Faculty House, 2nd Floor, Seminar Room 1
Global Cultural Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (NYU), Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
How do we not have to change ourselves so that the idea of a motley society does not turn into voting blocs, destroying democracy? Tapia will address the concepts and methodological strategy proposed by Rene Zavaleta Mercado to investigate social diversity in colonial and neocolonial situations. Zavaleta confronted the question of respecting diversity in the analysis of social reality in the twentieth century not only in terms of mere inclusion and exclusion but, as Tapia points out, in terms of a motley social situation.
Tapia will offer an initial approach to the new English translations of two key works published in the Elsewhere Texts series edited by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Hosam Aboul-Ela: Rene Zavaleta Mercado, Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia, 1879-1980, Calcutta: Seagull, 2016., & Luis Tapia Mealla, The Production of Local Knowledge: History and Politics in the Work of Rene Zavaleta Mercado, Calcutta, Seagull, 2022. Copies of these texts will be available at the event.
