In Latin America in Debate, eminent Argentine social theorist, novelist, and activist Maristella Svampa provides a broad and accessible overview of the key political and intellectual debates in Latin America from the early twentieth century to the present. She examines four main topics: the place of indigenous peoples in postcolonial nation-states; the impact of development on the Latin American political imagination; the impact of being economically dependent within a global capitalist order; and the turn to populism as a particular political response to these various challenges. Svampa traces each debate’s genealogy, contextualizes them over the course of the twentieth century, and demonstrates how intellectual and sociological currents have redefined and reshaped them in the twenty-first. Svampa also maps the tensions in each and shows how they influence contemporary Latin American politics. By focusing on indigeneity, development, dependency, and populism, Svampa provides a clear entry point to understand the most pressing issues confronting Latin America while showcasing how the region’s intellectuals have been thinking about and debating these issues in ways that generate social theory with global implications.

Maristella Svampa is Senior Researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas de Argentina and the author of Neo-Extractivism in Latin America and numerous other books.

Alejandro Reyes is a freelance writer, translator, and editor and the author of several books in Spanish.

Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction  1
Part I. Latin American Debates and History
1. The Debate on the Indigenous and Indianidad  15
2. Between the Obsession with Development and Its Critique  87
3. Dependency as an Organizing Axis  125
4. Populisms, Politics, and Democracy  177
Part II. Scenarios, Contemporary Debates, and Disputed Categories
Introduction to Part II.  217
5. The Ways of Indianismo: The Debate on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples  221
6. Debates on Development  247
7. Dependency as a “Compass”  273
8. Twenty-First-Century Populisms  301
Final Reflections  329
Notes  343
References  353
Index  387