While sharing fundamental similarities with other colonial and postcolonial experiences, Latin America has a unique history of having been the proving ground for early Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects, of having experienced a relatively long duration of-but also historically early end to-these projects, and of negotiating a particular and complex trajectory of internal and external post-colonial relations. What can the study of this distinct colonial and post-colonial experience contribute to a broader program of postcolonial sociology? Conversely, what can a revitalized postcolonial sociology contribute to the study of Latin America? This article develops provisional answers to these questions by reviewing major currents in South and North American scholarship on the Latin American colonial and post-colonial experience. Some of this scholarship self-consciously identifies with broader movements in postcolonial studies; but much of it-both historical and contemporary-does not. By bringing together diverse strands of thought, this article sheds new light on what postcolonialism means in the Latin American context, while using the comparative leverage that this set of often overlooked cases provides to contribute to a new program of postcolonial sociology.

O Brasil foi um dos casos pioneiros na recepção internacional de Pierre Bourdieu, sociólogo que, desde a década de 1990, tornou-se um dos mais citados em todo o país. Essa questão é discutida articulando-se duas séries históricas: a produção e consagração da obra de Bourdieu a partir da França e a dinâmica da institucionalização das ciências sociais no Brasil. Desde o final dos anos de 1960, a circulação de pesquisadores brasileiros na França aumentou consideravelmente, e alguns deles se constituíram em importantes mediadores da recepção de Bourdieu no Brasil; suas trajetórias e os papéis desempenhados são avaliados neste artigo. Inicialmente recebido como um dos autores contemporâneos mais propensos à renovação teórica e metodológica das ciências sociais nas décadas de 1970/80, o autor seria instituído, a partir da década de 1990, como referência obrigatória, a despeito das resistências que suscitou.

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Architects of Austerity is a well-researched, clearly written, and convincingly argued book on the political history of international finance regulation of the post-WWII period. I don't think I exaggerate when I say that, with this book, Aaron Major establishes himself as a leading voice among analysts who, over the past decade or so, have done some serious rethinking of the common wisdom surrounding our understanding of this crucial period.This common wisdom looks something like this: the end of the Second World War coincides with the emergence of a new international regime broadly governed by a logic of "embedded liberalism." Unlike the gold standard regime and its focus on monetary stability at the expense of all else, under embedded liberalism new economic priorities become dominant, and among those priorities the primacy of growth and full employment over the need for stability takes pride of place. But for reasons having to do with the weak political will of the forces underlying this regime, the tension created by the Cold War and the rise and decline of US hegemony, and the contradictions of the regime itself, embedded liberalism falls apart under the weight of stagflation and international volatility, to be replaced surprisingly by a resurgent liberal doctrine. While neo-liberalism is not free of problems and contradictions, it acquires an uncontested, hegemonic status that to this day sets strict limits on the financial and fiscal autonomy of national governments. Neoliberalism underpins the current politics of austerity.In what ways is this common wisdom incorrect? Scholars from a variety of fields and approaches have taken issue with its lack of nuance: neoliberalism is surely dominant, but its rise has been uneven to say the least, and understanding the sources of this unevenness yields insight into the political processes that underlie it. Put differently, understanding neoliberalism as a reaction to the economic failure of embedded liberalism hides the institutional foundations of neoliberalism, and the identity and shape of the political constellations that have facilitated its diffusion. But ignoring those institutional foundations means implicitly accepting that neoliberal success is a function of its effectiveness as an economic solution. The search for institutional differences in the intensity, timing, and configuration of neoliberalism, in turn, has unearthed unexpected evidence about the political coalitions where important ideas that neoliberalism later appropriates come from (see in this respect Monica Prasad's book The Politics of Free Markets).Major's book joins this conversation by pointing not to national differences, but to institutional continuity at the international level in order to explain neoliberalism's resurgence. In fact, Major's argument is that classical liberalism never went away; rather, it constituted the ideological terrain of international financial institutions throughout the period of embedded liberalism, and exercised important constraints on national governments ...

<p>Na literatura recente em Ciências Sociais, o paradigma eurocêntrico da modernidade vem sofrendo ataques de diferentes naturezas. Buscando dialogar com parte dessa literatura crítica, este trabalho (parte de uma pesquisa de mestrado) tem por objetivos: revisar o núcleo articulador da concepção eurocêntrica de modernidade e as consequências dessa forma de teorização para a reflexão sobre as sociedades periféricas; apresentar os avanços fornecidos pela perspectiva das “múltiplas modernidades”; e, por fim, apontar os limites dessa perspectiva, a partir de outros discursos teóricos, sobretudo a partir de teorias Pós-Coloniais e da Teoria da Dependência. </p>

From the late 1970s until the early 1990s, the issue of the right to housing in São Paulo’s peripheral neighborhoods was pursued side by side with a questioning of the political character of design and construction techniques and an attempt to reframe the construction site as a space of cooperation and political education. This article addresses how this articulation between architects and urban social movements led to an innovation of organizational practices within those movements, transformations in the field of architecture, and the local emergence of the idea of the “right to architecture.”

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This article examines the question of how architects in São Paulo during the 1950s and 1960s addressed the political nature of their work, and more specifically the connections between their practice and the lives and politics of the urban poor in the context of a rapidly expanding metropolis of the Global South. More specifically, it assesses how they elaborated strategies to articulate the semiotic and material practices of Brutalism and the political repertoire of national developmentalism, initially in its democratic and later in its authoritarian form. The article argues that these architects deployed two semio-material strategies to operationalize the articulation between that political repertoire and the field of architecture: metaphorical indexicality and the impetus for the industrialization of construction. The image of the urban poor reinforced by that political repertoire was marked by a severe distance from their empirical life experiences, which deeply affected the practices of design and construction that progressive architects advanced.