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Presenting a new framework for understanding indigeneity and Indigenous peoples’ demands for territorial restitution

Asserting that the work of critical theory today must attend to an epistemic locality rather than the universalizing impulse of its European intellectual genealogy, Ethan Madarieta makes central to his study the literatures and philosophy of the Mapuche peoples of Wallmapu (comprising south-central regions of what are currently known as Chile and Argentina). In doing so, he argues that the primary site of settler and Indigenous antagonisms is not “land,” as is ubiquitously asserted, but the overlapping and incommensurate conceptual orders within which land and body are constituted and accrue meaning.

Land’s Language works to unsettle the stability and universality of how land and body are understood by calling into question what can or will be restored or returned and to whom. Drawing on Latin American and Mapuche historical, philosophical, and literary studies in dialogue with global critical theory and Anglophone critical Indigenous studies, this book demonstrates how Mapuche knowledge and thought, and that of each Indigenous nation across the planet, offer ways to live in ethical relation beyond that of the state and under the wider systemic hegemony of colonial racial capitalism.

First published in English in 1990 as Latin American Politics: A Theoretical Framework, a translation of Torcuato S. Di Tella's original Sociología de los procesos políticos, this new edition also focuses on the prerequisites for democracy in any society and on the role of the popular classes in social change. Di Tella draws on the work of Montesquieu, Burke, Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim in formulating his explanatory theories. These theories are then tested against crucial events in Latin American history—from the rebellions of the eighteenth century to the caudillos of the nineteenth century and the militarism of the twentieth century.

This edition is more attuned to an English-speaking audience, with a new chapter addressing the historical process in Argentina from the 1930s to 2000. Latin American Politics is written in a style easily accessible to the general reader or student, while its emphasis on the growth of democracy in Latin America makes it particularly timely.