How Do We Think of Social Diversity: A Discussion between Luis Tapia, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Bruno Bosteels

Today's call for diversity in the United States quite often reduces itself to body counts. René Zavaleta Mercado (1937-1984) confronted the question of respecting diversity in the analysis of social reality in the twentieth century. Luis Tapia’s Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia, now translated into English for the first time, confronts this question not only in terms of mere inclusion and exclusion but in terms of a "motley" social situation, devising methodology to represent its demand. It is time that we in the United States take this text out of its silo and use it to think diversity beyond the inevitably hierarchized "intersection" model.

Luis Tapia, an imaginative activist, is the best expert on Zavaleta we have. In his book, The Production of Local Knowledge: History and Politics in the Work of René Zavaleta Mercado, also translated into English for the first time, he lays out an epistemological program to make Zavaleta's injunctions real. How do we have to change ourselves so that the idea of a "motley" society does not turn into voting blocs, destroying democracy?

Books will be made available for purchase by Labyrinth Books at the event.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications (OWNER)

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