Panel featuring Julie Skurski of the City University of New York and Alejandro Velasco of New York University.
Inaugural event for the new interdisciplinary seminar series:
Americas South Seminar: Dominant, Residual, and Emergent Political Forms
The Americas South Seminar aims to cultivate a space of critical ethnographic reflection on the Americas from the multiple perspectives of what we might call--in its broadest sense--the south of the continent. The seminar will examine the rearticulation of capital, the political, and diverse life-worlds in the Americas as a space shaped by the conflicts, ruptures, and forms of domination elicited by historical transformation. We are interested in understanding how residual forms of the political are resignified and mobilized in the face of new dynamics of capital accumulation. These dynamics simultaneously demand and produce forms of power that reach beyond the public sphere and traditional forms of sovereignty, while redefining these very concepts in the process. We seek to problematize the continuities and discontinuities produced by the interplay between capital, politics and the ways of life that--being confronted by the demands of accumulation and power--give rise to emerging forms of political strategies. These strategies, despite being situated in their specific histories, tend to produce forms of contestation and domination that may be interpreted as historically unprecedented in the region.
