The Global Circulation of Dependency Theories. Construction (and Decay) of Latin America as “Third World”
Clara Ruvituso (FU Berlin)
Abstract
The dependency theories configured the Latin American approach to the social sciences with the greatest transregional circulation in both the south-south and south-north directions and became – until the end of the eighties – a relevant argumentative support for the left at a global level. The two central breaks shaping the long-term transregional epistemological and political impact of dependency theories had to do with the construction of an idea of Latin America outside the teleological horizon of both classical liberalism and Marxism and, in parallel, as more historically aligned as a periphery with the other regions of the Third World than with Europe.
The proposal of my presentation is to reconstruct the main arguments of the dependency theories that fed the construction (and decline) of Latin America as a part of the Third World, taking into account the institutional and political contexts of production explaining the global circulation of dependency theories, with a special consideration of the reception in the Federal Republic of Germany during the Cold War.
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About the Speaker
Clara Ruvituso is researcher at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin and Postdoctoral Investigator in Mecila, where she coordinates the Research Area “Medialities of Conviviality”. Her doctoral thesis analyzed the controversial reception of Martin Heidegger in Argentina. Currently, she focuses on a much less researched direction of the circulation of knowledge: from south to north. Clara’s main research interest in the framework of conviviality concerns the analysis of inequalities, entanglements and transformations in the production and transregional circulation of Southern Theories. In her project at Mecila, she analyses the circulation of Latin American dependency theories in France and Germany, comparing processes of translation, appropriation, modification and exchanges within structures marked by inequality and difference.
Clara is a sociologist from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and obtained her PhD in Political Science from the Universität Rostock within the framework of the DFG-Graduate School “Cultural Encounters and Discourses of Scholarship”. Until August 2020, she was lecturer and researcher at the Universität Rostock in Political Sciences (2013-2018) and at the Freie Universität Berlin in Sociology (2019-2020). She was a visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3).