Inestabilidad del Estado-Nación en la era Global: Repensando los Movimientos Posthegemónicos en América Latina

Abstract

My thesis analyzes the emergence of contemporary Latin American social movements in the 21st century as a result of the mutability of the Nation-State, producing what I call posthegemonic movements. Drawing from theories on sovereignty, posthegemony, social movements, subjectivity and biopolitics, this project examines the instability of the Nation-State in the global era and the interconnectedness with the different theoretical approaches to the field of social movements studies that emerged during the second half of the 20th century by building on critical work in social and political theory as well as social movement studies. I argue that current social movement studies emerging from Latin America and the United States, instead of opening new windows of dialogue and approaches that can offer a more suitable interpretation of recent social mobilizations, they are trapped inside an exhausted hegemonic language. I suggest a new theoretical approach in studying these social movements that have emerged in the first two decades of the new millennia. I argue that the new configuration of the Nation-State in the global era is producing posthegemonic movements that constitute political singularities, mobilize, and communicate in a different manner than they did before. I do so through a reading of cultural texts such as Diamela Eltit’s Fuerzas especiales, Tryno Maldonado’s Teoría de las catástrofes, and Guadalupe Nettel’s El huésped, in order to demonstrate how the social movements that are emerging on Latin American soil are not acting within the same parameters of mobilized action as most of the circulating research prove but instead are a group of social singularities that have adapted to the ongoing political and economic conditions amid globalization and at the same time, they are capable to produce different modes of political articulation that go beyond the hegemonic frame. Through my reading of contemporary Latin American literary works from Mexico and the Southern Cone thus this project offers a more incisive and productive critical approach to study the posthegemonic movements of the 21st century in Latin America.