Creative Resistance And Utopian Subjectivities: Zapatista Autonomy As Discourse, Power, And Practice (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico has been the first example of the rising radical movements that aim to implement utopian projects, i.e. pass beyond existing institutional frameworks and emphasize an autonomous, horizontal, and anti-power politics in the post-Cold War era. Having left 2011 behind, the question concerning the possibilities for and obstacles to the utopian projects of movements like Occupy!, Indignados, and the autonomist groups in the Arab Spring begs an answer. The Zapatista movement with its resilience despite ongoing conflict and hardships in the region and its increasing move towards the offensive by constructing an alternative project offers a response to this question. This paper studies the utopian nature of the movement’s political project analyzing it under the category of radical utopias. By presenting the discourse and the institutional designs of the Zapatista movement, it argues that despite the tensions between such movements’ visible anti-formalism and their intention to construct a radical utopia for radical social change, the Zapatista movement has created ways to incorporate the three features utopias entail - subjective imaginations, collective political will, and realization – simultaneously and on all levels into its radical utopia. It concludes despite the shortcomings of the Zapatistas, the movement, through utopian spaces of dialogical politics and spaces for political experiments, creates a coherence between the subjective / collective imaginary of the people and the institutions, and places the utopia to “here and now” as part of their resistance. PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR IF YOU WANT TO ACCESS THE PAPER.
Zapatista Voice, Visibility and Vision: An-other Aesthetics of Globalization
Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo , 2020
Since their insurrection on January 1st, 1994, the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [“Zapatista Army of National Liberation] has promulgated an incisive critique of the colonial character of capitalist accumulation and violent dispossession led by globalized finance capital and enabled by state force. With their grassroots organization, Zapatistas have transmitted an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial worldview to urban and rural communities around the world, demonstrating us an-other globalization. This was possible not only with the strategic use of communication technologies and alternative media networks but with an understanding and production of aesthetics that uses language, visual symbols, humor and stories with an indigenous sensibility. It is thus a very poignant observation by Maria Saldaña-Portillo who argues that the Zapatistas fill in the empty content of the signifier ‘Indian’ with ‘Indian specificity (Saldaña-Portillo2003). The unification of the ‘subjective philosophy of rage’ with Mayan cosmology and worldview makes neo-Zapatismo both aesthetic and political. Zapatistas strategically build their vision of the ‘other politics’ by constructing a visual and aural world, which is hard to articulate in the traditional vocabulary and imagination of revolution as it is a unique encounter between libertarian Marxism and historical indigenous resistance. This has constituted 'a powerful disruption on the original plan, and the opening of unprecedented possibilities around which a new subjectivity started taking shape ' as Deleuze articulated (Deleuze 1994:190). It is thus essential to examine the art of the Zapatista movement that can present an important political conjuncture from which to sustain other sensorial worlds here and now. Analyzing their community murals and other visual production with a dialectical materialist perspective, this paper theorizes and historicizes the Zapatista aesthetics and shows how the Zapatista movement in Chiapas has creatively articulated new forms of social politicity with their unique aesthetic engagements.. Zapatista aesthetics is not only important to recognize that 'another aesthetics' is possible but also enables us to map the visible but disregarded ground of aesthetics in recent social movements.
One No Against Violence, Many Yeses Beyond Violence: Zapatista Dignity, Autonomy, Counter-Conduct
(150 words) Leading nonviolent resistance scholars have interpreted nonviolence as an effective strategy for political reform within the violent world-system. In contrast, a revolutionary approach requires us to change the violent world-system by creating alternative ways of life. Nonviolence is not just a strategy without and against violence; it is a holistic and constructive process for making other worlds without-against-and-beyond violence possible. It involves one No against systemic violence as well as many Yeses beyond it. Although Zapatista rebels asserted their dignity with Fire, they learned to confront and move beyond violence with Word and Autonomy as weapons. Revolutionary Zapatista women engaging in counter-conduct within the movement are on the frontlines of contemporary struggles without-against-and-beyond violence. In this chapter we propose eleven theses to critically reflect on the state of nonviolent resistance studies, utilizing practices and insights of the Zapatista movement to exemplify revolutionary nonviolence and encourage further research on struggles for autonomy and alternative ways of life. The peripheral field of "nonviolent action studies" that took shape in the 1970s, particularly with the now classic work of Gene Sharp (1973), was for a long time an almost invisible area related to other more prominent fields exploring activism, such as social movement studies. However, during the last decade it has emerged as a popular framework for understanding unarmed popular uprisings, such as those in the Arab rebellions 2011. With the publication of the celebrated work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan (2011), there has been a virtual explosion of interest and research. At the backdrop of this development, we make in this chapter is a critical problematization of the enthusiasm for "regime change", "nonviolence," and "civil resistance".
Inspiring alterpolitics (R. Ciavolella & S. Boni coords). Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, ISSN 0920 12 97, 2015
Since 1994, the Zapatista political autonomy project has been claiming that “another world is possible”. This experience has influenced many intellectuals of contemporary radical social movements who see in the indigenous organization a new political alter-native. I will first explore some of the current theories on Zapatism and the crossing of some of authors into anarchist thought. The second part of the article draws on an ethnography conducted in the municipality of Chenalhó, in the highlands of Chiapas, to emphasize some of the everyday practices inside the self-proclaimed “autonomous municipality” of Polhó. As opposed to irenic theories on Zapatism, this article describes a peculiar process of autonomy and brings out some contradictions between the political discourse and the day-to-day practices of the autonomous power, focusing on three specific points linked to economic and political constraints in a context of political violence: the economic dependency on humanitarian aid and the “bureaucratic habitus”; the new “autonomous” leadership it involved, between “good government” and “good management”; and the internal divisions due to the return of some displaced members and the exit of international aid. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2015.720105
In book: Reframing Latin American Development, Routeldge, 2018
In many aspects, through its theory and practice, the Zapatista movement has become a bea-con of inspiration for critical thinking on development. Faced with the ferocious onslaughtagainst humanity represented by the deep crisis through which the world today is passing, itis essential to understand the fundamental characteristics of contemporary capitalism and toseek and struggle for a pathway towards emancipation. This need becomes particularly im-perative in the face of the deep and severe current crisis — which some analysists describeas terminal — and the resounding failure of both capitalism, even in the form of human de-velopment, and so-called ‘actually existing’ socialism to overcome the upheavals of a classdivided society.
Building Post-Capitalist Worlds: Zapatistas, Via Campesina and other rebellions*
2015
In the context of the prevailing abundance of diversity (biological, ethnic), the profound social inequalities, and the trends and attitudes of hegemonic forces in Latin America, a coherent process of environmental governance is proving difficult and environmental injustice is aggravated. Regardless of where one turns in the region, there is an increase in the number and intensity of conflicts between groups committed to promoting economic development (i.e., growth), and those claiming to speak for the planet and/or the welfare of the large majority of the population or particular minorities, who feel excluded from these processes and are bearing the brunt of the negative impacts of these activities. This paper gives voice to the actors actually involved in developing alternatives to the development proposals of the hegemonic forces driving the transformations in their societies. These alternatives emerge from groups whose organizations are shaped by different cosmologies, products ...
An Attempt to Understand and Reflect on the Construction of Zapatista Resistance in Chiapas, Mexico
2018
The following paper is an attempt to understand and reflect uponon the construction of Zapatista resistance in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatista uprising January 1st, 1994 was the beginning of a struggle for autonomy and subsistence largely led by indigenous communities. The author will attempt to ground the Zapatista resistance in the long history of resistances in Chiapas and consider the new element in the oppressive structures in Mexico that is neoliberalism. After discussing the historical context, the paper will read the Zapatista organization and practices alongside theoretical conceptualizations ranging from Gramscian and Laclau-Mouffian hegemony as well as Castoriadian discussions on the project of autonomy to the theory of becoming posed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. After arguing that no theoretical conceptualizations can nor should adequately capture Zapatista lived experience, the paper will engage with anthropological insights largely infused by the Anthropology of Becoming presented by João Biehl and Peter Locke as well as the concept of prefiguration explained by Marianne Maeckelbergh. These approaches finally present new starting points for a positioning of anthropologists in contemporary social struggles that are defined by action and a desire for another world
Empowerment from below: the Case of the Zapatista Movement
Critiques of empowerment and participation have focused on the limitations of these strategies as imposed ‘top down’, and based on more powerful development actors´ positions and objectives. These analysis many times fail to go beyond traditional notions of power as possessed and exercised by one agent over another, limiting the analysis to empowerment conferred by ‘the powerful’ to ‘the powerless’. However, by analyzing empowerment dynamics from a Foucaludian theory of power as ¨truth¨ and socialized norms, this essay will seek to demonstrate that empowerment of ‘others’ is not only possible, but it is a process that can originate from visibly ‘powerless’ actors in the global South, transforming social realities on a local, national and even global level. This idea will be developed through an analysis of the empowerment strategies of the Zapatista indigenous movement in Mexico. The analysis will describe four related dynamics which illustrate the potentials and complexity of empowerment processes, particularly through a radical approach to participation: 1.The various processes of empowerment which shaped the ideological, organizational and cultural origins of the Zapatistas; 2.The local practice of empowerment of the Zapatistas within indigenous communities, through strategies aimed at shifting prevalent norms, developing radical participatory democracy, and processes of critical pedagogy; 3.The contrasting views of aid and cooperation, from the vertical processes of external organizations to the horizontal approach advocated by the Zapatistas; and 4.The broader processes of empowerment as a result of the Zapatista’s shifting of discourses and boundaries of action, transcending boundaries of space, and dichotomies of North-South or power-powerless.
The Inconvenience of Revolution: Zapatismo, Cynicism and Memory
2017
In this article, I analyse the Zapatistas’ political practices and literary discourse in order to discuss two features of Zapatismo that have largely been overlooked yet I believe were fundamental for its ability to cross national boundaries and influence oppositional practices, social movements and revolutionary activity in the last two decades. The first feature is what I will call the Zapatistas’ fecund, living memory, that is, the place-specific memory that derives from everyday experience and learning, and therefore cannot be systematized and applied universally. If this first aspect is intrinsic to the Zapatista experience itself, the second feature is more related to how the Zapatistas’ discourse and political practices were read outside the indigenous communities in which Zapatismo originated, namely, as following in the footsteps of the long and marginalized tradition of Cynicism and courageous truth telling. I argue that the combination of these two features—one intrinsic ...