The "Lettered City" and the Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges in Latin America

Abstract

This article explores how the knowledge practices of some academic-intellectuals are shifting in such a way as to signal a radical departure from the "traditional" role that academic-intellectuals have had in Latin America. This re-direction is part of a much larger process, namely, the gradual rejection of the modern project by increasingly larger sectors of the Latin American population, and their ongoing efforts to bring about "worlds and knowledges otherwise." In effect, some of the social movements and patterns of mobilization that have become highly visible in Latin America at the turn of the 21st century are probing the modern project-including established knowledge practices of academic-intellectuals-according to expectations, logics and standards other than the ones that have dominated for the last two centuries or more. In particular, the article suggests how these avenues, once opened by social movements, local intellectuals and other sites of knowledge production regarding the intellectual-political project in Latin America, have productively contaminated the dominant regime of power/knowledge (the "lettered city") that has been in place since colonial times. A focus on three cases where this contamination is currently taking place points to possible directions in which a reconfiguration of the dominant regime of power/knowledge might proceed. These developments include the relative equalization of diverse knowledge practices through the proliferation of sites of encounter between them, but also a disposition to allow for the contamination of academic-intellectuals' knowledge practices by the insurrectional movements' non-modern knowledge practices.