Laclau Research Articles

The role of memory in populist discourse: the case of the Italian Second Republic

ABSTRACTCento Bull's paper takes as its starting point Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's conceptualization of populism as counter-hegemonic, and argues, with reference to the Italian case, that populism not only takes the form of a rejection of the establishment and political elites, but also entails a construction of ‘the people’ that requires, as well as the development of empty signifiers as shown by Laclau, also the deployment of common myths based on a collective memory of an imagined past. Cento Bull therefore argues, in line with Ritchie Savage, that the role of memory in populist discourse has been underestimated. Specifically, many populist movements and leaders engage in a fundamental redefinition of who constitutes ‘the people’ accompanied by mistrust and demonization of the Other, which is predicated upon (and justified with recourse to) a reimagining of the nation's and/or democracy's ‘founding moment’. Furthermore, many populist movements make use of a political rhetoric revolving around the ‘anti-subversive impulse’ and aimed at instilling fear and a sense of being under threat.

Ernesto Laclau and Critical Media Studies: Marxism, Capitalism, and Critique

Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxist discourse theory is increasingly utilised within media studies in order to investigate discourses circulating about, within, and through media. Discourse theory has proved itself to be a productive theoretical asset that can yield important empirical insights into the solidification and neutralization of particular discursive regimes. Yet, the critical potentials of Laclau’s theoretical work have often been downplayed or neglected. Instead of offering a fully formed critical theory, Laclau has been relegated to offering a descriptive toolbox in which the underlying critical implications have often either been overlooked or forgotten altogether. This paper seeks to reflect on the potentials and obstacles within Laclau’s work for critical media studies by engaging with the role of Marxism, capitalism and critique. First, the paper addresses the relation between Marxism and post-Marxism by arguing that rather than abandoning Marxism, Laclau actively situates his own work as a dialogue with and against this tradition. Second, the paper addresses the relation between Laclau’s analysis of so-called globalised capitalism and political struggle, which leads to a discussion of class relations and political economy. Third, the paper examines Laclau’s notion of ideology critique and argues that it must be seen as a simultaneously explanatory, normative and practical perspective. Based on these discussions, it is this paper’s contention that it is insufficient to simply appropriate discourse theory as a descriptive research format, but that it must rather be seen as underlined by a radical critique of existing structures of domination and capitalist subordination. The paper furthermore argues that there are parts of Laclau’s work that are problematic for this purpose and needs to receive further attention by future research. By providing an extended discussion of Laclau’s own work, this paper seeks to contribute to the critical application of discourse theory within the field of media studies and contribute to the on-going dialogue between Marxism, post-Marxism, and critical media studies.

The Zapatista challenge: Politics after catastrophe

In this article, I examine the prescient political/theoretical contributions of the Zapatista movement in the context of the emergence and decline of Latin America’s “progressive governments.” Mexico’s ongoing and devastating social decomposition, and the structural crisis of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, I place the Zapatistas’ theorizations on the nature of “neoliberal globalization” in extended conversation with the work of Ernesto Laclau and Antonio Negri—both of whom have served as key referents for Latin America’s left. I argue that Zapatismo deserves to be taken seriously as an endeavor that both parallels and exceeds these more well-known theorists and thus allows for rather unique insights into what the recuperation of an anti-capitalist political horizon might require today.

From Populist to Institutionalist Politics: Political Cultures of Protest in Contemporary Andean Bolivia

Social movements and acts of protest have played significant roles in charting the path of Bolivian history. Massive waves of protest against neoliberalism led to the overthrow of two presidents from office and culminated in the victory of Evo Morales. The stability of the Morales government stands in stark contrast to the chronic political instability of the neoliberal era. This paper deals with the paradox of the persistence of acts of protest all over Bolivia and the stability of the political regime of Evo Morales. The paradox is explained through the use of the distinction between populist and institutionalist politics made by Ernesto Laclau. Politics in the neoliberal era was populist, where society was divided into two opposed camps through the construction of a ‘people’ against the regime. The era after the election of Evo Morales is characterized by institutionalist politics where each political demand is separately and unevenly absorbed into the system. The potential of acts of protest to cause political transformations at various levels depends on their ability to construct a hegemonic chain of equivalence against the system, and the failure to construct it has frustrated efforts to create a more radical alternative to the current government.

Constructing a new politics

Recent initiatives across Europe have shown that political projects drawing on the work of Gramsci, especially as interpreted by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, can be the source of strong growth in support for the left. Chantal Mouffe and leading Podemos strategist Inigo Errejon here discuss the rise of Podemos, and the ways in which the party has drawn on the theoretical contribution made by Laclau and Mouffe. The first part of the discussion looks at the dominance across Europe of the centrist consensus, and the response to that of right-wing populism, stressing the need for an equivalent act of boldness on the left in shifting away from the centre. The second part looks at the relationship between the 15 May movement and the emergence of Podemos, and offers an insightful analysis that has implications for our understanding of how social movements and political parties interact.

O fundamento como "fundamento ausente" nas ciências sociais: Heidegger, Derrida e Laclau

Neste artigo, refletimos teoricamente sobre o pós-fundacionalismo, corrente filosófica que influenciou o surgimento do pós-estruturalismo francês na segunda metade do século XX. De uma forma mais específica, nosso objetivo é discutir as implicações ontológicas, teóricas e epistemológicas da abordagem pós-fundacional para pesquisas em ciências sociais. Para tanto, cumprimos o seguinte percurso. Primeiramente, discorremos sobre o que chamamos de o Zeitgeist pós-fundacionalista, em especial a ênfase na diferença ontológica e no fundamento como Abgrund oriundos da obra de Martin Heidegger. A seguir, apresentamos a influência heideggeriana na reflexão filosófica pós-estruturalista de Jacques Derrida. Na sequência, discutimos a incorporação e a aplicação da ontologia heideggeriana na obra de Ernesto Laclau, principalmente a partir da discussão das noções de hegemonia e de populismo. Ao final, apresentamos nossas considerações acerca da importância do pós-fundacionalismo para pesquisas na área das ciências sociais.

Ethnicity, left-wing essentialism and radical democracy. In memory of Ernesto Laclau and his work with Chantal Mouffe

L’article aplica la crítica a l’essencialisme de classe d’Ernesto Laclau i Chantal Mouffe als essencialismes ètnics que s’han imposat en les agendes polítiques dels moviments socials llatinoamericans en les últimes dècades i s’indaguen algunes repercussions d’aquest essencialisme en les complexes relacions entre el govern de Rafael Correa i un sector de l’esquerra equatoriana. A partir de les preocupacions de Laclau i Mouffe per indagar les arrels de l’autoritarisme d’esquerres, l’article mostra algunes de les coincidències de l’essencialisme ètnic amb les tradicions autoritàries que, al llarg del segle XX, van imposar els criteris d’una classe definida de manera essencial. També s’analitzen les relacions de l’essencialisme ètnic amb el sorgiment de noves formes de racisme que afebleixen la construcció de projectes polítics de base popular i afermen l’exclusió dels sectors ètnics que diuen redimir.

Plus Ça Change … Re-Articulating Authoritarianism in the New Turkey

This study argues that the understanding of politics that prevails in contemporary Turkey resonates with Ernesto Laclau’s perspective on Turkish politics of the 1930s. Adapting Laclau’s antagonistic politics to the analysis of contemporary Turkey produces a critical counter-narrative that reveals in effect a continuation of an authoritarian tradition, between the socio-political discourses of the 1930s CHP and the present AKP. Accordingly, discourses of both political movements are fundamentally inspired by the same logic of difference, one that reduces the role of the construction of equivalential chains among different pre-existing political demands to a pragmatist game of hegemony. Their authoritarianisms, however, differ from one another in terms of the symbolic frameworks within which each respective regime is sustained. Whereas the early CHP represented French-inspired, Jacobin-like, nationalist approach to democracy, the AKP has established US-paralleling, neoliberal and neo-conservative governmentality, which was made public in the party’s New Turkey Manifesto in 2014.

The phantasmatic sovereign: The political implications of Podemos appropriation of Laclau

Podemos is, by many, seen as the natural continuation of the Indignados movement. However, what happens when a movement transforms into a political party? Podemos’ intellectual figureheads have in this process been heavily influenced by the theories of Ernesto Laclau, and they have adopted his ideas on hegemony and political articulation. As of late, however, Podemos has also begun to employ the concept of sovereignty. In this article, I argue that the concept of sovereignty used by Podemos might carry unintended political implications. I demonstrate that Podemos use sovereignty in both national and popular versions, and I point to how this illustrates the inherent tensions between horizontality and verticality. However, if not sufficiently recognising these tensions, Podemos are risking association with claims not readily compatible with a radical politics. There are therefore two political implications: firstly, the use of sovereignty places more emphasis on verticality and leadership than on the popular base and, secondly, sovereignty has strong historical ties to a more reactionary electorate.

What Laclau Said and What Laclau Was Unable to Say : A Materialistic Reinterpretation of Post-Marxism

What Laclau Said and What Laclau Was Unable to Say : A Materialistic Reinterpretation of Post-Marxism

Srinivas Aravamudan

Srinivas Aravamudan Jonathan Culler Although I am not in any way an eighteenth-century scholar, I was the chair of Srinivas Aravamudan’s dissertation committee at Cornell. I don’t recall exactly how this happened—whether he enlisted me at the beginning of his graduate school career, before his eventual specialization in the eighteenth century became clear, or whether he persuaded me that, despite my lack of knowledge of the eighteenth century and especially of the texts and discourses of colonialism, the rhetorical focus of his project made it appropriate for me to be his thesis director. (Srinivas was always very persuasive, as many colleagues and institutions, including the Mellon Foundation, can attest.) I suspect it may have been the latter, since Srinivas came to Cornell after having completed an MA at Purdue in 1986, and so was not starting from scratch. In any event, I agreed because I understood that it would be a pleasure to work with such a talented and engaging student, whatever the eventual topic of the dissertation. Srinivas completed his dissertation, “Tropical Figures: Colonial Representation in England and France, 1688–1789,” in 1991, after spending a year in Paris, studying with Jacques Derrida, among others. (In the biographical sketch that prefaces the thesis, he wrote that “he decided both to conduct research and live life to the fullest in Paris, France. When he found that Paris was perhaps conducive to [End Page 104] life, but much less so to research, he returned to labor in the intellectual vineyards at Ithaca.”) As the title indicates, his dissertation formed the basis of Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804, an immensely successful book which won the MLA’s first book prize and is still highly regarded in eighteenth-century studies. The success of Tropicopolitans is testimony to the advantages of giving junior faculty time to develop the dissertation into something truly valuable and memorable, rather than pushing them to publish a book that will be out by the time of a tenure revue at the beginning of the sixth year, as administrators increasingly seem to demand. Srinivas’s dissertation was completed in 1991 and Tropicopolitans was published eight years later. He took the time to produce a real transformation. What is striking when one compares the two volumes is that, while the three main texts discussed in the dissertation—Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Captain Singleton, and the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes—remain central to the book (others were added, especially Equiano’s autobiography, Lady Mary Montagu’s Letters from the Levant, and several discussions of the sublime), the conceptual framework was radically modified. The starting point for the dissertation is the work of Antonio Gramsci and his account of subalternity, neither of which even figures in the index of Tropicopolitans. And the conclusion of the dissertation, essentially an essay on tropes, starts from Hayden White’s organization of the historical field through the four fundamental tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Strikingly, White too disappears from Tropicopolitans. The fundamental argument of the dissertation, “that literary representations of colonized peoples—such as Caribbean slaves—had a profound impact on the formation of the Enlightenment-inspired Western political subject, because discourses of individualism, economic freedom, secularism, and national liberation were intricately linked with colonial modes of domination and the representation of those modes,” is recognizable in Tropicopolitans.1 But the focus in the dissertation is on “examining the interaction between various modes of ‘subalternity’ and the strategies of ideological containment that were deployed to combat the resistances that subalterns posed” (3). Relying on Gramsci’s six-point definition of the steps to be followed in studying subalternity, drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s influential discussions of hegemony and on the Subaltern Studies investigations of peasant resistance in India, the dissertation adopts a political vocabulary quite different from that of Tropicopolitans, asserting that “historically-oriented literary criticism could learn a great deal from subaltern historiography’s reconstruction of elisions within dominant historiography” (10–11). This introduction makes little reference to the current state of eighteenth-century studies but sees itself rather as allied with feminist, cultural-materialist and anti-imperialist critics generally in “a...

Toward a Political Ethics of Equity: Hegemonic Movement Practices in the Neoliberal State

How can contemporary social movements turn resistance struggles into transformative strategies for advancing radical democracy? An analysis of current rights-based movement organizing in the United States suggests that hegemonic practices may require an ethical component to give rise to alternative institutional projects. Taking Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-marxist approach as a starting point, this article pushes the theory of hegemony beyond its procedural emphasis on contingency, and situates an ethics of response-ability within the antagonistic relations of hegemony. This inspires a political commitment to equity that can guide movement strategies toward a constructive transformation of institutions.

La Teoría del discurso de Laclau y su aplicación al significante “la paz”

Ernesto Laclau develops a research program that aims at explaining political phenomena as articulatory practices that structure collective identities. Discourse Theory, as social ontology and research methodology for Politics, highlights the antagonistic nature of historical-cultural processes during the production of meanings and senses that shape social field. By reviewing the sources that inspire the Argentinean philosopher to develop his proposal, it is concluded that discourses are established through a hegemonic dynamic that recognizes the contingent and antagonistic nature of every discourse. In the end, Discourse Theory is applied to the Colombian context, more precisely to the signifier “peace” during the 2014 Presidential Elections. It is argued that “peace” made possible the unification of different parties due to its semantic indeterminacy as empty signifier.

Feminismo como crítica: Sujeto y universalidad

Firstly, this article aims to refute some approaches of difference feminism` using as a guide Chantal Mouffe and Judith Butler proposals, both linked to the defense of a women open concept. Later, also resorting to populist proposal of Ernesto Laclau, we’ll argue in favor of a political feminism understood as a possible tool of unification of various struggles for the construction of a counter-hegemony.

Who and What Does Involvement Involve? A Multi-Sited Field Study of Involvement of Relatives in Danish Psychiatry

This article gives an account of aspects of a multi-sited field study of involvement of relatives in Danish psychiatry. By following metaphors of involvement across three sites of the psychiatric system—a family site, a clinical site and a policy site—the first author (J.O.) investigated how, and on what grounds, involvement of relatives is perceived in Danish psychiatry. Paradoxically, the current understanding of involvement of relatives fails to take into consideration the perspectives of the relatives per se and families that were being studied. By analyzing involvement from a discourse theoretical perspective laid out by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the aim of this study is to show how the dominant discourse about involvement at the political and clinical sites is constituted by understandings of mentally ill individuals and by political objectives of involvement. The analysis elucidates how a psycho-ideological discourse positions the mentally ill person as weak, incapable, and ineffective. By contrast, the supporting relative is positioned as a strong, capable, and effective co-therapist. Furthermore, the analysis considers how this dominant discourse of involvement is constituted by a broader discourse of neoliberalism and market orientation, which justifies involvement as a subtle institutionalization of social control. The article highlights that the role of the relative as a co-therapist may be contested by the families’ discourse, which emphasizes issues concerning the responsibility toward the mental health of the ill individual as well as toward the psychological milieu of the family.

From the Last Dancer

From the Last Dancer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (bio) Edward W. Said died in 2003. Jacques Derrida died in 2004. Kofi Awoonor was killed in Westgate Mall last year. Now Stuart Hall is gone. And then Ernesto Laclau. A generation of intellectuals and activists, intellectual/activists, is disappearing. Academics worldwide could not think “Black Britain” before Stuart Hall. And, in Britain, the impact of cultural studies went beyond the confines of the academy. That quiet, gentle, witty, tenacious, learned, original political thinker inspired generations of students into intellectual and cultural production that spilled over into hands-on activism. Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, Isaac Julien, Michelle Barrett, John Akomfrah, the list goes on. It was my good fortune to meet Stuart Hall with an opportunity of spending quality time with him in discussion at the Marxist Cultural Interpretation Institute in Champaign-Urbana in 1983, under the shadow of Shabra and Shatila. Stuart Hall recounted the days of the saving of the New Left Review when the Russell Foundation no longer supported it, in, if memory serves, 1963. (I was in Britain that year, a young Bengali woman tyrannized by a prefeminist white alpha-male financially dependent resentful companion, a transient research student at Girton, two years out of India, not part of the radical mainstream.) Hall was among the founders in the fifties of the New Left Review. I cannot museumize Stuart in the widely claimed Euro-U.S. protest scene of the sixties, as widely claimed as the Naxalbari movement at home. He surely belonged to it as a passionate participant, even a charismatic leader, but mourning takes me elsewhere. Today, I remember that it was also the moment of the death of Lumumba, Fanon, Du Bois. In other words, Hall came in and participated without epistemic recognition in the inauguration of a new [End Page 129] way of thinking about the world in the long-haul, not just immediate protest or resistance. I cannot confine him to British cultural studies alone, even as it preserves its political difference from U.S. cultural studies’ identitarianism, betraying the austere hospitality of democracy; I read him rather in the world that worked for social justice in the diversified field of the struggle for citizenship in the metropolis after the waning of territorial imperialisms, and after the passing of the initial dreams of negritude and Pan-Africanism. It was Awoonor who made me imagine the early 1960s in this worldly way. Awoonor came back to Accra with a good Brit Lit degree from Leeds even as the New Left was consolidating itself at Oxford. Smart boy from Africa, not in the radical British mainstream. Awoonor became Du Bois’s minder. He remembers the move against Du Bois’s sympathies with a peculiar communism, which meant passport denial in the United States, but might mean going with the Eastern bloc in newly fledged Ghana. (Remember Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? [1956], and that Marcus Garvey was still taken seriously as an alternative?) More important, he remembered the 1959 Pan-African Congress, with both Lumumba and Fanon (“the tall one and the short one”) in attendance. I want to place Hall, young man lately arrived from Jamaica, in this broad world, for the philosophers of the future, rather than keep him local. I wish he were here for me to be having this discussion about global connectivities. You listened, Stuart Hall, contradicted, but also, sometimes, agreed. I can sense the shadow of this constellation in “When Was the Postcolonial?” Although the essay apparently relates to a debate by now forgotten (between “postcolonial critics” Robert Young, and Homi Bhabha, and Arif Dirlik, Ella Shohat, Anne McClintock, Lata Mani, Ruth Frankenburg, Mary Louise Pratt), “Larger issues are ‘at stake’ in these debates than the criticisms which have been widely signalled sometimes suggest” (Hall 1996, 256). Paragraph after paragraph describes—without mentioning Africa—the predicament of postcolonial nation-states in Africa, a predicament that clearly signals Africa’s nationalism, division into regionalism, un-examined culturalism. As we are today reeling under the dismissal of a good governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, or looking at an aging FLN member running again for president in Algeria, along with witnessing...

The Politics of Hollywood Cinema: Popular Film and Contemporary Political Theory

The driving ambition of this important book is to combat the argument, deeply ingrained in the discipline of film studies, that Hollywood films are ‘politically naïve or backward’ and ‘of a conservative, reactionary kind’ (p. 1). Instead, Rushton proposes that ‘some examples of classical Hollywood tackle politics and issues relating to democracy in ways that deserve to be explored’ and that can be considered as genuinely ‘democratic art’ (p. 2). The opening section of the book consists of a sceptical account of political modernist film theory, while the remainder is composed of a series of staged engagements between the ideas of certain post-Marxist political philosophers (Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, Claude Lefort, Étienne Balibar and Ernesto Laclau), or ‘theorists of democratic politics’, as Rushton labels them, and redemptive readings of a number of carefully selected classical Hollywood films. These engagements seek to answer two complex and important questions, which run in parallel: what is democracy, and what is cinema?

“Marxism, without Guarantees”: What I Learned from Stuart Hall

“Marxism, without Guarantees”What I Learned from Stuart Hall Kenneth Surin (bio) and Steven Salaita With the death of Stuart Hall we have lost the last of the British, or British-based, Left-wing intellectuals who began their work in the decade or so after the end of the Second World War. The roll of honor of the departed is long, and it includes, in addition to Hall, Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, Raphael Samuel, Ralph Miliband, John Westergaard, Roy Pascal, Geoffrey de Ste Croix, George Rudé, Isaac Deutscher, Norman Geras, Chris Harman, and Tony Cliff (and these are only those I’m aware of). Of the succeeding generation, Terry Eagleton, David Harvey, Sheila Rowbotham, Perry Anderson, and Robin Blackburn endure in immensely productive ways, but we’ve also lost Ernesto Laclau, Peter Gowan, Gerry Cohen, and Andrew Glyn from this later generation. The prospects for a continued and vibrant British Marxism, combining intellectual activity with practice, are certainly not sunny on the surface, but there is still before us the formidable, albeit posthumous, instance of Stuart Hall—an always-bracing presence, at all times combining a gravity in his analyses with an un -stoppable willingness to be up for the next battle, even as he was engaged in what seemed like two or three other concurrent battles as he was speaking or writing (and these included poor health, barely mentioned by him, involving long-term dialysis and an eventual kidney transplant, in the two decades before his death). I was at Birmingham from 1972 to 1977 doing my PhD in philosophy and theology. On most days it was possible to see this stylish black man (the only one on the faculty as I recall)—usually wearing [End Page 136] an open-necked shirt and blue jeans, with a sports jacket reserved for cooler days—walk across the main quad between the Muirhead Tower and the faculty common room.1 Hall was director of the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, whose remit was a source of puzzlement for those of us chained intellectually, and mostly unknowingly so, to the seminar tables of more traditional departments. “What do they do there?” some of us asked, a question to which even our fellow PhD students in English, naïvely presumed by the questioner to be interested in “culture,” seemed not to have an answer. In time this questioner got a vague sense that “they” worked on topics usually ignored by the academic mainstream, using a distinctive pedagogy involving team-based research and working groups. Hall had a reputation, which transcended departmental boundaries, as a rivetingly charismatic lecturer, and he did give the occasional open lecture, a couple of which I attended. But at that point in my intellectual formation, with a first degree in analytical philosophy, plodding now with a zig-zagging passion through a narrowly focused dissertation on the ontological argument for the existence of God using the semantics of modal logic, I had no real reference points for engaging with the intellectual agendas associated with Hall, even though I was in complete agreement with the essence of his politics. Toward the end of my time at Birmingham, as a respite from reading (ah, that endless bibliography!) Quine, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Richard Montague, Alvin Plantinga, Richmond Thomason, Nino B. Cocchiarella, Richard Routley (who changed his name to Richard Sylvan when he abandoned quantified modal logic for environmental philosophy), Jaakko Hintikka, Stig Kanger (a pioneering modal logician in his 50s from Helsinki who gave a talk to our philosophy department; he was a very dignified grandfatherly figure with shoulder-length gray hair, dressed in what looked like a pale blue spacesuit with boots of the same color, a veritable prefiguration of Gary Numen and Devo in the post-punk movement of a decade later—did they know that a great Finnish logician was their precursor in fashion?), and others, I read with absolute fascination Adorno’s Minima Moralia and Martin Jay’s intellectual history of the early Frankfurt School at the instigation of Rex Ambler, the much-loved but at times bewilderingly eclectic Quaker theologian in Birmingham’s theology department. [End Page 137] A...

Is Populism an Ideology? A Refutation and a New Perspective

The dominant theoretical paradigm originating in the work of Cas Mudde conceives of populism as a thin-centered ideology that focuses on the antagonism between people and elites against the backdrop of popular sovereignty. While this framework has contributed significantly to an improved scientific analysis of populism, it is argued in this article that its ideological connotations are ill-conceived both conceptually and methodologically, and that its normative implications and failure to acknowledge the graded nature of populist behavior hinder the further evolution of the field of populism studies. Combining insights from the work of Ernesto Laclau and the proponents of frame theory, the article suggests dropping the ideological clause and simply conceiving populism as a discursive frame. The article contends that frame analysis reveals a strong fit between discursive elements and cognitive features of populism, furnishing solid methodological foundations to conduct empirical research and encouraging cooperation with neighboring fields of social science.

AS CULTURAS POPULARES NAS POLÍTICAS CULTURAIS: UMA DISPUTA DE SENTIDOS

O objetivo deste artigo é compreender os usos da noção de “cultura popular” presente nos documentos do Ministério da Cultura (MinC) no governo Lula. Tal recorte se impõe quando se constata que, a partir de 2003, a defesa e a promoção das culturas populares se fazem por meio de novas questões e de uma ampliação conceitual que envolve o patrimônio (material e imaterial), as identidades (no plural) e a diversidade cultural brasileira. A pesquisa documental bem como depoimentos de agentes envolvidos no processo compõem o corpus, para cuja análise utilizamos, principalmente, o aporte teórico de Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe.