ICLS Dissertation Colloquium

Philosophy 302

Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS)

Abstract: This chapter examines the social life of legislative activism surrounding efforts to amend Article 2 of the Mexican Constitution in 2024. It argues that Indigenous activists strategically turned to Mexico’s hegemonic populist-leftist party, Morena (Movement for National Regeneration), as a vehicle for advancing Indigenous agendas. Drawing on ethnographic research, I trace how a national coalition of Indigenous public servants, elected officials, and councilors from Mexico’s officially recognized Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities acted as intermediaries between federal bureaucracy, the legislative branch, and grassroots organizations. Through these forms of intermediation, they generated support for a form of constitutional activism that valorized the role of the State as an instrument of legal and social change while simultaneously asserting Indigenous sovereignty and practices of co-government. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how populism reshapes the horizons of political agency and juridical possibilities for Indigenous collectives, challenging normative frameworks that cast populism as democratic backsliding or as an accretion of executive decisionism.

 

Samuel Hellman, East Asian Languages and Cultures, “A Building Without a Plan: Professional Architecture and the Great Leap Forward”

Abstract:  This chapter analyzes a 1959 architecture conference in the context of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) and the broader visual culture of the Chinese revolution. Through analyses of the 1958 film, Love the Factory like the Home, and the conference speeches, I investigate how architects endeavored to harmonize their labor with the productive and emancipatory goals of the GLF.  As a discipline borne of a particular western history of capital, architecture was both anathema to the politics of the GLF and absolutely essential to its program of mass commune construction. Following years of critique and tumult, Chinese architects at the conference sought new cognitive mappings for design and the built environment that would rectify their problematic subjective position. Through a close reading of Liu Xiufeng, Liang Sicheng, Yang Tingbao, and Wu Liangyong, I elucidate their critiques of architecture, which ranged from a final accounting of revivalism (fuguzhuyi 复古主义) to a total deconstruction of the studio system. The chapter ends with their call to refigure the problematic expert into a revolutionary culture worker (wenyi gongzuo zhe 文艺工作者) tasked with designing the spaces of mass life while also integrating with that life, embedding in its geography, its people, and its patterns of habitation.