Terremoto 12 - Independencias

Terremoto 12 - Independencias
Author: Dorothée Dupuis (ed.)
Publisher: Terremoto, Motto Books
Language: Spanish / English
Pages:
Size: 22.7 x 34 cm
Weight: 382 g
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9782940524761
Availability: In stock
Price: €10.00
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Product Description

For a certain Western, white, and bourgeois elite, the year 1968 is often recalled in relation to the month of May, following the famous Californian Summer of Love of 1967: an emblem of the social, moral, and consumer emancipation of a certain youth. However, in 1968 this side of the Atlantic was also the site of a series of events linked to other struggles for liberty and social demands that were exacerbated in the second half of the twentieth century: the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, protests against the War in Vietnam, the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico, the first papal visit to Latin America in Colombia, the Noche de los Bastones Largos (Night of the Long Staffs) in Argentina, the riots in Rio de Janeiro, and the skirmishes in Peru.

Although students were placed at the head of a romanticized struggle to escape oppressive authority—to be able to kiss freely in the streets with the conviction of a better and more egalitarian world, circumstances always outdid them. In Latin America, youth, without realizing that their dreams of emancipation came with a helping of Coca-Cola ads and Disney films, struggled to free their bodies from religious and conservative societies, the same regimes that would transmute from dictatorships formed by Yankee imperialism to Neoliberal regimes. Throughout the struggle, the contradictions between the libertarian thought of José Martí, the legacy of Simón Bolivar, and the post-Marxist philosophies that were nourished by the multiplicity of class, race, and identity within the region faded. If in Europe these two paradoxical roles were able to coincide, it is thanks to the economic prosperity left behind by a certain moderate Left that granted a few last social privileges before the beginning of the bestial neoliberalism of the eighties. In Latin America, this political dialogue failed almost immediately due to revolutionary idealism and the unsurpassed brutality of a colonial condition thus far.

As such, 1968 came to be the year in which the schism inherent to the postmodern human condition became more acute. Namely, the split between liberal egoism exacerbated by a consumerist society and the dreams of collective emancipation born from the wave of independence. What mechanisms of struggle, optimism, and collaboration can be revealed when confronted with a conservatism that renews itself so as to not relinquish its power? How can we articulate the aperture aroused from consciences and crosscuts in the years leading up to ’68? How to resuscitate the optimism of youth in our activism towards the notion that there is a future? In this issue of Terremoto, we will use the fiftieth anniversary of the year 1968 as a starting point for a reflection on the notion of independence and freedom through various contributions regarding the autonomy of bodies, sexualities, and thoughts, as well as of small towns, ecosystems, and dogmas—whether authoritarian or emancipatory. We will follow artists and researchers into the insatiable search for this impossible autonomy, and, together, we will clash our chains in a vicious celebratory dance in the face of fraternity and alienation.