Cultures Of Politics/politics Of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements

by Sonia E. Álvarez, Evelyn Dagnino

Investigating the complex interrelations between culture and politics in a wide range of social movements in Latin America, this book focuses on the cultural politics enacted by social movements as they struggle for new visions and practices of citizenship, democracy, social relations, and development. The volume explores the potential of these cultural politics for fostering alternative political cultures and social transformations. Theoretical and empirical chapters assess and build upon novel conceptions of culture and politics in a variety of disciplines and fields—particularly anthropology, political science, sociology, feminist theory, and cultural studies.The notion of the cultural politics of social movements provides a lens for analyzing emergent discourses and practices grounded in society and culture, the state and political institutions, and the extent to which they may unsettle, or be reinscribed into, the dominant neoliberal strategies of the 1990s. Contributors explore how social movements—urban popular, women's, indigenous, and black movements as well as movements for citizenship and democracy—engage in the cultural resignification of notions such as rights, equality, and difference, thus altering what counts as political. By highlighting simultaneously the cultural dimensions of the political and the political dimensions of the cultural, the book transcends the distinction between “new” and “old” social movements and thus significantly renews our understanding of them.

480 pages, Hardcover

First published February 26, 1998

About the author

Sonia E. Álvarez is the Leonard J. Horwitz Professor of Latin American Politics and Society at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.