Description:

This talk analyses the cultural and media dimensions of political imaginaries of social change in contemporary Latin America as responses to the postsocialist condition—the moment of coexistence of declarations of the death of socialism with the rise of new anti-capitalist demands. What do our political alternatives look like after “the end of history,” and how are the old but still influential legacies of red-washing and red-baiting remediated and challenged via cultural and media artifacts and practices in a new communication environment? With a focus on the cultural counternarratives, aesthetic strategies, and media practices of progressive alternative politics in contemporary Latin America, Prof. Duong analyzes the development of new forms of critique in the region that go beyond the paradigms of total, national revolutions by targeting extractive developmentalisms and patriarchal populisms via feminist, decolonial, and ecocritical perspectives. She is interested in the cultural and media dimensions of these movements: how and what media are engaged in organizing and reconceptualizing these struggles, what aesthetic strategies are involved in forms of performative insubordination and solidarity-building, and what responses do they elicit in the form of cooptation and demonization. She considers these dynamics in light of the legacy of Cold War propaganda, which regularly portrayed demands for social and economic justice as anti-Christian and apocalyptic, as inroads of Soviet imperialism, or as the deviant desires of undisciplined premodern, female, or other marked subjects. Employing this framework, her talk addresses not only recent discursive and aesthetic shifts within the counterhegemonic politics of the region, but also the rhetorical changes of corresponding conservative responses from both the left and right political establishments.