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Special Topics in Latin American and Caribbean Studies (401-0-1)

Topic

Crisis, Contentious Politics, and Critical Thought

Meeting Info

Fisk Hall 114: Tues 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Crisis, Contentious Politics, and Critical Thought in Latin America

The course starts with a critique of theories that, in the second half of the 20th century, argued for the impossibility of a democratic matrix of modernity in Latin America. Instead, it seeks to highlight how the continent served as a laboratory in which, during various cycles of global crisis, attempts were made to consolidate a democratic path, specifically one that addressed popular sovereignty as the expansion of the political sphere, redistribution, and cultural representation.

The course explores cycles of capitalism that have put different social classes under tension, the politicization of these differences, the formation of power dynamics, the configuration of state institutions and the shared repertoires between state agencies and social subjects. In connection, the course addresses the contest over the interpretation of social tensions as shaped by ideology, culture, and aesthetic representation. The debates accompanying the periods to be addressed include: the Spanish American Enlightenment, imperialism, and democratic republicanism (Black and popular); racial positivism and revolutionary modernism; gamonal and falangist thought versus national-popular thought and the strategy of popular fronts in Latin America; avant-gardes in the context of the struggle for hegemony; the Cold War, the origins of postmodernism; dependency theories and the Marxist school of modes of production theory in Latin America. The debate over the origins of the welfare state or pre-emptive state in Latin America, the problem of the national-popular in the face of the 20th-century crisis will also be addressed. The course will end with a discussion of Ideologies and violence surrounding authoritarian neoliberalism and the problem of hegemony in the present. This course combines social history of politics and political languages, critical studies on culture and hegemony, and historical and comparative sociology from Latin America.