Posthegemony endeavors to "redescribe and reconstruct an image of society that no longer depends on society's own self portrayal" in order to recognize cultural struggles that offer the best likelihood of changing the current exclusionary and unjust structure and order of society (p. xv). Beasley-Murray posits that within the academy we must replace and rethink concepts like consent, ideology, and identity, along the lines of concepts like affect, habit, and multitude.
I am intrigued by the move of this book is making to critique cultural studies and to problematize the false dichotomy between consent and coercion in politics. I find it interesting the role censorship also plays in these processes and Beasley-Murray is interested in exposing the failure of hegemony and why hegemony can't work. Accordingly, posthegemony works "to uncover what has been obscured in these substitutions and to outline the means by which its suppression has been achieved, enforced, naturalized, and legitimated" (p. 63).
In this works that we've read thus far there seems to be a trend in exposing the failure of systems of power and political theories in place. I'm wondering if that's what Latin American theory is defined by; that is; a process of uncovering what is hidden by signs and codes that obscure cultures and societies.
By the way, Jon Beasley-Murray has an entire blog dedicated to posthegemony: http://posthegemony.blogspot.com, just in case anyone wanted to check it out.
Hi Vincent. I like that you pointed out the theme of failure- failure of power structures, failure of representation. These themes have been superinteresting this semester.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking of Los Rubios and Los Planetas and how both fail constantly in representing the disappeared and reclaiming that which was lost. Perhaps in exposing that impossibility, we achieve an alternative to post-hegemony, something not attached to hegemony but past and outside of it.
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