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Does the extreme right also laugh and read? The global right from Brazil and Latin America

María Belén Díaz Armas

Information for students

Modulprüfung im MA Lateinamerikastudien (SPO 2023) (Profil B/C): Hausarbeit (ca. 15 Seiten)

Additional information / Pre-requisites

Seminarsprachen: Deutsch/Englisch/Spanisch/Portugiesisch

Comments

When we speak of “the right” it sometimes seems that we are referring to a monolith without faces. However, the accelerating events of recent times—from Bolsonaro’s mandate and Trump’s reelection to the triumph of Milei and the AfD—show that right-wing actors are heterogeneous and transform their strategies in a flexible manner. On the one hand, there are the movements, parties, think tanks, political figures and influencers who forge alliances and promote neoliberal, conservative and extreme projects. On the other hand, there are the people who vote, give likes, sympathize with certain ideas or start participating in organized right-wing spaces. The question that lies at the heart of this seminar is: Why has the right managed to be so successful? We will approach this complex topic through an interdisciplinary combination of theoretical discussion and empirical examination. Through the collective analysis of concrete cases from Latin America and the world, we will exercise our sociological imagination to understand and evaluate concepts such as the right and neoliberalism. We will also review disputes of meaning around the supposed “woke culture” and gender issues such as hegemonic masculinity or right-wing women. We will place particular emphasis on the Brazilian case of the last decade in order to understand, among others, how youth movements renewed strategies of interpellation through (digital) humor and “cool” political training. In methodological terms, we will learn to problematize the scales of analysis to develop intertwined lenses that overcome dichotomies between the local and the global. In addition, we will reflect on the methods and challenges to study the right, focusing on ethnographic approaches. close

Suggested reading

Blee, K. M. (1991). Women of the Klan: racism and gender in the 1920s. Berkeley; London: University of California Press. Rocha, C. (2021). Menos Marx, mais Mises: O liberalismo e a nova direita no Brasil. Sa~o Paulo: Todavia. Shoshan, N. (2015). Ma´s alla´ de la empati´a: La escritura etnogra´fica de lo desagradable. Nueva Antropologi´a, 28(83). Vommaro, G. (2023). Las derechas en Ame´rica Latina: De la democratizacio´n al fin del giro a la izquierda. In M. Barraga´n & S. Marti´ (Coords.), Ame´rica Latina: Democracias fra´giles y conflictividad (pp. 45–66). Valencia: Tirant Humanidades. close

Additional appointments

Wed, 2025-04-16 16:00 - 18:00