Dartmouth Events

The Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture is an interdisciplinary cultural studies laboratory that has been practicing collective research at Yale University since 2003. This year's iteration of the group includes Ever Osorio Ruiz (American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies); Javier Porras Madero (Latin American History); Jess Cruz (History); Jessica Marion Modi (African American Studies and English); Michael Denning '76 (American Studies); and Morgan E. Freeman (American Studies).

A half century after the heyday of Latin American dependency theory, and two decades after Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon's landmark "A Genealogy of Dependency," the collective project returns to the keyword to track a genealogy and geography of dependence from Greenland to Guatemala, Mexico to Martinique. Tracing narratives of (in)dependence from the twentieth-century's long cold war to our post-neoliberal present, the Working Group on Globalization and Culture collectively reflects on the antinomies of dependence and independence.

The linked presentation opens with "The Loneliness of Modern Dependency: Mexican Narratives of Land Dispossession in the 20th century," in which Ever Osorio Ruiz explores recent scholarship on politics and emotion that reveals the depencency of the latter on the social structures that order human life. In "As if the Nation Depends on it," Jessica Marion Modi turns to the post-French departmentalization poetry of Martinician poet, politician, and prominent négritude philosopher, Aimé Césaire. In "Dependence and Independence: Toward a Theory of Capitalist Sovereignty," Michael Denning '76 returns to Marx's use of the rhetoric of dependency, exploring his concept of "relations of dependence," arguing that Marx's theory of capitalist sovereignty begins not from the idea of the state but from the imposition of capitalist compulsions across a system of independent states and dependent territoriess. In "Myths of Dependency," Javier Porras Madero considers how twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals grappled with legacies of political dependence and cultural interdependence to create a new, Latin American language of universalism. In "Arctic Fever: Greenland and Polar Dependence," Morgan E. Freeman situates Greenland at the center of state dependency considering how it has been persistently positioned by dominating powers as geographically advantageous, both as a Danish territory and as home to the United States' northernmost Armed Forces base. In "Airing ALBA," Jess Cruz traces the political cultures that gave life to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA), fleshing out how everyday people in Venezuela and Cuba were not only reacting to the alliance but also creating their own meanings of regional interdependence and economic sovereignty.

This event is free and open to the public, and is co-sponsored by the Dartmouth Society of Fellows, Department of History, Dickey Center for International Understanding, and the Neoliberalism and its Discontents Group. Masks are encouraged and appreciated.