The Posthegemonic Turn (original) (raw)

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Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America

2010

A challenging new work of cultural and political theory rethinks the concept of hegemony Posthegemony is an investigation into the origins, limits, and possibilities for contemporary politics and political analysis. Challenging dominant strains in social theory, Jon Beasley-Murray contends that cultural studies simply replicates the populism that conditions it, and that civil society theory merely nourishes the neoliberalism that it sets out to oppose. "In Posthegemony, Jon Beasley-Murray provides a superbly written and insightful theoretical evaluation of the shifting relation between culture and state in Latin America." — Gareth Williams, author of The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America

New Approaches to Latin American Studies preview.pdf

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 chapters written by experts in their respective fields help explain the various ways in which to think about these shifts. Questions posited include: Why are turns so crucial? How did they alter the shape or direction of the field? What new questions, objects, or problems did they contribute? What were or are their limitations? What did they displace or prevent us from considering? Among the turns included are: memory, transnational, popular culture, decolonial, feminism, affect, indigenous studies, transatlantic, ethical, post/hegemony, deconstruction, cultural policy, subalternism, gender and sexuality, performance, and cultural studies.

US Power in Latin America: Renewing Hegemony, by Ru-brick Biegon. New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 208

2018

US presence in Latin America has been challenged by New Left movements from the early Cold War era up to the late 1990s and early 2010s, as “Pink Tide” governments rose across the continent. While several policy-makers attribute the United States’ geopolitical decline to the emergence of the New Latin Left (NLL), Rubrick Biegon follows a different path. The author of US Power in Latin America proposes the study of hegemony “as a unified, asymmetrical social relationship combing material and ideational elements of coercion, consensus-building and ideological legitimation” (p.2). Biegon aims to show how the US has sought to renew its hegemonic position in the Americas through an open-ended, non-linear process (p.3). The US Power in Latin America is an effort to utilise a neo-Gramscian, historical materialist and interpretivist approach to the study of US hegemony in Latin America. The book also takes into account theoretical and analytical tools from different traditions and disciplin...

Posthegemony: Cultural Theory and Latin America, October 10th, 1492-April 13th, 2002

2003

This dissertation is an analysis and critique of discourses on culture both within cultural studies and within the social sciences. It is also a historical investigation of (primarily) twentieth-century Latin American political movements, from classical populism to national liberation movements, new social movements, and beyond, and of the relations between culture and politics that they incarnate.

US Power in Latin America: Renewing Hegemony, by Rubrick Biegon. New York: Routledge, 2017

US presence in Latin America has been challenged by New Left movements from the early Cold War era up to the late 1990s and early 2010s, as “Pink Tide” governments rose across the continent. While several policy-makers attribute the United States’ geopolitical decline to the emergence of the New Latin Left (NLL), Rubrick Biegon follows a different path. The author of US Power in Latin America proposes the study of hegemony “as a unified, asymmetrical social relation-ship combing material and ideational elements of coercion, consensus-building and ideological legitimation”.

Views from the "South": Intellectual Hegemony and Postmodernism in Latin America

Reviews in Anthropology, 2006

Euroamerican scholars mark Latin America as a site of utopian revolutions, foreign intervention, troubled economies, military repression, and a failed modernist paradigm of development. Four recent books critically assess this construction by addressing its source in the international imaginary. They advocate a subaltern perspective on colonial difference and argue that postmodernity as promulgated by Euroamerican scholars may become yet another intellectual trend ignorant of Latin America’s particularities and complexities. Latin American scholars have embraced postmodernity far longer than their Euroamerican counterparts, whose relatively recent applications remain problematic.

Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate

Duke University Press, 2008

[Table of Contents and Introduction] Postcolonial theory has developed mainly in the U.S. academy, and it has focused chiefly on nineteenth-century and twentieth-century colonization and decolonization processes in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Colonialism in Latin America originated centuries earlier, in the transoceanic adventures from which European modernity itself was born. Coloniality at Large brings together classic and new reflections on the theoretical implications of colonialism in Latin America. By pointing out its particular characteristics, the contributors highlight some of the philosophical and ideological blind spots of contemporary postcolonial theory as they offer a thorough analysis of that theory’s applicability to Latin America’s past and present. Written by internationally renowned scholars based in Latin America, the United States, and Europe, the essays reflect multiple disciplinary and ideological perspectives. Some are translated into English for the first time. The collection includes theoretical reflections, literary criticism, and historical and ethnographic case studies focused on Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, the Andes, and the Caribbean. Contributors examine the relation of Marxist thought, dependency theory, and liberation theology to Latin Americans’ experience of and resistance to coloniality, and they emphasize the critique of Occidentalism and modernity as central to any understanding of the colonial project. Analyzing the many ways that Latin Americans have resisted imperialism and sought emancipation and sovereignty over several centuries, they delve into topics including violence, identity, otherness, memory, heterogeneity, and language. Contributors also explore Latin American intellectuals’ ambivalence about, or objections to, the "post" in postcolonial; to many, globalization and neoliberalism are the contemporary guises of colonialism in Latin America.

From Domination to “Buen Vivir” : Latin America and Contested Globalizations

Social Justice and the University, 2014

It has been claimed that "The decolonization of knowledge is [.. .] one of the most important intellectual challenges of our times" (Pratt 2008, 460). In that regard, the following essay is an attempt to explore the meanings of "the decolonization of knowledge," especially in the context of this volume's principal theme: "Globalization, Social Justice, and the University" and, above all, from the perspective of an academic who has been deeply influenced by "Buen Vivir," described as "an ethics aimed at the collective well-being and not merely that of the individual" (Acosta 2011, 52). Implicit here is the need to rethink the role of the university as a center of knowledge while academics struggle to make sense of globalization and its effects on the quality of life throughout the world. Moreover, it is important to be mindful of what some refer to as the "geopolitics of knowledge" (Mignolo 2008; Walsh 2012; Dussel 2008) and the "global hegemony" of Western European thought (Quijano 2008) that constitute the very foundation of higher education in the United States and elsewhere. Thus, it has been argued that "It is no longer possible, or at least it is not unproblematic to 'think' from the canon of Western philosophy, even when part of the canon is critical of modernity. To do so means to reproduce the blind epistemic ethnocentrism that makes difficult, if not impossible, any political philosophy of inclusion. . ." (Mignolo 2008, 234). Area Studies specialists, among others, are certainly familiar with our shared colonial histories and the extent to which colonization has utilized the subjugation of peoples as a means 1 A version of this essay was originally written in Spanish and titled: "De la dominación al buen vivir: América Latina como proyecto civilizatorio 'otro'"; it was published as a chapter in Mario Campaña, ed.