by Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Edited by Brian Whitener, Translated by JD Pluecker
Common Notions
8/13/2024, paperback
SKU: 9781945335112
The essential political and theoretical work of one of Latin America's most important contemporary theorists.
Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar is one of the foremost Latin American political thinkers. From armed Indigenous struggle in the Bolivian altiplano to the contemporary wave of feminist uprisings, Raquel Gutiérrez's life and work have spanned and spurred on some of the most important political sequences in the last forty years in Latin America.
Almost unknown in the United States, Raquel is one of the Latin American anticapitalist, antistate Left's most important contemporary theorists. She has produced important work on communal struggles and political forms and has been at the center of some of the most important political organizing in Bolivia and Mexico in the last forty years.
This volume presents an extensive interview with Raquel in which she charts her political and intellectual trajectory from her militancy in the Ejército Guerrillero Tupac-Katari, to Bolivia's famous Water and Gas wars, to the massive wave of popular feminist rebellions and organizing. Translator and writer, Brian Whitner offers two essays in translation that contain some of her central theoretical concepts, including the veto and reappropriation of communal wealth, for thinking a politics in common, and of the commons.
With the publication of In Defense of Common Life, a new audience of English-language readers can finally engage with the thought and political experience of a thinker and militant, whose contributions to social movements span an incredible political and regional breadth, and resonate deeply with current debates with the US about the conditions and practices of revolutionary change, feminism, and popular struggle.
Reviews:
"Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar is not only an innovative theorist but also an inspiring activist. This beautifully edited and translated volume charts her extraordinary political trajectory and presents some of her vital contributions to contemporary political and theoretical debates. With this English-language edition, new audiences will be able to benefit from her important work." -- Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies and coauthor of Bolivia Beyond the Impasse
"In Defense of Common Life is a magnificent introduction of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar's work to a wider audience. It crystallizes hard-won insights gleaned from four decades of political struggle in Latin America. She interrogates political organization, feminist praxis, and making-the essential social force that capital can never fully contain. To escape capitalism and stultifying definitions of revolution, she illuminates paths to imagine the world anew. Here is a text to wrestle with-- a gift in translation."
-- Christina Heatherton, author of Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution
About the Contributors:
Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar is an organizer who has participated in numerous struggles and uprisings in Latin America over the last four decades. From the civil wars in Central America in the 1980s to Indigenous uprisings in Bolivia, she has contributed to struggles both as an active participant and as a theorist of movement strategies, horizons and possibilities. After spending five years in prison in Bolivia, and energized by the Water War in Cochabamba, Gutiérrez Aguilar returned to Mexico in 2001. Since then, she has experimented working with and alongside women in multiple ways: in autonomous organizations, social centers, publishing projects, the academy and, most recently, via journalism with the digital weekly Ojala.mx.Gutiérrez.
Brian Whitener is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo and author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil, Face Down (Timeless Infinite Light, 2016), and The 90s. He is an editor of Border Abolition Now and Abolir ya: otra justicia es posible. Other writing or translation projects include De gente común: Arte, política y rebeldía social, edited with Lorena Méndez and Fernando Fuentes and the translations of Grupo de Arte Callejero: Thoughts, Actions, Practices and Genocide in the Neighborhood: State Violence, Popular Justice, and the 'Escrache'.
JD Pluecker works with language, that is, a living thing, a thing of life and history. Their undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Gore Capitalism and Antígona González, and forthcoming Writing with Caca by Luis Felipe Fabre and Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny. Their book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press, and in 2019 Lawndale Art Center supported the publication of the artist book, The Unsettlements: Dad.