MARGINS V. 15, N. 24, JUN. 2021 - DOSSIER MARGINS, POWER AND INSURGENCIES IN LATIN AMERICA

Abstract

Abstract: When we take Latin America as a locus of reflection, in its multiplicity of cultures, cosmologies, ways of existing and resisting, it is inevitable to focus on the relationship between modernity, the State, violence, and racism, articulated with local forms of power in societies marked by experience colonizer and by what Achille Mbembe considers as fabulation processes, expressed by the fallacious invention of statements about the inhuman and savage inferiority of certain populations. The flow of historical processes of domination and oppression that still run through the open veins of Latin America, however, has never ceased to face insurgent collectivities that, in rural and urban contexts, (re)invent other identities and narratives, confronting mechanisms of subjugation and silencing, destabilizing state production in “non-law zones”, affirming subalternate identities and fighting for changes in power relations from the margins of the State, in the sense attributed by Veena Das and Deborah Poole. Thus, we seek, in this dossier, to bring together researchers who, from their empirical experiences or bibliographic discussions, reflect on: (1) the practices and discourses through which state agents and institutions update historical violence, producing zones of spatial and moral degradation by capturing, subjecting or even “recovering” bodies and existences; (two); the political claims against the violence engendered by neoliberal rationality, which undermines the human condition and the possibilities of building alliances and solidarities. In this sense, we also value the narratives about collective confrontations, past and contemporary, practiced by rural women and men (from forests, rivers, islands, quilombos, villages, and other territorialized spaces) against specific forms of local authorities and against the perverse logic of big capital over the earth and its human and non-human inhabitants. Thus, we seek to broaden the debates on the possibilities of reinscribing insurgent narratives that subvert the logic of oppression in scenarios that are always marked by violence, subjection, and silencing.

Keywords: Insurgency. Resistance. Latin America. Violence.