Son[i]a #255
Daniel Inclán
In the 2008 financial crisis, the banking industry won thrice over: it kept the pension and savings funds, it was bailed out by public money, and it managed to concentrate its activities in a small number of banks.
The historian and ‘violentologist’ Daniel Inclán, lecturer at the Institute of Economic Research at UNAM and member of the Latin American Observatory of Geopolitics, uses this example of the concentration of capital as one among many cases of what he describes as ‘a stateless war, a war against history.’
This steam-rolling, ubiquitous war, leads to the symbolic and real extermination of people and of social ties. In his opinion, the lethal combination of this ‘presentist’ logic and the aestheticisation of the world, in which we ‘consume effects rather than processes’, turns us into mere spectators of our own catastrophe. It prevents us from recognising an alternative historicity and, consequently, robs us of the possibility of imagining presents that contradict the prevailing homogeneous forms. Daniel suggests confronting the prisons of liberal thought with a politics of moderation that seeks understanding in disagreement, and other ways of inhabiting time.
SON[I]A talks to Daniel Inclán about coffee, Zapatismo, à la carte politics, hamburgers, long presents, tacos, biographical narcissism, authoritarianism in democracy, aesthetic whiteness, and the nixtamalisation of maize.
Aura Cumes
Aura Cumes charts a lucid historical path through colonial processes, analysing the mechanisms of control, violence, and dispossession that have perversely shaped the identity of the native-servant, relegated in favour of the progress and well-being of white men, their families, and their capital. Racism and sexism thus progress side by side, in a web of exploitation in which hierarchies often overlap.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk with Lucía Piedra Galarraga, Diego Falconí Travez and Karo Moret from the Study Group on Afro/Black Ideas, Practices, and Activisms about altars, ekekos, nefandos, Saint Barbara, and Valdivia's Siamese twins. They turn their attention to the politics of hair, talk about sugar as the star product plying the Caribbean routes, and acknowledge the usefulness of ashes in proving the extermination of the ancient Andean sodomite communities.
Raquel Gutiérrez
Raquel Gutiérrez talks about semantic revision and political experimentation, about the failure of “just add women and stir” policies, about popular feminisms and the women's struggle, about what happens when Sumak Qamaña (living well) stops being a path and becomes a model, and about how to introduce the agenda of the autonomy of the body into her notion of 'politics in feminine'.