Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Williams, Gareth. The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America. “Chapter 7: Operational Whitewash and the Negative Community”. Pp. 273-304. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. In Latin America, nationalist projects have been based on the establishment of normative identities and communities that indicate their limits in opposition to non-normative identities. Hegemony, thus, constitutes at the same time the grounds for subalternity (6). Subalternity is understood by Williams as "the often violent subject effect of national and post-national processes of social subordination, but also as the epistemological limit at which the nonhegemonic announces the limits of hegemonic thought and of hegemonic thinking". (10) Williams is looking for sites at the limits of current operations of whitewashing of both the relations between past and present violence and of heterogeneities collapsed under the idea of the national (such as the "chola" i...

Velasco, Juan. “Performing Multiple Identities: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and His “Dangerous Border Crossings”. Latino/a Popular Culture edited by Michelle Habell-Pallan and Mary Romero. New York, London: New York University Press, 2002. Velasco looks at Gómez-Peña body of work which comprises performance and writing, and points at several issues raised by it: - commodification of indigenous identities - connections between the production of the 'authentic Other' and the new world order - performative nature of identity - colonial discourse as relying on a binary between colonizers and colonized identities - strategies by which colonized subjects can subvert this binary Anzaldúa has previously constructed the notion of the 'border' as a site for articulation of a 'new mestiza consciousness', a type of subjectivity that refuses to be on one side or the other. Gómez-Peña however, seems to be more skeptical about any 'positive model of cultural hybridity' since...

Smith, Carol A. “Myths, Intellectuals, and Race/Class/Gender Distinctions in the Formation of Latin American Nations”. Journal of Latin American Anthropology . September 1996, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 148-169. Smith examines how "mestizaje" emerged linked to nationalist ideology but has also been appropriated in different ways by the identity politics of some "new social movements" in Latin America. The myth of mestizaje entails at the same time the illusion of homogeneity and the affirmation of internal racial hierarchies. Hegemonic national culture needs to be produced and controlled by state institutions. Mestizaje is presented as the "natural" or biological basis for the project of a national culture, and it is then a key ideological and mythical component of nation-building processes in LA. However, as subaltern subjects have more access to the means of production of images and discourses about them, they can manipulate these meanings. Smith is specially in...

Levinson, Brett. “Dictatorship and Overexposure: Does Latin America Testify to More than One Market?” Discourse - 25.1&2, Winter & Spring 2003, pp. 98-118. Levinson argues the 1973 coup never ceased happening, it actually stroke with all its horror in the post-dictatorship, when the possibilities for articulating different political projects was radically closed, as the ideology of the free market was imposed as a consensus, and precisely, presented not as an ideology anymore, but as what just is , or "it goes without saying". To challenge this is actually not to make any sense. The coup really just hits with all its strength now, when the victims of state violence find there is no possible discourse available to account for the experiences. When violence is recognized, is done under the paradigm of measurability and trade, the exchange of crimes of one side in the market of forgiveness and forgetfulness of the transition. "Transition consequently commands a poet...