i

Meridional. Chilean Journal of Latin American Studies is pleased to invite you to participate in the dossier “Relevance of Latin American Marxism: Thinking from, with, and beyond Michael Löwy’s work”, which consists in our 21st volume, to be published in October 2023. 

Reimagining the ‘Hemispheric South’: Reflections on the Nature of the Nation-state

Authors

  • Ileana Rodríguez Ohio State University

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss four disjunctions essential to the definition of the ‘Hemispheric South’, namely, Fred Jameson’s ‘spatial disjunction’, Javier Sanjinés and José Rabasa’s ‘ethnic disjunction’, Arturo Escobar’s ‘new social movements´ disjunction’, and Claudia Llosa’s ‘language disjunction’. I am well-aware that well-established imperial, colonial, and nationalist narratives have obtained consensus in portraying the ‘Hemispheric South’ in narratives of indigeneity, rurality, corruption, anti democratic politics, untapped and rich natural resources, criminality, trafficking, migration and the like. My starting point is the relatively common assumption that the concept ‘South’ spills over into political reconfigurations of the natural space. ‘South’ stands for the notion of ‘frontier,’ the possibility of wider, ample, supple, available territories, pragmatic redrawing of borders militarily, politically, economically, and electronically. A critical reading of the ‘Hemispheric South’ goes beyond a deterministic thinking and also beyond the well-established imperial, colonial, and nationalist narratives that have obtained consensus in portraying ‘the South’ in terms of unique poverty –a very generative concept, the flip side of which is development.

Keywords:

Hemispheric South, Latin American disjunctions, National, political and cultural narratives, political and natural spaces