...reclaim

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...reclaim, reclaim, reclaim writing, thinking, discussion and learning, all that is open, and fashioned by historicity, and confronts contingency.

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'Venezuela Undercover'. What the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent left behind

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Campbell and Davis render chavismo banal, reducing it to the recklessness of Chavez’s charisma and people’s adoration of a now dead leader. Foreign Correspondent disappoints with ‘Venezuela Undercover’. A good-looking but trivial piece of ‘investigative journalism’. The 30-minute documentary by reporter Eric Campbell and producer Mike Davis, begins by asserting that Venezuela is, today, a ‘disaster’. Though very little in the documentary is offered that might allow the viewer to understand why ‘Venezuela is a disaster’. The imagery of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, looks colourful and striking on screen, but the material accompanies a formulaic narration. Caracas is either manic and dangerous or a stagnant and politically depressed city. The assumption that Campbell or Davis are capable of reporting on Venezuela is naïve. That they should report on Venezuela is arrogant. Beyond Campbell’s statements on ‘populism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘oil wealth’, very little is said beyond a reference t...
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On Temporality & Life Critique

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A comment on a footnote in one of Fernando Coronil  very last articles, "The Future in Question:  History and Utopia in Latin America (1989-2010)".  Coronil  observes in a footnote to R. Koselleck's work that "Scholars have shown that conceptions of history and cultural cosmologies are intimately connected to each other and are historically specific" (288). In the piece Coronil found it necessary to discuss to a certain extent the question of the future, or rather, to be more precise, the issue of a "present-day future imaginary" (232). His discussion looks in particular at how the the "turn to the Left" in Latin America has been linked to new contemporary imaginaries for a future envisioned from the state. The point Coronil is making is simple. He means to say that the cultural category of the future that Latin Americans work with, serving as a basic understanding of temporality, would have some kind of historically specific cosmologic...
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Hard to be be Left in Venezuela

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It's already quite hard to be Left in Venezuela given that much of what is debated strictly follows what Chávez' Government/Party puts forward. But something that makes it even harder to back, support, criticise and debate with peers and  compañeros within our Left Government, is the quantity of entirely apologetic stuff put forward and written by supporters within the country and beyond its borders.  Solidarity is a tricky thing. On this point, see the latest in the 'solidarity genre' by the likes of Federico Fuentes in the Australian  Green Left Weekly here .  To respond to this would involve articulating the logic and limits of solidarity. How does one do solidarity? Solidarity with whom? How does your solidarity 'over there' engage with our struggles over here...  The point is that so much that would have to be acknowledged and questioned, is simply too intricate to be voiced in the work of solidarity, due to the way in which we usually carry out th...
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