In recent years the critical paradigms for theorizing power as well as the very idea of resistance itself have become saturated through hasty and imprecise usage, leaving a conceptual vocabulary that retains little of its truly political meaning, function, and force, and which demands serious revision if it is to continue to be analytically useful, and continue to inspire people’s struggle for freedom. In this talk, Abraham Acosta will propose a critical and historical reevaluation of contemporary Latin American theories and narratives of hegemony and resistance that advance a new more critical approach to understanding acts or moments of antagonism which he calls “illiteracy.” This talk will present some of the more salient and productive features of Thresholds of Illiteracy (Fordham University Press, 2104) as it relates to current intellectual debates concerning Latin America and the now post hegemonic role of culture and state in the neoliberal era.
Abraham Acosta is Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Arizona. He specializes in literary and cultural analysis, focusing on questions of subalternity, postcoloniality, and biopolitics in the Americas. His research traverses the critical realities of contemporary multilingual contexts, where assumptions of power, knowledge, and capital crosshatch with historical translations of cultural difference. Acosta’s work has been published in such journals as Dispositio/n, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Social Text, and Critical Multilingualism Studies. His book, Thresholds of Illiteracy: Theory, Latin America, and the Crisis of Resistance (2014) is published by Fordham University Press.

Cosponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature