Spotlight

Abraham Acosta,

Abraham Acosta, Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Arizona, speaking on Monday, May 18th, 3:30-5:00 pm in HG 1010. Acosta specializes in literary and cultural analysis, focusing on questions of subalternity, postcoloniality, and biopolitics in the Americas.

Abraham Acosta, Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Arizona, "Remapping Resistance in the Posthegemonic Age: Cultural Studies, Affect, Illiteracy"

Monday, 18 April 3:30-5:00PM
HG1010

This paper will explore the critical stakes of resistance (resistant culture, politics, thought) in a contemporary moment marked by the increasing discordance between contemporary theories of power and the intensified historical contradictions brought about by the neoliberal restructuration of the nation-state. Otherwise known as posthegemony, the present conjuncture bears witness to the critical debilitation of the nation-state as a culturally and politically binding model of social organization and the withering of once predominant categories which provided linguistic, ethnic, and cultural coherency. Cultural studies, in an attempt to offer political meaning to cultural practices in such a radically transformed political environment has been seen pushed to its limits and may no longer provide the secure analytic footing it did in previous years.  Given these conditions, the paper will reflect upon several, recently developed, theoretical accounts of power that aim to think beyond the critical and material assumptions of power and hegemony––including the notions of “posthegemony”, “affect,” and my own concept of “illiteracy”––as a means to chart a new critical path and theoretical framework for cultural, ethnic and linguistic inquiry.

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​.