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How to think the public when the public's most intimate kernel of structuration is no longer the knowable terrain of the nation-state, but the snaking circuitry of transnational neoliberalism and its systematic reorganization of state and civil processes at local, national, and transnational levels? This class will examine Latin American novels and essays dealing with the birth and deconstruction of the ideology of national and regional development and progress in the 20th century. The course will examine texts dating from the heyday of national populism through to the recent emergence of globalization. We will view the ways in which the neoliberal abandonment of geopolitics in favor of the geoeconomics of transnational configurations such as NAFT A and Mercosur have drastically transformed state/culture relations, while altering forever the terms and limits of cultural practice, representation, knowledge production, and the ways in which contemporary subject formations can be constructed, conteste d, and rearticulated as political categories. In recent years in Latin America, the slippery social terrain of neoliberal postnationhood has transformed the notion of the public to such a degree that previous ties of civil commonality --people's local an d national bonds of collective attachment --have given way to the shifting renegotiation of commonality through the articulation of micro-group injury and alienation. Contemporary thought on the public now emerges from within late capitalism's reformulat ion of its global spatial fix, the technocratic neoliberal state, nomadic hybrid identities marked by the traumas of flexible labor, and the ways in which these phantasmal social agents position themselves and are positioned and displaced by the deterritorializing agency of the mass culture industries. Yet to understand postmodernity as the relocation of places, peoples, neighborhoods, regions, and nations within the complex restructuring of contemporary global accumulation, one must always hist oricize. Thus, we will examine the construction and articulation of discourses of development and of national and regional "peoplehood-fabrication" from the turn of the century through to the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in January 1994.
COURSE FORMAT: Lecture
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA RLAN Grading Mode: Graded
Prerequisites: NONE
Last Updated on MAR-24-2000
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459