The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: the Art of Organising Hope

The Radical Americas Network and UCL Institute of the Americas are pleased to invite you to the launch of ‘The Power of Autonomy in Latin America: the Art of Organising Hope’ by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (Bath).

’The Power of Autonomy in Latin America: the Art of Organising Hope’ offers a much-needed critical review of the concept an practice of autonomy. By establishing an elective affinity between autonomy and Bloch’s philosophy of hope, the book defines autonomy as ‘the art of organising hope’, that is, the art of shaping a reality which is not yet but can be anticipated by the movements’ collective actions. The politics of autonomy is the struggle that simultaneously negates, creates, deals with contradictions and, above all, produces an excess beyond demarcation that cannot be translated into the grammar of power. Reading Marx’s method in key of hope, the book offers a prefigurative critique of political economy and emphasises the prefigurative features of indigenous and non-indigenous autonomies at a time when utopia can no longer be objected.

Dr Ana Cecilia Dinerstein is a Political Sociologist with particular expertise in social and labour movements, autonomous organising, prefigurative politics and the politics of policy. More: http://www.bath.ac.uk/sps/staff/ana-dinerstein/

’The Power of Autonomy in Latin America: the Art of Organising Hope’ is published by Palgrave Macmillan.