Exploring Latin America

Ending on a happy note – week 13

Posted by in Week 13

As we’ve discussed in class, it’s important to not always “end on a heavy note.” Though it has proven difficult in the context of our classroom discussions in LAST 100, there are, in fact, many positive vibrant dynamic events people movements happening in Latin America. To focus entirely on the negative conflict-riddenness or violent aspects of Latin America is to only tell one story about such a vast and diverse continent and its peoples. Further, this single story of damage threatens to make invisible the actual lives of Latin Americans,…read more

2

Complex post-cold war politics, depoliticizing and Human Rights – week 12

Posted by in Week 12

As we get closer to the modern day in our learning on the politics of Latin America, it seems the issues seemingly become more complex. Perhaps it is the lack of temporal distance; these events are discussions are not clarified by historical distance. Also, as the polarizing and binarizing tendencies of cold war ‘camps’ dissolve, so our compartmentalizing of stakeholders becomes unstructured. Perhaps this dissolution leaves bare these political events, which can no longer be reduced to capitalist versus communist. As these structures lift, we can only wonder how much…read more

0

Latinx lives matter – week 11

Posted by in Week 11

A new world order emerges from the atrocities of World War Two. One dominated by nation states, with inviolable sovereignty (ideas of “humanitarian intervention” will wait until the 90s, with the end of the Cold War), and decorated with a humanist ambition embodied by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the newly established United Nations in 1948. Latin Americans would, however, not feel the protection of this declaration. Nation-states would wage violence against the people in their territories, untouchable in terms of the legalized legitimation of state violence….read more

1

Charisma, Perón, and Perónismo – Short Research and Writing Assignment

Posted by in Uncategorized

Corse, Theron E. Projecting Peron: The Constructed Image of Juan Peron, 1945-1949, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1995.   Max Weber describes three ‘pure’ types of legitimate authority: rational, traditional and charismatic. His account of ‘charismatic authority’ outlines its relation to specific and exceptional sanctity, heroism and exceptional character of an individual grounded in a complete devotion out of enthusiasm, despair or hope–– the crux of this legitimacy lies in a leader’s perception by his followers. Charisma is an intimate component of ‘populism;’ as such, its dialectic opposition to rationality and routine grounds…read more

0

Is populism democracy without liberalism? – week 10

Posted by in Week 10

Populism is a difficult work to unpack. And its connotations have probably changed significantly over time. I believe that populism is intrinsically connected to a broad public or mass attraction. As such, it might defy traditional conservative perspectives on politics as exclusionary and being relegated to a certain political class. Populism can be construed as dangerous much as social movements can be (originally analyzed by political scientists as destructive “mob” mentalities). There is definitely a paternalism from political elite when deeming these populist movements as negative or “unfit” to the…read more

3

A new dealer, same game? – week 9

Posted by in Week 9

The twentieth century brought a new international culture, a new dynamic to which Latin American nations and peoples would have to adjust to and engage in. In the stead of traditional European domination, a new ‘exchange’ emerged with the United States of America – one that would be contrasted with the old imperialist European hegemony. The USA described itself as anti-imperial, and insisted on a new kind of relationship with the ‘outside world’ for Latin America. However, as we have seen this week, this professed divergence between European and USA…read more

2

Twentieth century: an era of plurality? – week 8

Posted by in Week 8

With the turn of the twentieth century in Mexico, social forces that had long been oppressed by Porfirio Diaz’s regime saw in his promise for fair elections in 1910, an opportunity to act. What becomes clear, however, is that those emerging social movements are not as homogenous, hierarchically organized nor as experienced in governance as the existing regime. Though these various actors in the Mexican Revolution could agree that something should change, what, and how things should change was far from consensus. Does an increasing political consciousness among peasant and…read more

1

Who does modernity serve? – week 7

Posted by in Week 7

What is modernity? From our standpoint in the internet age, the technological ‘miracles’ of the telegraph and the ‘horseless carriage’ can seem ridiculous at best. However, what began to emerge in the later part of the nineteenth and continuing into the twentieth century was a globalized utopia that became named modernity. Modernity became a cultural ideal, characterized in political (liberal democracy), economic (industrialization, global trade), social (family units, institutionalized education) qualities, as well as other hallmarks of a ‘modern’ society. An underlying question remains: who manufactured this cultural ideal that…read more

2

Week 6

Posted by in Week 6

Human Rights have been hailed as humanity’s last-standing hope (Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia, 2010). They are ambitious in potential and broad in scope. Yet, as has been iterated by Prof. Beaseley-Murray in this week’s lecture, the remain “far from ‘self-evident.’” This is because rights are a discourse, not an absolute (expressed by Ronald Dwarkin: “rights as trumps”). Instead, rights must be understood as needing weighing, not hierarchizing (Pildes, The Structural Conception of Rights and Judicial Balancing, 2002). As such rights discourse holds no inherent morality, instead morality must be…read more

2

Week 5

Posted by in Week 5

In the period following “independence” of the former Spanish Empire in the Americas, many of the new nation-states struggled to establish peaceful regimes in the ensuing vacuum of power. What becomes clear is a linear conception of development (in the broad, historical sense) largely defined by Eurocentric (and therefore colonial) ideology. The binary between barbarism and civilization points to the two extremes of this imported historical-determinist trajectory. In turn, the ideal of civilization became dominated by the subsequent royalist-republican binary (along liberal-conservative lines). Through the analysis of the concept of…read more

1

Spam prevention powered by Akismet