Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes - Paperback

by Arturo Escobar (Author)

In Territories of Difference, Arturo Escobar, author of the widely debated book Encountering Development, analyzes the politics of difference enacted by specific place-based ethnic and environmental movements in the context of neoliberal globalization. His analysis is based on his many years of engagement with a group of Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia's Pacific rainforest region, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). Escobar offers a detailed ethnographic account of PCN's visions, strategies, and practices, and he chronicles and analyzes the movement's struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition. Yet he also does much more. Consistently emphasizing the value of local activist knowledge for both understanding and social action and drawing on multiple strands of critical scholarship, Escobar proposes new ways for scholars and activists to examine and apprehend the momentous, complex processes engulfing regions such as the Colombian Pacific today.

Escobar illuminates many interrelated dynamics, including the Colombian government's policies of development and pluralism that created conditions for the emergence of black and indigenous social movements and those movements' efforts to steer the region in particular directions. He examines attempts by capitalists to appropriate the rainforest and extract resources, by developers to set the region on the path of modernist progress, and by biologists and others to defend this incredibly rich biodiversity "hot-spot" from the most predatory activities of capitalists and developers. He also looks at the attempts of academics, activists, and intellectuals to understand all of these complicated processes. Territories of Difference is Escobar's effort to think with Afro-Colombian intellectual-activists who aim to move beyond the limits of Eurocentric paradigms as they confront the ravages of neoliberal globalization and seek to defend their place-based cultures and territories.

Back Jacket

This book invites us all into alternative projects of world-making. Never losing sight of the forces pushing back at us or the colonizing power of Western thinking, Arturo Escobar marshals an extraordinary array of intellectual resources and social networks to galvanize hopeful action. He grounds his honest yet truly inspiring vision in the place-based knowledge and global activism of his longstanding collaborators, the and resilient and resourceful Afro-Colombian activists of the Pacific region.--J. K. Gibson-Graham, authors of "A Postcapitalist Politics "and" The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy

""Arturo Escobar brings his signature commitments--a focus on the materiality of place, nature, and environmental politics, and a recognition of difference and the inescapable histories of coloniality--to an analysis of regional ecological and cultural struggles in Colombia. It is a singularly original contribution, both empirically and theoretically, which forces us to confront the real complexities of capitalism, identities, and political struggle. This book should be required reading for everyone interested in contemporary forms of globalization and economies, as well as the social movements organized against them."--Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Author Biography

Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Teaching Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, winner of the Best Book Award from the New England Council of Latin American Studies, and Más Allá del Tercer Mundo: Globalización y Diferencia. He is a co-editor of World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power; Women and the Politics of Place; The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires; and Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements.