Posthegemony

Political Theory and Latin America

2010
Author:

Jon Beasley-Murray

A challenging new work of cultural and political theory rethinks the concept of hegemony

Posthegemony is an investigation into the origins, limits, and possibilities for contemporary politics and political analysis. Challenging dominant strains in social theory, Jon Beasley-Murray contends that cultural studies simply replicates the populism that conditions it, and that civil society theory merely nourishes the neoliberalism that it sets out to oppose.

In Posthegemony, Jon Beasley-Murray provides a superbly written and insightful theoretical evaluation of the shifting relation between culture and state in Latin America.

Gareth Williams, author of The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America

Posthegemony is an investigation into the origins, limits, and possibilities for contemporary politics and political analysis. Jon Beasley-Murray grounds his theoretical discussion with accounts of historical movements in Latin America, from Columbus to Chávez, and from Argentine Peronism to Peru’s Sendero Luminoso.

Challenging dominant strains in social theory, Beasley-Murray contends that cultural studies simply replicates the populism that conditions it, and that civil society theory merely nourishes the neoliberalism that it sets out to oppose. Both end up entrenching the fiction of a social contract. In place of hegemony or civil society, Beasley-Murray presents a theory of posthegemony, focusing on affect, habit, and the multitude. This approach addresses an era of biopolitics and bare life, tedium and terror, in which state control is ever more pervasive but something always escapes.

In his thorough examination, Beasley-Murray undoes the dominant narrative of hegemonic projects and counterhegemonic resistance, of civilization and subalternity, to reveal instead a history of failed contracts and unpredicted insurgencies.

Awards

Honorable Mention for the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Modern Language Association

Jon Beasley-Murray is assistant professor of Hispanic studies at the University of British Columbia.

In Posthegemony, Jon Beasley-Murray provides a superbly written and insightful theoretical evaluation of the shifting relation between culture and state in Latin America.

Gareth Williams, author of The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America

Posthegemony makes a number of important critical contributions that encourage a radical reappraisal of the last twenty years of Latin American politics and what might be tentatively described as an emerging field of ‘multitude studies.’

Theory & Event

Beasley-Murray has written a provocative and learned tour de force that draws from various strands of postmodernism in order to examine political developments in contemporary Latin America.

International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics

Contents

Prologue: October 10, 1492
Introduction: A User’s Guide

I. Critique
1. Argentina, 1972: Cultural Studies and Populism
2. Ayacucho, 1982: Civil Society Theory and Neoliberalism

II. Constitution
3. Escalón, 1989: Deleuze and Affect
4. Chile, 1992: Bourdieu and Habit

Conclusion: Negri and Multitude
Epilogue: April 13, 2002

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index