220206 Rethinking the Popular: Theories on Cultural Politics and Populism in the Americas (K) (SoSe 2025)

With Trump, Bolsonaro and Milei, the word populism is currently on everyone's lips. The aim of this course is to explore the meanings of populism and the popular in the Americas in their historical depth and conceptual breadth. This includes not only political populism, but also various popular cultures. We will critically discuss the main theories that address the elusive concept of the popular. In particular, the seminar reviews the notion of popular culture(s) and its relationship with different social and political phenomena that occur in diverse societies located in the Americas. Contrary to those romantic and essentialist visions that conceptualize popular culture as homogeneous, static and rejectable, the seminar conceives popular culture as a set of relational, heterogeneous, subaltern and contradictory practices and processes that are both effect and result of a cultural domain and a version opposed to literate and official culture. In order to understand popular culture(s), the seminar proposes to insert it in the broad framework of a hegemonic culture, the struggles, negotiations, exchange systems, consumption and historical transformations that shape it.

Literaturangaben

Bibliography

Alabarces, Pablo. 2020. Pospopulares: Las Culturas Populares Después de La Hibridación. CALAS-Afrontar Las Crisis. Alemania: Bielefeld University Press.

Breaugh, Martin. 2013. The Plebeian Experience. A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom. The United States of America: Columbia University Press.

Ginzburg, Carlo. 2013. The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Edition with new preface. The United States of America: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Remedi, Gustavo, Andrea Carriquiri, and García Javier. 2019. “La Esfera Pública Plebeya En América Latina: Prácticas Subalternas, Significaciones, Usos.” Revista de Encuentros Latinoamericanos III (July): 2–9. https://doi.org/ISSN1688-437X.

Thompson, E.P. 1974. “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture.” Journal of Social History 7, No 4: 382–405. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3786463.