Human Rights or Human Wrongs
The line between what is an acceptable and moral practice is continually blurred, and may soon be nonexistent. In our "me first" society, it is expected that we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, with our bodies because, after all, they are our bodies and no one can tell us what we can or can't do. And so science marches along. Science can be a great thing, and miracles happen every day in the field of science. But just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it.
THE POLITICS OF NAMING
This article explores the definitions, constructions, understandings and struggles around Cultural Studies as a whole in Latin America, giving particular attention to its central legacies and the differences among them. Its interest is to bring to the fore the ways in which the political and de-colonial afford perspectives that challenge and make tense the hegemonic academic enterprise as a whole, and drive efforts to (re)think Cultural Studies – or better called inter-Cultural Studies – as projects of intervention in which knowledge and thought are intertwined with transformation and the making of a radically distinct social world.
Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Social Thought
Political and social thought regarding Latin America has been historically characterized by a tension between the search for its specific attributes and an external view that has seen these lands from the narrow perspective of European experience. There has also been an opposition between the challenge of the rich potentialities of this New World and distress over its difference, which stands in contrast with the ideal represented by European culture and racial composition. Nonetheless, external colonial views and regrets because of the difference have been widely hegemonic. A brief revision of the texts of the first republican constitutions is enough to illustrate how liberals, in their attempt to transplant and install a replica of their understanding of the European or North American experience, almost completely ignore the specific cultural and historical conditions of the societies about which they legislate. When these conditions are considered, it is with the express purpose of doing away with them. The affliction because of the difference—the awkwardness of living in a continent that is not white, urban, cosmopolitan, and civilized— finds its best expression in positivism. Sharing the main assumptions and prejudices of nineteenth-century European thought (scientific racism, patriarchy, the idea of progress), positivism reaffirms the colonial discourse. The continent is imagined from a single voice, with a single subject: white, masculine, urban, cosmopolitan. The rest, the majority, is the “other,”