The tendency to treat reified cultural or ethnic features as the key for explaining social conflicts is a cornerstone of bourgeois ideology and useful weapon of imperialism. Yet, such an approach characterizes many Western academic discourses that purport to combat ‘coloniality’ and racism, including decolonial theory. This talk addresses important differences between culturalist approaches to analyzing imperialism, racism, and ideology, and the historical materialist and dialectical orientation of Marxism, particularly in the forms it has taken in the Global South.
Dr. Jennifer Ponce de León is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies and a member of the graduate groups in Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Left movements and cultural production in the Americas in the 20th and 21st centuries and Marxist and anticolonial thought. She is Associate Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique, which holds an intensive summer research program at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris every summer, as well as public conferences and lectures online and in person. Dr. Ponce de León is the author of Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke University Press, 2021), and her essays have been published in journals such as American Quarterly, Philosophy Today, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, and ASAP/Journal. She is co-editor with Richard T. Rodriguez and Randall Williams of Puto and Other Plays by Ricardo A. Bracho, which is forthcoming from Duke University Press, and she is currently co-editing the anthology Latinx Marxisms with Ben V. Olguín and Jaime Cortez. She is co-editor of the Anti-Imperialist Marxism book series for Iskra Books/Critical Theory Workshop.
This event will take place November 14th on Zoom (https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/83259571366) from 12-1:15pm as part of the GCLR's new Interdisciplinary Brown Bag Lunch series.
November 6, 2024 - 12:03pm