Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In the framework of postdoctoral research aimed at historically reconstructing contemporary dance practices between the Argentine dictatorship and post-dictatorship, this article focused on one of the episodes interpreted as a cross between arts worlds and cultural actions of resistance or democratic manifestation. We explored the event called "Open Dance" (1981-1983) and other parallel experiences that took place in the cities of Córdoba and Rosario. We analyzed a heterogeneous documentary corpus made up of programs, posters, photographs, publications, newspapers, oral and secondary sources with tools from a Transdisciplinary Cultural History approached. The microsocial and political dimensions were addressed in order to investigate the development of contemporary dance and its relationship with practices of democratic openness and social cohesion in a restrictive socio-political framework dominated by dictatorial state violence. Among the objectives were the interest of recognize possible networks and exchanges and the particularities that each of these experiences assumed. The consideration of other cities as case of study, outside the reality of Buenos Aires, provided a decentered and extended look at the artistic cultural processes of Argentinean recent past, recognizing their points of contact and differentiation within the same temporal delimitation and according to their local contexts.

In the paper we intended to reconstruct the debates within anarchism and socialism about the indigenous issue in Argentina at the end of the 19th century. To this end, the article analyzes the development of the policies of these ideologies, the ways in which the oppression of indigenous communities was addressed, and the interactions between ethnic and class identities. Through the study of the works of left-wing intellectuals –such as Germán Avé-Lallemant, Juan B. Justo or José Ingenieros– and the publications El Perseguido, La Protesta Humana, La Vanguardia and El Sol, we established the specificity of anarchist and socialist conceptions, the development of their internal tensions, as well as their strategies to link with the native people and to incorporate -or isolate- them to the social struggle.

This article discusses the search for freedom by enslaved people in Louisiana, before the abolitionist laws that banned slavery in the United States in 1865. From the study of fugitive men and women, first to Spanish and Mexican Texas territory and then to northern Mexican states such as Tamaulipas, we can observe that despite living in highly oppressive systems, thousands of enslaved people constantly fought for their own freedom and that of their families during the nineteenth century. Even while abolitionist discussions were taking place around the world, they risked their lives and those of their families to seek freedom and better living conditions. Therefore, it is intended to decenter abolitionist laws as milestones of freedom, emphasizing the struggles for emancipation undertaken by enslaved people.

The article provides a periodization of the processes of gradual and total abolition in Spanish America and points out the importance of studying the special status granted to freed children of enslaved mothers after Free womb laws. The piece highlights the relevance of the goal of recruiting men for the wars in the abolitionist policies and the prevalence of master’s compensations policies. Finally, it presents the contributions to the dosier which contributions highlight not only the legal changes but also the strategies of the enslaved.

Revisión del libro El peronismo en los confines. Salud, vivienda, educación y trabajo en el interior de Jujuy (1943-1955) por M. Jerez y A. Kindgard

The article examines critique in relation to current theories pursued and addressed in contemporary art and activism. The conception of a “partaking critique” seeks to conceive critique beyond universalising abstractions and totalising gestures. By reformulating critique as a partaking practice, we set ourselves in relation to the current demands and urgencies of a world that must confront the challenges of climate change, migration flows, inequalities between the global north and south, and the mistrust of democracy. We find it important that critique results not merely in a judging and condemning analysis and the division between correct and false. A “partaking critique” deals with historical conditions and traditional formulations of critique. Critique as a partaking practice is situated, local, transversal, and reparative, and thus mobilises dispositions to act in a panorama of neo-liberal mechanisms of paralysis and paranoia. We developed our understanding of critique based on our engagement with critical examples at the crossroads of artistic and activist practices, such as Colectivo Situaciones, which in the scope of this article can only be briefly presented. We queried, shifted and transformed the concept of critique employing discourse analysis and a close reading of critical (queer)feminist concepts of the late 1980s. The perspectives taken by Donna Haraway and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick allow us to place the focus not on negative critique but on instituent and transversal processes, and thus on rethinking the transformative potentials of ethico-aesthetic practices. The current socio-political and ecological challenges require a thinking that transverses and queers traditional valorisations of critique: we do not offer a universal, objective and strong theory, but instead favour categories of partiality, situatedness and responsibility. Critique as a practice of partaking is communicated not as the judgement of a critical subject, but in, through and with instituent processes as well as in materialities.

Since 2008, the artist Melanie Gilligan has been investigating how the techniques of machinic capitalism have intensified in the face of digital environments. This is expounded upon in three video works in particular. Crisis in the Credit System (2008) raises the question of how the market, controlled by an “invisible hand”, functions as the milieu of an economic subject. Popular Unrest (2010) shows how algorithms intervene in the reproduction of life and, in doing so, not only govern subjects, but interpret their infra- and supraindividual data traces as an environment. In The Common Sense (2014), society regulates itself through a decentralized but omnipresent affective network created by environmentally distributed technologies. In this paper I want to ask what kind of power-formation is sketched by Melanie Gilligan, especially since the focus of all three works is put on the control of environmental factors. In order to achieve this, I will follow what Foucault developed in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics. The power-formation he calls governmentality does not aim at the production of subjects (as disciplinary techniques), but rather at the control over their milieus or environments. I want to show that this is a central aspect of the power formation, that is implicated in the diegetic universes of Gilligan’s films. Additionally I discuss more recent contributions to the question of machinic control: Erich Hörl’s concept of environmentalization, Antointette Rouvroy’s term algorithmic governmentality, Gerald Raunig’s latest thoughts about the dividuum and machinic capitalism, as well as Maurizio Lazzarato who has taken up Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thoughts about asignifying semiotics. By successively working through Gilligan’s three works, I conclude that the way Gilligan conceives of different formations of control may be analyzed as allegories of historical and technological processes of governmentality, that reach from the 18th century’s milieu of the market to today’s digital milieus.

This volume includes texts by authors who are explicitly inspired by the ecosophical pragmatics of Félix Guattari or who resonate with it. Published in a blend of English and Spanish, the thirteen articles were written by researchers, artists, art historians, philosophers, and schizoanalysts from Asia, America, and Europe. Their methods, ideas, and approaches highlight the ability of creative practice to map and engender complex, relational, singularized, transversal, and constitutive forms of life. Departing from bold analyses of capitalism’s mechanisms of subjection, their contributions describe how art is able to resist the repressive politics of dominant representations and mobilize processes of existential heterogenesis through molecular becomings. The origin of this publication is the IV International Symposium Mutant ecologies in contemporary art: machinic capitalism, molecular beings, and subsistence territories that took place online on November 25-26, 2020, which had as special guest the philosopher and art theorist Gerald Raunig. This special issue of the Journal of Global Studies and Contemporary Art builds on the project started with the book Mutating Ecologies in Contemporary Art (Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona) which investigated the conjunction of the ecological turn in contemporary art and Guattarian ecosophy to inquire about the role of art in light of the challenges posed by the environmental degradation and the socio-political crises of today. Thirty years after Guattari’s death and the publication of Chaosmosis (1992), this collection of texts testifies that Guattari’s clinical and critical analyses continue to infuse artistic, ecological, and political practice with a revolutionary potential.

This article examines the relevance of Guattari’s ecosophy and Gandhi’s ecophilosophy to provide an ontological response to environmental (in)justice in the Indian subcontinent in the context of Anthropogenic climate change. Considering what it signifies to live in the Anthropocene, it engages with the Guattarian idea of emancipation and the Gandhian concept of swaraj to understand the ethics of justice in the new climate regime. Through these intellectual encounters, this article develops an ontological framework for addressing the question of human agency in the Anthropocene considering the long history of decolonization in South Asia which was largely shaped by Gandhi’s idea of swaraj. To facilitate engagement across diverse philosophical cultures for the purpose of decolonizing the Anthropocene, this article seeks to understand possible points of alliance between Guattarian ecosophy and Gandhian ecophilosophy. This cross-cultural conversation becomes pertinent when neoliberal capitalism is radically transforming the lives and landscapes of the planet, reconfiguring the registers of what Guattari (2000) has called the three ecologies: namely those of the environment, social relations and human subjectivity. This cross-cultural confluence of philosophical ideas unveils how the ecologies of both humans and nonhumans are globally reconfigured according to the logic of neoliberal capitalism. Therefore, this article seeks to conjoin Guattarian ecosophy and Gandhian ecophilosophy to understand environmental (in)justice in the Indian subcontinent in the context of anthropogenic climate change. Reflecting on Gandhian ideas with the help of Guattarian ecosophy would help us understand the detrimental effects of the colonial Anthropocene. The condition of the Global South is still deeply colonial, which is marked by economic inequality and social injustice. Therefore, engaging with Gandhi and Guattari in the Anthropocene is a task of radical ecological imagination. This article elaborates on this project of radical ecological vision by drawing their philosophical contributions.

Este artículo pretende aclarar el sentido en el que se utiliza el concepto de planetariedad en los discursos sobre terraformación. Para ello, la primera parte sitúa el término en los actuales debates en torno a lo que se conoce como giro planetario, y que da cuenta de la necesidad de encontrar un marco alternativo a la globalización para abordar los actuales retos -ecológicos, económicos y tecnológicos- en nuestra condición planetaria desde una perspectiva no totalizante ni hegemonizadora. La segunda parte explica en qué sentido la terraformación es un proyecto consistente en componer un modo de planetariedad viable, y cuál es su relación con el giro previamente analizado. El tercer punto aborda una posible contradicción entre la planetariedad (y su insistencia en la particularidad y la diferencia) y la terraformación (al aspirar a una intervención sobre el clima a gran escala), para explorar como posible vía la “tecnodiversidad” propuesta por Yuk Hui en la aplicación de medidas de geoingeniería. Concluimos que, en lugar de reivindicar un legado o tradición cosmotécnica, lo fundamental es lo que determinadas tecnologías revelan sobre el funcionamiento del planeta y cómo esto trastoca nuestras cosmovisiones.