Infrapolitical Passages

This book makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. Infrapolitical Passages proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. In doing so, Gareth Williams makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. The book offers a theory of globalization as a gigantic, directionless crisis in humanity’s symbolic organization, as well as a theory of global economic warfare as the very positing of directionlessness and, at the same time, facticity. Williams’s infrapolitics stands at a distance from the biopolitical, which it understands as domination presenting itself as the production of specific forms of subjectivity in the face of the commodity. The subsequent obscuring of being signals the need to circumvent the instrumentalization of life as subordination to the metaphysics of subjectivity, representation, and politics. Infrapolitical Passages works to confront that which is unavailable in subjectivity and representation, opening a way for facticity in the age of globalization in order to make room for the infrapolitical question for existence.

The personal is not political, even if politics marks it and, in many cases, determines it. Infrapolitics seeks to understand conditions of existence that are not reducible to political life and that exceed any definition of world bound to political determinations. It seeks to mobilize an exteriority without which politics could only be business or administration, that is, oppression. It demands a change in seeing and an everyday practice that subtracts from political totalization in the name of a new production of desire, of a new emancipation, and of a conception of experience that can breach the general captivation of life. In this book, Alberto Moreiras describes a form of thought aiming to provide content for a form of life and to offer a new theoretical practice for concrete existence. The book provides a genealogy of the notion of infrapolitics and places it within contemporary philosophical reflection, examining its deployment in the wake of postphenomenology and deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the principle of anarchy, and an egalitarian symbolization of social life. In doing so, Moreiras elaborates Infrapolitics as both a general critique of the political apparatus and as an imperative horizon for existential self-understanding.

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms brings together a team of expert contributors in this critical and innovative volume. Highlighting key trends within the discipline, as well as cutting-edge viewpoints that revise and redefine traditional debates and approaches, readers will come away with an understanding of the complexity of twenty-first-century Latin American cultural production and with a renovated and eminently contemporary understanding of twentieth-century literature and culture. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and academics in the fields of Latin American literature, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

Continental Theory Buffalo is the inaugural volume of the Humanities to the Rescue book series, a public humanities project dedicated to discussing the role of the arts and humanities today. This book is a collaborative act of humanistic renewal that builds on the transcontinental legacy of May 1968 to offer insightful readings of the cultural (d)evolution of the last fifty years. The volume contributors revisit, reclaim and reassess the "revolutionary" legacy of May 1968 in light of the urgency of the present and the future. Their essays are effective illustrations of the potential of such interpretive traditions as philosophy, literature and cultural criticism to run interference with (and offer alternatives to) the instrumentalist logic and predatory structures that are reducing the world to a collection of quantifiable and tradeable resources. The book will be of interest to cultural historians and theorists, media studies scholars, political scientists, and students of French and Francophone literature and culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this original study, Gabriel Horowitz examines the work of select nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American writers through the lens of contemporary theoretical debates about nature, postcoloniality, and national identity. In the work of José Martí, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos, Cesar Aira, and others, he traces historical constructions of nature in regional intellectual traditions and texts as they inform political culture on the broader global stage. By investigating national literary discourses from Cuba, Argentina, and Paraguay, he identifies a common narrative thread that imagines the utopian wilderness of the New World as a symbolic site of independence from Spain. In these texts, Horowitz argues, an expressed desire to return to the nation’s foundational nature contributed to a movement away from political and social engagement and toward a “biopolitical state,” in which nature, traditionally seen as pre-political, conversely becomes its center.

This book traverses the cultural landscape of Colombia through in-depth analyses of displacement, local and global cultures, human rights abuses, and literary and media production. Through an exploration of the cultural processes that perpetuate the "darker side" of Latin America for global consumption, it investigates the "condition" that has led writers, filmmakers, and artists to embrace (purposefully or not) the incessant violence in Colombian society as the object of their own creative endeavors. In this examination of mass-marketed cultural products such as narco-stories, captivity memoirs, gritty travel narratives, and films, Herrero-Olaizola seeks to offer a hemispheric approach to the role played by Colombia in cultural production across the continent where the illicit drug trade has made significant inroads. To this end, he identifies the "Colombian condition" within the parameters of the global economy while concentrating on the commodification of Latin America’s violence for cultural consumption. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Grounded in perspectives of affect theory, Other Americans examines the writings of Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Alarcón; films by Alfonso Cuarón, Claudia Llosa, Matt Piedmont, and Joel and Ethan Coen; as well as the Netflix serials Narcos and El marginal. These widely consumed works about Latin America—equally balanced between narratives produced in the United States and in the region itself—are laden with fear, anxiety, and shame, which has an impact that exceeds the experience of reception. The negative feelings encoded in visions of Latin America become common coinage for US audiences, shaping their ideological relationship with the region and performing an affective interpellation. By analyzing the underlying melodramatic structures of these works that would portray Latin America as an implicit other, Bush examines a process of affective comprehension that foments an us/them, or north/south binary in the reception of Latin America’s globalized art.

An estimated 2.7 million Africans made an enforced crossing of the Atlantic on British slave ships between c.1680 and 1807--a journey that has become known as the 'Middle Passage'. This book focuses on the slave ship itself. The slave ship is the largest artefact of the Transatlantic slave trade, but because so few examples of wrecked slaving vessels have been located at sea, it is rarely studied by archaeologists. Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping,1680-1807 argues that there are other ways for archaeologists to materialize the slave ship. It employs a pioneering interdisciplinary methodology combining primary documentary sources, maritime and terrestrial archaeology, paintings, maritime and ethnographic museum collections, and many other sources to 'rebuild' British slaving vessels and to identify changes to them over time. The book then goes on to consider the reception of the slave ship and its trade goods in coastal West Africa, and details the range, and uses, of the many African resources (including ivory, gold, and live animals) entering Britain on returning slave ships. The third section of the book focuses on the Middle Passage experiences of both captives and crews and argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the coping mechanisms through which Africans survived, yet also challenged, their captive passage. Finally, Jane Webster asks why the African Middle Passage experience remains so elusive, even after decades of scholarship dedicated to uncovering it. She considers when, how, and why the crossing was remembered by 'saltwater' captives in the Caribbean and North America. The marriage of words and things attempted in this richly illustrated book is underpinned throughout by a theoretical perspective combining creolization and postcolonial theory, and by a central focus on the materiality of the slave ship and its regimes.