GUEST SPEAKERS Luis Tapia, CIDES, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University Bruno Bosteels, Columbia University 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 Po
’ is an unusual book. It’s a fiercely and uncompromisingly critical attempt to reconfigure the terms of the existing debate on populism. Not only do you attempt to recover
populism from its staple association with the far-Right. But you also differentiate yourselves, and your argument, from seemingly like-minded theorists who do not accept that populism is an exclusively right-wing form of politics.
Instead, you boldly argue that populism is always radical and emancipatory – an anti-authoritarian force – and you suggest that what we call right-wing populism has none of these characteristics and belongs to a different universe, that of fascism. Arguing from a historical perspective, Federico Finchelstein reaches the opposite conclusion: that