Foucault and Latin America is the first volume to trace the influence of Foucault's theories on power, discourse, government, subjectivity and sexuality in Latin American thought.
Foucault and Latin America is the first volume to trace the influence of Foucault's theories on power, discourse, government, subjectivity and sexuality in Latin American thought.
Critique of Latin American Reason is one of the most important philosophical texts to have come out of South America in recent decades. First published in 1996, it offers a sweeping critique of the foundational schools of thought in Latin American philosophy and critical theory. Santiago Castro-Gómez argues that “Latin America” is not so much a geographical entity, a culture, or a place, but rather an object of knowledge produced by a family of discourses in the humanities that are inseparably linked to colonial power relationships. Using the archaeological and genealogical methods of Michel Foucault, he analyzes the political, literary, and philosophical discourses and modes of power that have contributed to the making of “Latin America.” Castro-Gómez examines the views of a wide range of Latin American thinkers on modernity, postmodernity, identity, colonial history, and literature, also considering how these questions have intersected with popular culture. His critique spans Central and South America, and it also implicates broader and protracted global processes. This book presents this groundbreaking work of contemporary critical theory in English translation for the first time. It features a foreword by Linda Martín Alcoff, a new preface by the author, and an introduction by Eduardo Mendieta situating Castro-Gómez’s thought in the context of critical theory in Latin America and the Global South. Two appendixes feature an interview with Castro-Gómez that sheds light on the book’s composition and short provocations responding to each chapter from a multidisciplinary forum of contemporary scholars who resituate the work within a range of perspectives including feminist, Francophone African, and decolonial Black political thought.
Both as historian and maker of culture, Foucault infused numerous disciplines of study with a new conceptual vocabulary and an agenda for future research. His ideas have called central assumptions in Western culture into question and altered the ways in which scholars and social scientists approach such issues as discourse theory, theory of knowledge, Eros, technologies of the Self and Other, punishment and prisons, and asylums and madness.The contributors to this volume indicate Foucault's achievements and the suggestive power of his work, as well as his methodological weaknesses, historical inaccuracies, and ambiguities. Above all, they attempt to show how one can use Foucault to go beyond him in opening new approaches to cultural history. Though comprehensiveness was not attempted, their essays broach the major controversial aspects of Foucauldian cultural history--the position of the subject, the fusion of power and knowledge, sexuality, the historical structures and changes--and they explicitly analyze them with respect to antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century.In this collection, Neubauer presents analyses by historians, literary scholars, and philosophers of the entire, transdisciplinary range of Foucault's oeuvre, emphasizing the rich suggestiveness of its agenda. The breadth of the undertaking makes it suitable for seminars and graduate courses in numerous departments.
A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org . Cyborgs in Latin America explores the ways cultural expression in Latin America has grappled with the changing relationships between technology and human identity.
A critical reading of philosophy paired with a philosophy of criticism is essential in cultures that continue to struggle for the decolonization of both thought and life. This interdisciplinary book will be an important resource for scholars and students in Latin American studies, comparative literature, world literature, and philosophy.
Mapping the resonances, dissonances, and linkages between the thought of Gramsci and Foucault to uncover new tools for socio-political and critical analysis for the twenty-first century, this book reassesses the widely-held view that their work is incompatible. With discussions of Latin American revolutionary politics, indigenous knowledges, technologies of government and the teaching of paediatrics in post-invasion Iraq, complexity theory, medical anthropology and biomedicine, and the role of Islam in the transition to modern society in the Arab world, this interdisciplinary volume presents the latest theoretical research on different facets of these two thinkers’ work, as well as analyses of the specific linkages that exist between them in concrete settings. A rigorous, comparative exploration of the work of two towering figures of the twenty-first century, Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, political sociology, communication and media studies, and contemporary philosophy.
The only reader currently available on criminality in Latin America, Reconstructing Criminality in Latin America reconstructs the way in which different Latin American societies have viewed, described, defined, and reacted to criminal behavior. Crime in Latin America is explored in terms of gender, race, class, and criminological theory. The highly readable essays in this book explore how Catholic notions of sin, natural law, the "divine" rights of absolutist monarchs, liberal rights of "man," positivism, and social Darwinism received a sympathetic, even enthusiastic, endorsement from policy makers throughout Latin America. Reconstructing Criminality in Latin America also shows how new methodologies have given scholars deeper insight into the significance of crime in Latin American societies. The selections testify that the insights of scholars like Eric Hobsbawm and Michel Foucault are the foundations of modern histories of crime in Latin America. This book is ideal for criminal justice, sociology, and Latin American social history courses.