagogía, vol. 48,
2007, pp. 25–35.
———, Freya Schiwy, and Santiago Castro-Gómez, editors. Indisciplinar las ciencias sociales:
Geopolíticas del conocimiento y colonialidad del poder: perspectivas desde lo andino. Universidad
Andina Simón Bolívar/Abya-Yala, 2002.
Williams Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. Columbia UP, 1958.
———. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977.
Yúdice, George. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in a Global Era. Duke UP, 2004.
Zavaleta Mercado, René. Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia. Plural, 1986.
1
7
THE DECOLONIAL TURN
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
21
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
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:
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
214
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
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”.
References
Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Atallah, Devin G. “Toward a Decolonial Turn in Resilience Thinking in Disasters: Example
of the Mapuche from Southern Chile on the Frontlines and Faultlines.” International
Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, vol. 19, October 2016, pp. 92–100.
Ballestrin, Luciana. “América Latina e o giro decolonial.” Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política,
vol. 11, 2013, pp. 89–117.
Blanco, Juan. Cartografía del pensamiento latinoamericano contemporáneo: una introducción.
Universidad Rafael Landívar, 2009.
Carmona Báez, Antonio and Melisa Soto- Lafontaine. “Sexual Self- determination in
Cuba: The Epistemic Decolonial Turn.” Sexualities, vol. 18, no. 7, 2015, pp. 775–797.
Castro-Gómez, Santiago and Ramón Grosfoguel, editors. El giro decolonial: Reflexiones para
una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo clobal. Universidad Javeriana/Siglo del
Hombre Editores, 2007.
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham. Monthly Review P,
2000. First published in French, Discours sur le colonialisme. Présence Africaine, 1955.
Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack, editors. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics,
Culture, and Literary Theory. UP of Virginia, 2001.
Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead Books, 2007.
216
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text. Contexts. Criticisms, edited by
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver. W. W. Norton & Co., 1999.
Dussel, Enrique. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity.
Translated by Michael D. Barber. Continuum, 1995.
———. Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, edited by Alejandro A.
Vallega. Translated by Eduardo Mendieta et al. Duke UP, 2013.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. Grove Press, 2004.
———. Black Skin,White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. Grove Press, 2008.
Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the
Human Sciences. Routledge, 1995.
———. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. Routledge, 2000.
—— — . “Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence.”
Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, vol. 1,
no. 2, 2011, pp. 95–103.
Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political- Economy
Paradigms.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 211–223.
Grosfoguel, Ramón, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and José David Saldívar. “Latin@s and the
‘Euro-American’ Menace: The Decolonization of the US Empire in the 21st Century.”
Latin@s in the World-System, edited by Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres,
and José David Saldívar. Paradigm Press, 2005, pp. 3–27.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn.” Radical Philosophy
Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2006, pp. 111–137.
———. “La descolonización y el giro des-colonial.” Comentario internacional: Revista del
Centro Andino de Estudios Internacionales, vol. 7, 2006–2007, pp. 66–78. 216
———. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Duke UP, 2008.
———.“Post-continental Philosophy: Its Definition, Contours, and Fundamental Sources.”
Review of Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 9, 2010, pp. 40–86.
———. La descolonización y el giro des-colonial. Editorial de la Universidad de la Tierra, 2011.
———. “Enrique Dussel’s Liberation Thought in the Decolonial Turn.” Transmodernity:
Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011,
pp. 1–30.
———. “El pensamiento filosófico del ‘giro descolonizador’.” El pensamiento filosófico lati-
noamericano, del Caribe, y “Latino” (1300–2000), edited by Enrique Dussel, Eduardo
Mendieta, and Carmen Bohórquez. Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2011, pp. 683–697.
—— — . “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post- continental Interventions in
Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—An Introduction.” Thinking through the Decolonial
Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique. Special issue of
Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, vol. 1,
no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–15.
—— — . “Decoloniality at Large: Towards a Trans- Americas and Global Transmodern
Paradigm.” Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory,
Philosophy, and Critique. Special issue of Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural
Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, vol. 1, no. 3, 2012, pp. 1–10.
———. “Religion, Conquest, and Race in the Foundations of the Modern/Colonial
World.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 82, no. 3, 2014, pp. 636–665.
Marcos, Subcomandante. Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, edited by Juana Ponce
de León. Seven Stories Press, 2001.
Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border
Thinking. Princeton UP, 2000.
217
———. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke
UP, 2011.
Muñiz Reed, Ivan. “Thoughts on Curatorial Practices in the Decolonial Turn.” Broadsheet
Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, 2016, pp. 14–18.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo. Empire, Global Coloniality, and African Subjectivity: Berghahn
Books, 2013.
———. The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life. Berghahn, 2016.
Ndlovu, Morgan. “Why Indigenous Knowledges in the 21st Century? A Decolonial Turn.”
Yesterday & Today, vol. 11, 2014, pp. 84–98.
Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative
Ethnology. Cambridge UP, 1982.
Pérez, Emma. Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1999.
Quijano, Anibal. “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social.” Journal of World-Systems
Research, vol. 11, no. 2, 2000, pp. 342–386.
———. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2007
[1991], pp. 168–178.
Quijano, Anibal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas
in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal, vol. 44, no. 134, 1992,
pp. 549–557.
Rodríguez Reyes, Abdiel. Filosofía de la liberación y giro decolonial. Analéctica. Revista y Casa
Editorial, y Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Panamá, 2017.
Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. U of Minnesota P, 2000.
216 Sithole, Tendayi. Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness. Lexington
Books, 2016.
Tlostanova, Madina. “Decolonial Feminism and the Decolonial Turn.” Gender Epistemologies
and Eurasian Borderlands, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 19–60.
Uperesa, Lisa. “A Decolonial Turn in Anthropology? A View from the Pacific.” Savage
Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology, blog, June 7, 2016.
Walsh, Catherine, editor. Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial: reflexiones latinoamericanas.
Editorial Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2005.
Wood, Peter H.“‘If Toads Could Speak’: How the Myth of Race Took Hold and Flourished
in the Minds of Europe’s Renaissance Colonizers.” Racism and Anti-racism in World
Perspective, edited by Benjamin P. Bowser. Sage, 1995, pp. 27–45.
Wynter, Sylvia. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” Boundary 2, vol. 12,
no. 3, 1984, pp. 19–65.
———. “1492: A New World View.” Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New
World View, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1995, pp. 5–57.
———.“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human,
After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” The New Centennial Review, vol. 3,
no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.
218
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
219
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.
13
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
312
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
13
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
314
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
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.
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
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
References
Albó, Xavier. “Suma Qamaña, El Buen Convivir.” Revista Obets, vol. 4, 2009, pp. 25–40.
Anthias, Penelope. “Extraction, Revolution, and Plurinationalism: Rethinking Resource
Extraction Narratives from Bolivia.” Latin American Perspectives, forthcoming in
Special Issue “Open Veins Revisited”, edited by Nicole Fabricant.
Assies, Willem, Gemma van der Harr, and André Hoekema, editors. The Challenge of
Diversity: Indigenous Peoples and Reform of the State in Latin America. Purdue UP, 2000.
Bautista, S. Rafael. “¿Qué significa el Estado Plurinacional?” Descolonización en Bolivia,
Cuatro Ejes para Comprender el Cambio.Vicepresidencia del Estado, 2011.
Becker, Marc. “Ecuador: The Rights of Nature Threatened in Yasuni National Park.” Upside
Down World, September 5, 2013.
14
Bessire, Lucas and David Bond. “Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique.”
American Ethnologist, vol. 41, no. 3, 2014, pp. 440–456.
Blaser, Mario. “The Threat of the Yrmo: The Political Ontology of a Sustainable Hunting
Program.” American Anthropologist, vol. 111, no. 1, 2009, pp. 10–20.
———. “Political Ontology.” Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 5–6, 2009, pp. 873–896.
Brysk, Alison. From Tribal Village to Global Village: Indian Rights and International Relations in
Latin America. Stanford UP, 2000.
Burman, Anders. “Chachawarmi: Silence and Rival Voices on Decolonisation and Gender
Politics in Andean Bolivia.” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2011,
pp. 65–91.
Canessa, Andrew. “Conflict, Claim, and Contradiction in the New Indigenous State of
Bolivia.” Working Paper No. 12, desiguALdades, December 2012.
———. Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life. Duke
UP, 2012.
Choque Quispe, María Eugenia. “Colonial Domination and the Subordination of the
Indigenous Woman in Bolivia.” Translated by Christine Taff and Marcia Stephenson.
Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, 1998, pp. 10–23.
de la Cadena, Marisol. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections
beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 25, no. 2, 2012, pp. 334–370.
——— and Orin Starn. Indigenous Experience Today. Berg, 2007.
Denis, Ann.“Intersectional Analysis: A Contribution of Feminism to Sociology.” International
Sociology, vol. 23, no. 5, 2008, pp. 677–694.
Dietz, Gunther. “From Indigenismo to Zapatismo: The Struggle for a Multi- ethnic
410 Mexican Society.” The Struggle for Indigenous Rights in Latin America, edited by Nancy
Postero and Leon Zamosc. Sussex Academic Press, 2004, pp. 32–80.
Engle, Karen. The Elusive Problem of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy. Duke
UP, 2010.
Erazo, Juliet. “REDD: Development Opportunity or Neoliberal Threat? Indigenous
Organizations Take Opposing Views.” NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 46, no. 1,
2013, pp. 55–60.
Escobar, Arturo. “The ‘Ontological Turn’ in Social Theory: A Commentary on ‘Human
Geography without Scale’, edited by Sallie Marston, John Paul Jones II, and Keith
Woodward.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 32, no. 1, 2007, pp. 106–111.
Fabricant, Nicole. “Good Living for Whom? Bolivia’s Climate Justice Movement and the
Limitations of Indigenous Cosmovisions.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies,
vol. 8, no. 2, 2013, pp. 159–178.
———and Bret Gustafson. “Revolutionary Extractivism in Bolivia: Imagining Alternative
World Orders from the Ground Up.” NACLA March 2, 2015.
———and Kathryn Hicks. “Bolivia versus the Billionaires: Limitations of the Climate
Justice Movement in International Negotiations.” NACLA Report on the Americas, vol.
46, no. 1, 2013, pp. 27–31.
———and Nancy Postero. “Performing the ‘Wounded Indian’: A New Platform of
Democracy and Human Rights in Bolivia’s Autonomy Movement.” Performance Politics:
Spectacular Productions of Culture in Contemporary Latin America. Special issue of Identities:
Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 21, no. 4, 2014, pp. 395–411.
Friedlander, Judith. Being Indian in Hueyapan, A Study of Forced Identity in Contemporary
Mexico. St. Martin’s Press, 1975.
García, María Elena. “Introduction: Indigenous Encounters in Contemporary Peru.” Latin
American and Caribbean Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 2008, pp. 217–226.
412
———. “Negotiating Indigeneity.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, vol. 8, no. 2,
2013, pp. 107–121.
———and Leon Zamosc. The Struggle for Indigenous Rights in Latin America. Sussex
Press, 2004.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. The Cunning of Recognition. Duke UP, 2002.
———. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Duke
UP, 2011.
Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3,
2007, pp. 168–178.
Radcliffe, Sarah. “Development for a Postneoliberal Era? Sumak Kawsay, Living Well, and
the Limits of Decolonization in Ecuador,” Geoforum, vol. 43, no. 2, 2011, pp. 240–249.
———. Indigenous Women and Postcolonial Development. Duke UP, 2015.
Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement. Translated by Julie Rose. U of Minnesota P, 1999.
Richards, Patricia. Race and the Chilean Miracle. U of Pittsburgh P, 2013.
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. “The Notion of ‘Rights’ and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial
Modernity: Indigenous Peoples and Women in Bolivia.” Translated by Molly Geidel.
Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 18, no. 2, 2010, pp. 29–54.
——— and Rossana Barragán. Debates Post Coloniales: Una Introducción a los Estudios de la
Subalternidad. Historias, SEPHIS y Aruwiyiri, 1997.
Rousseau, Stéphanie. “Indigenous and Feminist Movements at the Constituent Assembly
in Bolivia: Locating the Representation of Indigenous Women.” Latin American Research
Review, vol. 46, no. 2, 2011, pp. 5–28.
Sawyer, Suzanna. Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in
412 Ecuador. Duke UP, 2004.
——— and Edmund Terrance Gómez. The Politics of Resource Extraction: Indigenous Peoples,
Multinational Corporations and the State. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Schiwy, Freya. “Decolonization and the Question of Subjectivity, Gender, Race, and Binary
Thinking.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 271–294.
Seider, Rachel. Multiculturalism in Latin America: Indigenous Rights, Diversity, and Democracy.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Speed, Shannon. Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas.
Stanford UP, 2008.
—— —. “The Intersectionality of Violence: Indigenous Women and Human Rights.”
Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
Washington, DC, December, 2014.
Tassi, Nico, Carmen Medeiros, Antonio Rodríguez-Carmona, and Giovana Ferrufino.
‘Hacer plata sin plata’: El desborde de los comerciantes populares en Bolivia. Fundación
PIEB, 2013.
Tsing, Anna. “Indigenous Voice.” Indigenous Experience Today, edited by Marisol de la Cadena
and Orin Starn. Berg, 2007, pp. 33–67.
Turner, Terrence.“The Crisis of Late Structuralism, Perspectivism, and Animism: Rethinking
Culture, Nature, Spirit, and Bodiliness.” Tipití Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of
Lowland South America, vol. 7, no. 1, 2009, pp. 3–42.
Van Cott, Donna Lee. The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin
America. U of Pittsburgh P, 2009.
Vasconcelos, José. La raza cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana. Aguilar, 1966.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled
Equivocation.” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America,
vol. 2, no. 1, 2004, pp. 3–22.
41
Wade, Peter. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. Pluto Press, 1997.
Walsh, Catherine. “Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21,
no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 224–239.
Warren, Kay. “Indigenous Movements as a Challenge to the Unified Social Movement
Paradigm for Guatemala.” Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re- visioning Latin
American Social Movements, edited by Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo
Escobar. Westview Press, 1998, pp. 165–195.
Webber, Katinka. “Chiquitano and the Multiple Meanings of Being Indigenous in Bolivia.”
Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, pp. 194–209.
Wolf, Eric. “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java.”
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, vol. 13, no.1, 1957, pp. 1–18.
Yashar, Deborah. “Contesting Citizenship: Indigenous Movements and Democracy in
Latin America.” Comparative Politics, vol. 31, no. 1, 1998, pp. 23–42.
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
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
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.
419
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.
15
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
512
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.
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
514
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
15
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.
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
517
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
518
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.
519
References
Agosín, Marjorie. Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love: The Arpillera Movement in Chile.
Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Harvard UP, 1962.
Briones, Claudia. “Teorías performativas de la identidad y performatividad de las teorías.”
Tabula Rasa, no. 6, January–June 2007, pp. 55–83.
Cabranes- Grant, Leo. “From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in
Colonial Mexico.” Theatre Journal, vol. 63, no. 4, 2011, pp. 499–520.
Davis, Tracy. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, edited by
Tracy C. Davis. Cambridge UP, 2008, pp. 1–10.
Diéguez, Ileana. Escenarios Liminales: Teatralidades, Performances y Política. Atuel, 2007.
Eltit, Diamela. Emergencias: Escritos sobre literature, arte y política. Planeta/Ariel, 2000.
Fabricant, Nicole. “Performative Politics: The Camba Countermovement in Eastern
Bolivia.” American Ethnologist, vol. 36, no. 4, 2009, pp. 768–783.
Féral, Josette and Ronald P. Bermingham. “Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical
Language.” SubStance, vol. 31, no. 98/99, 2002, pp. 94–108.
Flores, Victor Vich. El Discurso de la Calle: Los Cómicos Ambulantes y las Tensiones de la
Modernidad en el Perú. Red Para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Perú, 2001.
Fuentes, Marcela A. “Performance, Politics, and Protest.” What Is Performance Studies? edited
by Diana Taylor and Marcos Steuernagel. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and
Politics, 2013.
518
Fusco, Coco. English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New Press, 1995.
Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harper & Row, 1974.
Graham-Jones, Jean. Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina’s Female Icons before and after Eva
Perón. U of Michigan P, 2014.
Hamera, Judith. “Performance, Performativity, and Cultural Poiesis in Practices of Everyday
Life.” The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, edited by D. Soyini Madison and Judith
Hamera. Sage, 2006, pp. 46–64.
La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence. Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora. U of
Minnesota P, 2009.
Lane, Jill. “Digital Zapatistas.” The Drama Review (TDR), vol. 47, no. 2, 2003, pp. 129–144.
Lovato, Roberto. “Fauxccupy: The Selling and Buying of the Venezuelan Opposition,”
Latino Rebels. March 13, 2014.
Martín-Barbero, Jesús. “Matrices Culturales de las Telenovelas,” Estudios Sobre Las Culturas
Contemporaneas, vol. 2, no. 5, 1988, pp. 137–163.
Martins, Leda. “Performances of Spiral Time.” Performing Religion in the Americas: Media,
Politics and Devotional Practices of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alyshia Gálvez.
Seagull, 2007, pp. 173–208.
Millones, Luis. Actores de altura: ensayos sobre el teatro popular andino. Editorial Horizonte, 1992.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. U of
Minnesota P, 1999.
Neustadt, Robert. CADA día: la creación de un arte social. Cuarto Propio, 2001.
Paredez, Deborah. Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. Duke UP, 2009.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Routledge, 1993.
Reguillo, Rossana. “Condensaciones y desplazamientos: Las políticas del miedo en los
cuerpos contemporaneos.” Emisférica, vol. 4, no. 2, 2007.
610
Richard, Nelly. La insubordinación de los signos: cambio politico, transformación culturales y poéticas
de la crisis. Propio, 1994.
Rivera-Servera, Ramón. Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics. U of Michigan
P, 2012.
Rubio Zapata, Miguel. El Cuerpo Ausente. Groupo Cultural Yyachkani, 2008.
Savigliano, Marta E. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Westview, 1995.
Scolieri, Paul A. Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards and the Choreography of Conquest.
Texas UP, 2013.
Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty
War.” Duke UP, 1997.
———. “Translating Performance.” Profession, 2002, pp. 44–50.
———. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke
UP, 2003.
———. “Performance and/as History.” The Drama Review (TDR), vol. 50, no. 1, 2006,
pp. 67–86.
———. “Remapping Genre through Performance: From ‘American’ to ‘Hemispheric’
Studies.” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1416–1430.
——— and Marcos Steuernagel. What Is Performance Studies? Hemispheric Institute of
Performance and Politics, 2013.
Turner, Victor W. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. Performing Arts
Journal, 1982.
Vignolo, Paolo. Ciudadanías en Escena: Performance y Derechos Culturales and Colombia.
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2009.
Ybarra, Patricia A. Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History, and Identity in 610
Tlaxcala, Mexico. U of Michigan P, 2009.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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.
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,
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
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.
References
Alvarez, Sonia E. “Latin American Feminisms ‘Go Global’: Trends of the 1990s, Challenges
for the New Millennium.” Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin
American Social Movements, edited by Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo
Escobar. Westview Press, 1998, pp. 293–324.
———. “Enacting a Feminist Politics of Translation.” Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist
Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas, edited by Sonia E. Alvarez, Claudia de Lima
Costa, Verónica Feliu, Rebecca Hester, Norma Klahn, and Millie Thayer. Duke UP,
2014, pp. 1–18.
———, Arturo Escobar, and Evelina Dagnino.“Introduction: The Cultural and the Political
in Latin American Social Movements.” Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning
Latin American Social Movements, edited by Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo
Escobar. Westview Press, 1998, pp. 1–29.
—— — , Nalú Faria, and Miriam Nobre. “Introdução: Um Outro Mundo [Também 716
Feminista…] É Possível: Construindo Espaços Transnacionais e Alternativas Globais
desde os Movimentos.” Revista Estudos Feministas, vol. 11, no. 2, 2003, pp. 652–654.
Azeredo, Sandra. “Teorizando sobre Gênero e Relações Raciais.” Revista Estudos Feministas,
vol. 2, special issue, 1994, pp. 203–216.
Brundson, Charlotte. “A Thief in the Night: Stories of Feminism in the 1970s at CCCS.”
Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Chen
Kuan-Hsing. Routledge, 1996, pp. 276–286.
Cardoso, Claudia Pons. “Amefricando o Feminismo: O Pensamento de Lélia Gonzalez.”
Revista Estudos Feministas, vol. 22, no. 3, 2014, pp. 965–986.
Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled
Equivocation.” Tipití: Journal of the Society for Anthropology of the Lowland South America,
vol. 2, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–20.
Costa, Albertina de Oliveira. “Women’s Studies in Brazil, or the Tightrope- Walking
Strategy.” Brazilian Issues on Education, Gender, and Race, edited by Elba Siqueira de Sá
Barretto and Dagmar M. L. Zibas. Fundação Carlos Chagas, 1996, pp. 37–47.
——— and Cristina Bruschini. editors. Uma Questão de Gênero. Editora Rosa dos
Tempos/Fundação Carlos Chagas, 1992, pp. 54–92.
Costa, Ana Alice Alcântara and Cecília Sardenberg. “Teoría e Praxis Feminista na Academia:
Os Núcleos de Estudos sobre a Mulher nas Universidades Brasileiras.” Revista Estudos
Feministas, vol. 2, special issue, 1994, pp. 387–400.
Costa, Claudia de Lima. “Feminismos Descoloniais para Além do Humano.” Revista Estudos
Feministas, vol. 22, no. 3, 2014, pp. 929–934.
De La Cadena, Marisol. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections
beyond Politics.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 25, no. 2, 2010, pp. 334–370.
17
Del Sarto, Ana. “Foundations: Introduction.” The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader,
edited by Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo. Duke UP, 2004, pp. 153–181.
Evaristo, Conceição. Becos da Memória. Mazza Edições, 2006.
Ferreira, Gleidiane de S. “Feminismo e Redes Sociais na Marcha das Vadias no Brasil.”
Revista Artemis, vol. 15, no. 1, 2013, pp. 33–43.
Franco, Jean. “Un Matrimonio Imperfecto: Estudios Culturales y Feminismo.” Nuevo Texto
Crítico, vol. 13–14, no. 25/28, 2000, pp. 75–85.
Gonçalves, Eliane, Fátima Freitas, and Elismênnia Oliveira. “Das Idades Transitôrias: As
‘Jovens’ no Feminismo Brasileiro Contemporâneo, suas Ações e seus Dilemas.” Revista
Feminismos, vol. 1, no. 3, 2013.
Gonzalez, Lélia. “Por um Feminismo Afrolatinoamericano.” Revista Isis Internacional, vol. 9,
1988, pp. 133–141.
Gunn Allen, Paula. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions.
Beacon P, 1992.
Hermida, Viviane.“Marcha das Vadias: Reflexões Iniciais sobre a Trajetória de uma Expressão
dos Feminismos no Brasil.” Unpublished essay, 2014.
Hollanda, Heloísa Buarque de.“Os Estudos de Mulher e Literatura no Brasil: Uma Primeira
Avaliação.” Uma Questão de Gênero, edited by Albertina de Oliveira Costa and Cristina
Bruschini. Editora Rosa dos Tempos/Fundação Carlos Chagas, 1992, pp. 54–92.
Jesus, Carolina Maria de. Quarto de Despejo: Diáro de Uma Favelada. Francisco Alves, 1960.
Lao- Montes, Agustín. “Afro- Latinidades: Bridging Blackness and Latinidad.”
Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latino/a Studies, edited by Nancy R. Mirabal and
A. Lao-montes. Lexington Books, 2007, pp. 117–140.
716 Lugones, María.“Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia, vol.
22, no. 1, 2007, pp. 186–209.
———. “The Coloniality of Gender.” The Palgrave Handbook on Gender and Development:
Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice, edited by Wendy Harcourt. Palgrave,
2016, pp. 13–33.
Martello, Laura. “Tensões e Desafíos na Construção de Espaços e Encontros entre
Feministas Jovens Autonomistas no Contexto Brasileiro e Latinoamericano (2011–
2014).” Ph.D. dissertation, Federal University of Minas Gerais, 2015.
Martínez, María Tereza, Mónica Cejas, Merarit Viera, Luisa Fernanda Hernández Herse,
and Linda Daniela Villegas Mercado. “‘Ninguna Guerra en mi Nombre’: Feminismo y
Estudios Culturales en America Latina.” Nómadas, vol. 40, 2014, pp. 159–173.
Masiello, Francine. “Conhecimento Suplementar: Queering o Eixo Norte/Sul.” Revista
Estudos Feministas, vol. 8, no. 2, 2000, pp. 49–61.
Moraña, Mabel, editor. Nuevas Perspectivas desde/sobre América Latina: El Desafiio de los
Estudios Culturales. Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana/Universidad
de Pittsburgh, 2002.
Name, Leo and Julia Zanetti. “Meu Corpo, Minhas Redes: A Marcha das Vadias do Rio de
Janeiro.” Anais da ANPUR, 2013.
Oyewumi, Oyeronke. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourses. U of Minnesota P, 1997.
Paredes, Julieta. Hilando Fino desde el Feminismo Comunitário. Comunidad Mujeres Creando
Comunidad/CEDEC, 2010.
Prada, Ana Rebeca.“Is Anzaldúa Translatable in Bolivia?” Translocalities / Translocalidades: The
Politics of Feminist Translation in the Latin/a Americas, edited by Sonia E. Alvarez, Claudia
de Lima Costa, Verónica Feliu, Rebecca J. Hester, Norma Klahn, and Millie Thayer.
Duke UP, 2014, pp. 57–77.
718
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Women, Literature, and National Brotherhood.” Women, Culture, and
Politics in Latin America, edited by Emilie Bergmann, Janet Greenberg, Gwen Kirkpatrick,
Francine Masiello, Francesca Miller, Marta Morero-Frosch, Kathleen Newman, and
Mary Louise Pratt. U of California P, 1992, pp. 48–73.
Richard, Nelly. “Respuestas a un Cuestionario: Posiciones y Situaciones.” En Torno a los
Estudios Culturales: Localidades, Trayectorias y Disputas, edited by N. Richard. Editorial
ARCIS/CLACSO, 2010, pp. 67–82.
Segato, Rita Laura. “Gender, Politics, and Hybridism in the Transnationalization of the
Yorubá Culture.” Orisa Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of the Yorubá
Religious Culture, edited by Jacob K. Olupona and Terry Rey. U of Wisconsin P, 2008,
pp. 485–512.
Stengers, Isabelle. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” Making Things Public: Atmospheres of
Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. MIT Press, 2005, pp. 994–1004.
Trigo, Abril. “Practices: Introduction.” The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, edited
by Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo. Duke UP, 2004, pp. 347–374.
Walsh, Catherine. “Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought
and Cultural Studies ‘Others’ in the Andes.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2007,
pp. 224–239.
Yúdice, George. “Contrapunteo Estadounidense/ Latinoamericano de los Estudios
Culturales.” Estudios y Otras Practicas Intelectuales Latinoamericanas en Cultura y Poder, edited
by Daniel Mato. Clacso/Universidad Central de Venezuela, 2002, pp. 339–352.
718
719
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
810
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
18
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
812
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?
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,
814
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
158
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
816
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
817
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?
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:
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
819
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
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
References
Acosta, Bram. Thresholds of Illiteracy: Theory, Latin America, and the Crisis of Resistance.
Fordham, 2014.
Agamben, Giorgio. Il misterio del male: Benedetto XVI e la fine dei tempi. Laterza, 2013.
Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of
Mourning. Duke UP, 1999.
Balibar, Etienne. “Ambiguous Universality.” Differences, vol. 7, no. 1, 1995, pp. 48–74.
Beasley-Murray, Jonathan. Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. U of Minnesota
P, 2010.
Beverley, John. Latinamericanism after 9/11. Duke UP, 2011.
Cabezas, Oscar. Postsoberanía: Literatura, crítica y trabajo. La Cebra, 2013.
Collingwood-Selby, Elizabeth. El filo fotográfico de la historia: Walter Benjamin y el olvido de lo
inolvidable. Metales pesados, 2009.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994.
———. “Penser ce qui vient.” Derrida, pour les temps à venir, edited by René Major. Stock,
1997, pp. 17–62.
———. Heidegger: la question de l’Ëtre et l’Histoire— Cours de l’ENS- Ulm 1964– 1965.
Galilée, 2013.
Dove, Patrick. The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature.
Bucknell UP, 2004.
Fornazzari, Alessandro. Speculative Fictions: Chilean Culture, Economics, and the Neoliberal
Transition. Pittsburgh UP, 2013.
912
Galende, Federico. La oreja de los nombres. Gorla, 2005.
———. Filtraciones: Conversaciones sobre arte en Chile, 3 vols. Cuarto propio, 2007–2011.
———. Walter Benjamin y la destrucción. Metales pesados, 2009.
Graff Zivin, Erin. Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic
Atlantic. Pittsburgh UP, 2014.
James, Daniel. Doña María’s Story: Life, History, Memory, and Political Identity. Duke UP, 2004.
Jenckes, Kate. Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History.
SUNY UP, 2007.
Johnson, Adriana. Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil. Pittsburgh UP,
2010.
Johnson, David. Kant’s Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation. SUNY UP,
2013.
——— and Scott Michaelsen. Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of Culture. Fordham
UP, 2008.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.Verso, 1985.
Legrás, Horacio. Literature and Subjection: The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin
America. Pittsburgh UP, 2008.
Levinson, Brett. Secondary Moderns: Mimesis, History, and Revolution in José Lezama Lima’s
“American Expression.” Bucknell UP, 1996.
———. The Ends of Literature: The Latin American Boom in the Neoliberal Marketplace. Stanford
UP, 2004.
———. Market and Thought: Meditations on the Political and the Biopolitical. Fordham UP, 2004.
Long, Ryan. Fictions of Totality: The Mexican Novel and the National Popular State. Purdue
UP, 2008.
Moreiras, Alberto. Tercer espacio: Duelo y literatura en América Latina. LOM, 1999.
193
———. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. Duke
UP, 2001.
———. Interpretación y diferencia.Visor, 2001.
———. Línea de sombra: El no sujeto de lo político. Palinodia, 2007.
Richard, Nelly. The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and
Poetics of the Crisis. Duke UP, 2004.
———. Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s). Duke UP, 2004.
Thayer, Willy. El fragmento repetido: Escritos en estado de excepción. Metales pesados, 2006.
———. Tecnologías de la crítica. Metales pesados, 2010.
Villalobos, Sergio. Soberanías en suspenso: Imaginación y violencia en América Latina. La cebra,
2013.
Williams, Gareth. The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America.
Duke UP, 2002.
———. The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police and Democracy. Palgrave, 2011.
Zibechi, Raúl. Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements.
Translated by Ramor Ryan. AK Press, 2012.
912
914
12
THE CULTURAL POLICY TURN
Ana Wortman
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
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.
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
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).
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
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
203
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
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.
References
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.
204
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.
250
204
206
13
THE TRANSATLANTIC TURN
Bécquer Seguín
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
208
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
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
231
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
214
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
251
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
216
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
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
219
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.
References
Adelman, Jeremy. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton UP, 2009.
Adorno, Rolena and Kenneth Andrien, editors. Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and
Andeans in the Sixteenth Century. U of California P, 1992.
Altman, Ida. Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain and Puebla, Mexico, 1560–
1620. Stanford UP, 2000.
Altschul, Nadia R. Geographies of Philological Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic
National Epic. U of Chicago P, 2012.
Calvo Carrilla and José Luis. “Núñez de Arce y Rubén Darío.” 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. 269–274.
Cheah, Pheng. “The Limits of Thinking in Decolonial Strategies.” Townsend Center for the
Humanities Newsletter, November/December 2006, pp. 9–11.
21
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992.
Resina, Joan Ramon. “Cold War Hispanism and the New Deal of Cultural Studies.” Spain
beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, edited by Brad Epps and
Luis Fernández Cifuentes. Bucknell UP, 2005, pp. 70–108.
Rovira, José Carlos. “Unamuno y Amauta: textos y contextos de una relación.” 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. 555–560.
Sanders, James E. The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy
in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Duke UP, 2014.
Santana, Mario. Foreigners in the Homeland: The Spanish American New Novel in Spain, 1962–
1974. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2000.
Seed, Patricia. “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses.” Latin American Research Review,
vol. 26, no. 3, 1991, pp. 181–200.
Surwillo, Lisa. Monsters by Trade: Slave Traffickers in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture
Stanford UP, 2014.
Trigo, Abril. “Los estudios transatlánticos y la geopolítica del neo-hispanismo.” Cuadernos de
literatura, vol. 31, 2012, pp. 16–45.
2
23
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Note
1 While Paul Preciado, whose work advocates for a radical gender-neutral stance, 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.
References
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/la frontera. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Araujo, Kathya and Mercedes Prieto, editors. Estudios sobre sexualidades en América Latina.
Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, 2008.
Arnés, Laura. “Ficciones del sexo: modos de leer, modos de enseñar, modos de escribir.” Paper
presented in the conference “Los mil pequeños sexos,” Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios
de Sexualidad y Políticas de Género, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, July 2016.
Balderston, Daniel, editor. Sexualidad y nación. Instituto Internacional de Literatura
Hispanoamericana, 2000.
———. El deseo, enorme cicatriz luminosa: ensayos sobre homosexualidades latinoamericanas.
Beatriz Viterbo, 2004.
———and Donna Guy, editors. Sex and Sexuality in Latin America. New York UP, 1997.
Barbosa, Regina Maria and Richard Parker, editors. Sexualidades pelo avesso: direitos, identi-
dades e poder. Editora 34/Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 1999.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex.Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-
Chevalier.Vintage Books, 2011. 234
Bruschini, Cristina and Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, editors. Horizontes plurais: novos estu-
dos de gênero no Brasil. Editora 34/Fundação Carlos Chagas, 1998.
Buarque de Hollanda, Heloísa, editor. Tendências e impasses: o feminismo como crítica da cultura.
Editora Rocco, 1994.
———and Maria Helena Rolim Capelato, editors. Relações de gênero e diversidades culturais
nas Américas. Expressão e Cultura, 1999.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
———. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993.
Cabello, Cristeva. “Ya no leo a Butler, leo a valeria flores.” Disidencia Sexual: Revista Virtual
de Arte y Política Feminista de la CUDS, December 12, 2014.
Castillo, Debra. Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction. U of Minnesota P, 1998.
Chávez- Silverman, Susana and Librada Hernández, editors. Reading and Writing the
Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture. U of Wisconsin
P, 2000.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender.
U of California P, 1978.
Dinshaw, Carolyn and David Halperin. “From the Editors.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1993, pp. iii–iv.
Ferguson, Roderick. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. U of Minnesota
P, 2003.
Figari, Carlos.“Semióticas queer: subversions simbólicas de experiencias abyectas.” DeSignis,
vol. 19, 2013, pp. 47–57.
———. “Queer Articulations.” Critical Terms, edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben
Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and Marisa Belausteguigoitia. Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin
American Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 231–238.
253
Muñoz, José. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. U of Minnesota
P, 1999.
Núñez Noriega, Guillermo. Sexo entre varones: poder y resistencia en el campo sexual. El Colegio
de Sonora/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999.
Pecheny, Mario, Carlos Figari, and Daniel Jones, comps. Todo sexo es politico: estudios sobre
sexualidades en Argentina. Libros del Zorzal, 2008.
Perlongher, Néstor. O negocio do miché: prositução virile em São Paulo. Brasiliense, 1987.
Preciado, Beatriz. Testo Yonqui: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. The
Feminist Press, 2013.
Prieur, Annick. Mema’s House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos. U of
Chicago P, 1998.
Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke UP, 2007.
Quiroga, José. Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. New York UP, 2000.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs, vol. 5, no. 4,
1980, pp. 631–660.
Richard, Nelly. Masculino/femenino: prácticas de la diferencia y cultura democrática. Francisco
Zegers Editor, 1993.
Rodríguez. Juana María. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York
UP, 2003.
Salessi, Jorge. Médicos, maleantes y maricas. Beatriz Viterbo, 1995.
Santiago, Silviano. O cosmopolitismo do pobre. Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais, 2004.
Serrano Amaya, José Fernando, editor. Otros cuerpos, otras sexualidades. Pontificia Universidad
Javeriana, 2006.
Smith, Paul Julian and Emilie Bergmann, editors. ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic 236
Writings. Duke UP, 1995.
Valencia, Sayak. Capitalismo gore y necropolítica en el México contemporáneo. Melusina, 2010.
———. “Teoría transfeminista para el análisis de la violencia machista y la reconstruc-
ción no-violenta del tejido social en el México contemporáneo.” Universitas Humanística,
vol. 78, 2014, pp. 65–88.
Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Beacon Press, 1992.
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
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
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).
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
24
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).
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
246
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
247
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
248
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
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
References
Arellano, Jerónimo. Magical Realism and the History of Emotions in Latin America. Bucknell
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
as Political Performance in Late-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. 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.
253
———, 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
Turner. Instituto Iberoamericana/Serie Nuevo Siglo, 2005.
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.
524
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
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,
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,
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:
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
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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)
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
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).
References
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-
Roazen. Stanford UP, 1998.
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.
——— and Marc Zimmerman. Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions. U
of Texas P, 1990.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Cornejo Polar, Antonio. Escribir en el aire: ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural en las
literaturas andinas. Editorial Horizonte, 1994.
———. Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean
Literatures. Duke UP, 2013.
Galli, Carlo. Political Spaces and Global War. Translated by Elisabeth Fay. U of Minnesota
P, 2010.
García Canclini, Néstor. Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad.
Grijalbo: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990. 270
———. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. U of Minnesota
P, 1995.
González Echevarría, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative.
Cambridge UP, 1990.
Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks, 3 vols. Columbia UP, 2011.
Guha, Ranajit and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford UP, 1988.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard UP, 2000.
Levinson, Brett. The Ends of Literature: the Latin American “Boom” in the Neoliberal Marketplace.
Stanford UP, 2001.
———. Market and Thought: Meditations on the Political and Biopolitical. Fordham UP, 2004.
Marramao, Giacomo. The Passage West: Philosophy After the Age of the Nation State. Translated
by Matteo Mandarini.Verso, 2012.
Masiello, Francine. The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis. Duke
UP, 2001.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP, 2002.
Moreiras, Alberto. Línea De Sombra: El No Sujeto De Lo Político. Ediciones Palinodia, 2006.
———. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. Duke
UP, 2001.
———. “Infrapolitics: the Project and its Politics, Allegory and Denarrativization—A Note
on Posthegemony.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-
Hispanic World, vol. 5, no. 1, 2015, pp. 9–35.
Rama, Angel. La Ciudad Letrada. Ediciones del Norte, 1984.
———. The Lettered City. Translated by John Charles Chasteen. Duke UP, 1996.
Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. U of California
P, 1991.
217
Williams, Gareth. “On Global War and the End of the Katechon: Four Theses on
Posthegemony.” Unpublished work.
———. The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America.
Duke UP, 2002.
———. “Decontainment: The Collapse of the Katechon and the End of Hegemony.” The
Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas, edited by
Federico Luisetti, John Pickles, and Wilson Kaiser. Duke UP, 2015.
———. “Social Disjointedness and State-Form in Álvaro García Linera.” Culture,Theory and
Critique, vol. 56, no. 3, 2015, pp. 297–312.
270
27
INDEX
Adorno, Rolena 11, 209, 214, 216, 220 Butler, Judith 12, 147, 151, 224–5, 227,
aesthetics 10, 21, 24, 146, 152–5, 165, 227, 230–1, 234
248, 253
affect 237 Cabrera, Marta 18, 28–9
Alabarces, Pablo 8, 50, 63 Cadena, Marisol de la 129, 138, 141, 143, 27
Alarcón, Norma 227 173, 176
Altschul, Nadia 208, 220 Calveiro, Pilar 20, 23, 27, 29
Anthias, Penelope 133–5, 140 Canessa, Andrew 131, 136, 141
Anzaldúa, Gloria 12, 115, 124, 167, Carri, Albertina 21
174, 230–2 Castillo, Debra 162, 226, 234
archives of feeling 242, 251 Césaire, Aimé 101, 121–4
Atencio, Rebecca 22, 29 Chauí, Marilena 54
autonomy 58, 128, 130, 133–5, 141, 42, Chávez-Silverman, Susana 226
215, 271 Chodorow, Nancy 224, 234
Avelar, Idelber 15, 28–9, 184–6, 192 citizenship 9, 16, 27, 40–2, 47–8, 57–9, 61,
83, 96, 104, 128, 131, 133, 136, 139, 144,
Balderston, Daniel 226–7, 234 168, 172, 198, 202
Balibar, Etienne 179–81, 192 Cixous, Hélène 183, 225
Beasley-Murray, Jon 2, 13, 57, 59, 63–4, 88–9, Close, Glen 212, 221
93–4, 110, 184–8, 192, 237–8, 241, 244, Collective Memories of Repression
247, 250, 252, 255, 258–9, 265–7, 270 Project (Argentina) 16
Beauvoir, Simone de 224–5 coloniality 9, 81–4, 94, 101, 105, 109,
Bergmann, Emilie 178, 226, 236 111–17, 119–27, 137, 142–3, 150, 173,
Beverley, John 29, 59, 60, 63, 80, 84–6, 93, 175, 177, 208, 216–17, 221, 235
187–8, 192, 255, 257–8, 270 coloniality of power 82–3, 94, 105, 109,
biopolitics 102–3, 107, 233, 236, 241 137, 173, 216
Birmingham School 55, 97, 99 cultural inclusion 44, 82, 131, 148, 198
Blaser, Mario 137–8, 141 culture and development 197
Bonilla, Heraclio 17
Buarque de Hollanda, Heloísa 12, 162, 167, decolonial 9, 12, 59, 77, 81, 89–90, 92, 147,
228, 234 161, 168, 172, 175, 178, 182, 188, 208, 209,
buen vivir/living well 107, 134, 140 216–17, 220, 230–2, 235; option 81–4, 87,
Burt, Jo-Marie 18 127, 221; turn 111–17, 120–7, 174
273
Index 273
274 Index
Index 275
Speed, Shannon 130, 136, 143 trauma 4, 15, 20, 102, 103, 150, 241,
Spivak, Gayatri 59, 64, 78, 84–6, 89, 94, 245, 252–3
105, 110, 167, 227–8, 270 Trigo, Abril 107–8, 110, 164, 177–8, 207,
Stern, Steve 16–17, 30 222, 238, 242, 254
structures of feeling 242–3 Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Sturken, Marita 23, 25, 30 (TRC, Peru) 18, 28
subaltern studies 6, 9, 40, 48, 59, 68, 81,
85–8, 93–4, 106, 185, 207, 209, 213–16, Valencia, Sayak 231, 236
221, 270 Van Cott, Donna Lee 131, 143
subalternism 9, 11, 80, 84, 86–7, 185, 210, Vannini, Margarita 27
216, 219 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 137–9, 143,
Surwillo, Lisa 208, 222 174, 176
Taylor, Diana 28, 30, 146–52, 155–7, Weeks, Jeffrey 224, 227
159, 160 Williams, Gareth 9, 13, 57, 59, 64, 80, 93–4,
Teoría cuir 12, 231–2 184–6, 193, 255–9, 268–9, 271
territory 6, 28, 36, 40, 131, 133–4, Wittig, Monique 224–5, 236
142, 258 women’s studies 165–8, 176, 223–5
theater 146, 148, 152–3, 155–6, 160, 251 Wynter, Sylvia 111, 114–15, 118, 124, 127
transatlantic studies 11–12, 107, 206–8,
211–16, 218–20 Yezer, Caroline 23, 29
transculturation 57, 105, 222 Yúdice, George 164, 194, 200–2
transitional justice studies 22
transnationalism 6–8, 33, 35–49 Zambra, Alejandro 21, 31
247