Faculty Organizer: Bruno Bosteels, Associate Professor, Department of Romance Studies, bb228@cornell.edu
The conference aims to reach two primary goals:
- historically, to draw up a balance sheet of the Marxist legacy several decades after the last great revolutionary moment of the 1960s and 1970s, a moment that was often violently crushed by military dictatorships in several countries in Latin America;
- theoretically, to redefine the parameters for critical intellectual work in the humanities, constructively or deconstructively guided by Marxism, at the start of the twenty-first century.
“Marx and Marxisms in Latin America” is part of an ongoing effort at interdisciplinary and institutional collaboration, involving other universities in the US, Latin America, and Europe, other internationally renowned journals, such as the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and professional organizations, such as the Latin American Studies Association (which, for its 2007 international meeting, to be held September 5-8 in Montréal, includes two panels devoted to the same topic, sponsored by the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies).
The conference will bring a select group of internationally renowned scholars in the humanities to Cornell University, with invited speakers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and the United States of America. The aim is to assess the relevance, timeliness, or, as the case may be, untimeliness of Marx and Marxisms in Latin America, at a moment when many countries are traversing a new phase of left-wing politics, sometimes described as a new “spring” for the Left in Latin America.
Specialists, including both established and younger voices, have been invited mainly from the fields of political philosophy, critical theory, and literary and cultural studies—which are the fields most closely associated with the journal Diacritics as well as with the history of Marxist thought in general.
The primary sponsor is Diacritics: Review of Contemporary Criticism (http://www.arts.cornell.edu/romance/shared_info/diacritics.html).