The Pink Tide: Strategy and Socialist State Power
Instructor: Nara Roberta Silva
This is an online course.
Before the rise of Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, and Bernie Sanders, there was the “Pink Tide”—a wave of electoral victories that brought to power, in the early 2000s, left-wing governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, and elsewhere throughout Latin America. Emerging from a decade of indigenous democratic struggle, and openly rejecting the so-called Washington Consensus, the governments of the Pink Tide set about enacting an egalitarian agenda aimed at reducing inequality, socializing essential services, ending malnutrition, and bolstering indigenous, women’s, and LGBTQ rights. In the ensuing years, Pink Tide countries saw substantial economic growth coupled with decreases in inequality and poverty—as well as increases in public health, literacy, and popular political participation. Yet, by 2016, the Tide was said, particularly in the English-speaking press, to have “ebbed’; and today, revanchist right-wing governments preside in Brazil and Bolivia. How can we understand the rise and apparent decline of the Pink Tide? And, what lessons does it hold for activists and organizers, and for socialist politics, today?
In this course, we will consider the origins, context, policies, struggles, and complicated legacy of the Pink Tide, examining in particular the cases of Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela. We’ll seek to understand the Pink Tide as a multifaceted period of transformation, and situate it within the 21st-century international order. How did global geopolitical arrangements, particularly U.S. hegemony, affect the Pink Tide’s trajectory, and how, in turn, did progressive Latin American governments shape geopolitics? What are we to make of the Pink Tide’s success—and failures? And what, in the Pink Tide’s wake, is the future of socialist governance, both in Latin America and beyond?
Course Schedule
Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm EST
September 17 — October 08, 2020
4 weeks
$315.00
Nara Roberta Silva
Nara Roberta Silva earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil. She currently teaches at Lehman College – CUNY and has been a visiting research scholar at the Department of Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests are two-fold: Nara studies social movements, with a special interest in contemporary movements espousing forms of participatory democracy; as well as the links between classical and contemporary sociological theory to illuminate issues on race, class, and gender that inform political action and the making of subjectivity. Nara is also an academic advisor and writer at the Brazilian Foundation, where she assists students with a Brazilian background navigate the US educational environment.
Registration Open.
Link / enlace: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/latin-americas-pink-tide/
