Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is professor emérita, of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in Bolivia. She has two honorary doctorates from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés and the Universidad Nacional de San Luis Argentina. She has authored more than 10 books, including Oppressed But Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles Among the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia, 1900–1980, published in English and Japanese. Her latest book is a collection of essays titled: Un mundo ch'ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis (2018).
The presentation will start with a brief account of popular struggles and mobilizations in modern Bolivia (1952-2005) and draw on concept of “micropolitics” to interpret the ways in which popular organizations express long term grievances, in a cyclical but continuous process of self/creation, and retain their long and short-term memories. The talk will also focus on the mutual and paradoxical relations between micropolitics and memory as well as micropolitics and politics.
Sponsored by Five College Symposium Fund, FCWSRC, CLACLS and WGSS at UMass, Smith College, and Amherst College