Here's another review of the new book by Peter McLaren and my new colleague Nathalia Jaramillo. I particularly like the cover art. As I recall, it is a self portrait several times over of the artist.
HT to Peter for the link...
Saturday, November 17, 2007
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2 comments:
Lefty intellectuals have become very enamored of the popular movements in Latin America. Although I haven't read this book, the review indicates it fits within this emerging trend. While I also think these movements are very interesting and exciting, it is not clear to me how relevant they are for the American context. I'm not up on all the work coming out on this, but I haven't seen much that really talks about this issue.
To some extent, these folks seem to have found in these movements what they were looking for in the first place. At least on the surface, these movements seem to embody the kinds of popular discursive democracy that progressives have always preferred.
And perhaps they do. In my work on the civil rights movement in the South during the 1960s, however, I have found that white progressives have often missed the ways that the most effective aspects don't look much like the models they have tried to apply to them. I wonder if this may also eventually turn out to be the case for the Latin American examples, which I know much much less about.
But I want to see how it can work here. It's important to find democratic models for empowerment that work and not just models that we want to work.
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