Bulletin of Latin American Research最新文献

In December 2023, the Valparaíso-based artist, Danny Reveco, opened his exhibition, ‘Language Is Not Sufficient’. A month later, it was the catalyst of a cultural crisis when it was argued that Reveco's works were criminal acts. I recommend that Reveco was principally concerned with how the Chilean State interpellates residents in the national territory according to the ‘good behaviour’ of a proper citizen. Those who do not fulfil that good behaviour are deemed criminals. On the other hand, those cultural authorities who labelled the exhibition as criminal were trying to win a renewed legitimacy for the Chilean State.

How can we explain the political participation rate in electoral processes with different logics of representation? To address this question, two mechanisms of citizen participation in Montevideo are compared: conventional elections and participatory institutions. Focusing on territorial inequality, a dual comparison is conducted—both between the two mechanisms and within each one. The first comparison reveals that conventional elections systematically exhibit higher turnout rates than participatory institutions, regardless of the level of territorial development. The internal comparison, however, highlights that partisan factors play a crucial role in explaining differences in turnout within the same territory or within each mechanism. This analysis underscores the importance of institutional design and contextual factors, such as partisan dynamics and territorial disparities, in shaping political participation. By examining these mechanisms, the study provides insights into how varying logics of representation influence citizen engagement in democratic processes.

In 1966, Uruguayan journalist Carlos María Gutiérrez visited the People's Republic of China (PRC) as part of China's People's Diplomacy initiative. This article examines his travel writings and official Chinese reports to explore the complexities of intellectual and cultural exchanges between the PRC and Latin America during the Cold War. It argues that Gutiérrez's journey led to a nuanced reassessment of China's revolutionary path, underscoring the significance of first-hand encounters in shaping Latin American perspectives on socialism. His experience exemplifies the implications of People's Diplomacy, validating socialism as a path for social transformation in Latin America and the role of intellectuals in bridging ideological divides.

This article examines how grassroots agroecological practices, as carried out by small farmers and neorurals in the Cerro Manjui cloud forest of Colombia, hinge on a continuum that connects agricultural techniques, soil health, microorganismic life and forest ecosystems. Drawing on posthumanist scholarship on biopolitics and morphogenesis, the study demonstrates how a biopower of abundance offers an alternative to the hegemonic discourse of development and growth, which is fuelled by agro-industrial economies in Latin America. In rural Colombia, abundance does not necessarily refer to the utopia of freedom and happiness promoted by liberal democratic ideals; on the contrary, it points to flourishing and wellbeing across species. In short, abundance signifies autonomy and resistance against late-capitalist ideologies of scarcity.

The civil-military relations in Brazil have faced criticism due to weak political institutions and significant military autonomy, resulting in a regression of democratisation. This article posits that the shortcomings in Brazilian civil-military relations have historical roots, with military prerogatives established in the early twentieth century and largely unopposed since that time. The military's robust corporate identity and its pivotal role in public administration and policy have granted it significant bargaining power, enabling resistance to reforms and undermining civilian authority. This paper provides evidence indicating that elected Brazilian administrations since 1995, particularly during Silva (2003–2011, 2023–) and Rousseff (2011–2016) administration, have significantly militarised the defence decision-making process and increased the involvement of the armed forces in public security, infrastructure development and public administration.

This paper argues that paradigms rooted in Western epistemologies of control, extraction and anthropocentrism fail to address Latin America's socio-environmental complexities and cultural pluralities. Analysing contemporary techno-artistic practices, this approach offers a decolonial critique of dominant frameworks and proposes methodologies that reorient art, life and technology towards reciprocity, hybridity and situated knowledge. Focusing on Latin American artists who transcend bioart's conventional boundaries, the paper highlights practices resisting lab-centric reductionism and engaging with living systems as co-creative partners, destabilising the nature-technology binary and forging new analytical categories grounded in decolonial thought.

This article aims to contextualise the recent constituent process in Chile and its subsequent failure, paying attention not only to the so-called contingent nature of the revolts inaugurated in October 2019, but also to the reengineering process implemented by the Pinochet dictatorship. The most ostensible result of this reengineering process was the Constitution of 1980, which was supplemented by a complex juridical-political framework that has both protected the Constitution and regulated the life of the country during the last 50 years. Despite the recurrence of revolts during the last decades and the aspirations and hopes for a new Constitution, the failure of the recent constituent process is symptomatic of what we can consider the limitations of neoliberal democracy.

This paper explores de/sedimentation as both a textual and geological concept through the works of José Watanabe (La piedra alada) and Soledad Fariña (PAC PAC PEC PEC) to examine how literary and material traces accumulate, erode and reemerge within the colonial Anthropocene. Building on Watanabe's engagement with deep time, and non-extractive ways of temporal relating to stones, as well as Fariña's interrogation of the sedimentary layers of history and discourse, this research considers the fundamental interplay between poetry and geology in Latin American writings. Thus, the notion of palimpsest, thematically and formally understood, serves as a critical lens for tracing the entanglement of human and more-than-human histories and voices in times of extinction.

This paper explores the links between language (speech, language, and writing) and land/ earth (geo): can language say land, can land be a language? From the notion of figure, we will postulate literality to analyse the land of language and pathography to explore the language of land. Our study summons a concert of voices and ideas coming from apparently dissimilar theories because it will make of that dissimilarity its major bet: a theoretical twist for a situated thinking that assumes its differences, its traditions, and its translations.