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Special section: Responses to Arturo Escobar's ‘Latin America at a Crossroads: Alternative Modernizations, Post-Liberalism, or Post-Development’

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CHALLENGE TO IMPERIAL REASON

A commentary on Arturo Escobar's paper

Pages 450-458 | Published online: 10 Dec 2010
 

Notes

1. Fanon (Citation1967, p. 188) for instance defined the ‘collective unconscious’ as the ‘sum of prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a given group’. The term can be used in relation to all kinds of society, and in Western societies the history of Empire leaves in its wake a whole series of attitudes and values that act as a barrier to the working through of the varied meanings of the imperial experience so that new identities can be formed and fought for. Instead there is frequently a blockage preventing the processing of the imperial mentality and opposition to multiculturalism, or better expressed, interculturalism as well as new forms of racism result. For a stimulating analysis see Gilroy (Citation2005).

2. For an insightful analysis of the role of the United States in the recent events in Honduras, see, for example, Vigna Citation2010.

3. Geo-political interventionism can be taken as a clear sign of imperial power and during the nineteenth century, before the rise of communism, the United States intervened 103 times in the period from 1798 to 1895, in a wide range of countries, from Japan and China to Nicaragua and Argentina – see Zinn (Citation1996, pp. 290–291).

4. In this sense I would disagree with Arditi (Citation2008, p. 60) who is quoted by Escobar and who has written an imaginative paper on ‘Left turns’ in Latin America; rather than maintain that struggles against imperialism and infringements of sovereignty are in decline it can be seen that with Chávez (Venezuela), Morales (Bolivia) and Correa (Ecuador) – not to mention Cuba – these are urgent and contemporary issues.

5. Elsewhere I have dealt with this issue in some detail, see Slater (Citation2009).

6. For a detailed review and analysis of Latin American social movements, see Stahler-Sholk et al. (Citation2008).

7. This is an extensive field of analysis, but for two recent texts which are particularly useful see Chakrabarty (Citation2008) and Connell (Citation2007).

8. The Mexican social anthropologist Roger Bartra made the point that in many ways Latin American intellectuals are more global in orientation than their counterparts in the North, since in the global south intellectuals keep up to date with their own literature as well as that produced in the North – interview in Mexico City, April 2005. See Bartra (Citation1996) for related discussion.

9. For an excellent critical review of these three international financial institutions see Peet (Citation2009).

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