Confronting Inequalities in Latin America: Perspectives on Wealth and Power
After the first two decades of the 21st century, Latin America still exhibits a severe asymmetry in the distribution, access and consumption of wealth. The concentration of land, income and wealth reflects a historically persistent, multidimensional, and intersectional inequality. In recent decades, both in studies and politics, the focuses have been on poverty without acknowledging that inequality is a relational category. Therefore, poverty is incomprehensible without its counterpart: wealth.
Claudia Zapata: Crisis del multiculturalismo en América Latina
Has the life quality for the Indigenous peoples in Latin America improved after three decades in which legislation has been developed to recognize them? Statistical information and the increase of social conflictivity in the indigenous territories leads to the negative answer on that question.
Maristella Svampa: Las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina
The present book analyzes the progress of neo-extractivism in Latin America, through four fundamental nuclei. 1) It proposes the categories of neo-extractivism and Commodity Consensus as privileged vantage points for reading the current crisis. 2) It analyzes the different phases of neo-extractivism, from 2003 to the present. 3) It addresses the social resistances and the new political grammars, from the concept of the ecoterritorial turn and places the accent on the advance of indigenous peoples and the increasing protagonism of women.
Klaus Meschkat: La crisis de los regímenes progresistas y el legado del socialismo de Estado
Progressive regimes find themselves in a serious crisis. Those who are not satisfied with denouncing the predictable machinations of "imperialism" should seek the internal reasons for the failure of the proclaimed "socialism of the 21st century". Why have such regimes, which owe their emergence and early successes mainly to the mobilization of the masses, been unable to maintain the active support of the majority of the population? The answer is sought here by resorting to the record of the Latin American left.
Jeffrey Gould: Entre el bosque y los árboles. Utopías Menores en El Salvador, Nicaragua, y Uruguay
This book presents cases of social experiments in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Uruguay. In these spaces, where horizontal and multi-class communication flourished, Jay Winter's concept of minor utopias is suitable. This essay is inspired by Winter's important work, tracing what he calls the "visions of partial transformation," which coexisted temporarily with the great narratives of social transformation, but then lost their proper place in the historical record.
Pablo Alabarces Pospopulares: Las culturas populares después de la hibridación
The book offers an in depth balance of the debates that have organized the studies on Latin American popular cultures for the last thirty years. Simultaneously, it proposes new perspectives in times of crisis for the category: the central question is what does the popular mean today? The relationship between popular cultures and mass culture has changed radically in this century, in a way not foreseeable by classical texts.
León Enrique Avila Romero: Alternativas al colapso socioambiental desde América Latina
Latin America is facing a serious environmental crisis, which is leading the subcontinent to a collapse, understood as a shift in society and in the current way of living. This ecological crisis has been intensified by the entrenchment of the neo-liberal economic model and neo-extractivism, which has led to a dispute over common goods.
José Manuel Valenzuela: Trazos de sangre y fuego
The destructive features of the late international capitalist order brought the life-and-death relationship to the forefront of social, humanist, ecological and artistic discussion. The processes of poverty and social inequalities have been emphasized, as well as the scenarios of violence and death that involve people, the planet and life itself.
Olaf Kaltmeier: Refeudalización
In contemporary societies we observe a state of social inequality as in the Ancien Régime, the concentration of wealth in the "1 percent", billionaires as presidents, the increase of luxury consumption and the emergence of a culture of distinction as well as the concentration of land and spatial segregation. In order to understand these phenomena in a coherent interpretative framework, this essay proposes the hypothesis that we are living in the early 21st century a new conjuncture of re-feudalization.