This dissertation explores the renewed historical significance of the (geo)political demand to redraft national constitutions in the Americas. Building on previous work, my dissertation constructs a transnational lens to underline the intersectionality of the social struggles that catalyzed the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly process begun in 1999 and the Ecuadorian experience during 2007-2008: the first and the last processes behind what has been studied under the rubric of Latin American “neoconstitutionalism,” which I argue must be analyzed in relation to a broader postcolonial genealogy of constitution-making and grassroots organization. My historical-comparative approach points to the dual objective of documenting the contentious (geo)politics surrounding the last Venezuelan and Ecuadorian constituent assembly experiences (their origins and aftermath) while deconstructing (mis)representations of contemporary Latin/x American politics. By dismissing these experiences as simple power grab mechanisms of charismatic or populist caudillos, some accounts of contemporary (geo)politics in the region end up portraying Latin/x Americans as passive masses unfit for democratic and/or revolutionary institutional innovation. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on different forms of (counter)cultural production related to grassroots organization and mobilization that resulted in, and were further catalyzed by, the ongoing demand to redraft national constitutions across Latin America. My research design, focusing on the praxis of organized subaltern subjects that have played a key role in articulating the demand to convene participatory constituent assemblies and invoke the resulting constitutions in their cultural production, seeks to theorize the subaltern subjectivities at play on the redefinition of modern Latin American nations and states in the 21st century. This objective led me to identify crucial conflicts that emerged during the last Venezuelan and Ecuadorian Constituent Assemblies and informed my initial coding of primary documents such as transcripts of constituent assemblies’ debates as well as the sampling for interviews with elected representatives and other key (geo)political actors, particularly Afro-Amerindian and migrant women. In the aftermath of these processes, I have been able to develop a series of ethnographic engagements in social spaces that highlight the importance of considering the role that expressive cultures continue to play in these constituent processes. I show how the importance of expressive (counter)cultures is particularly salient in the Venezuelan case. The historical scope delineated by these national cases contributes to the analysis and theorization of power relations that characterize neoliberal (geo)politics across the Americas. In this vein, the in-depth accounts of the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian constituent assemblies are contextualized by referencing two “negative” cases where the demands to redraft national constitutions have been blocked by political elites (Chile and Honduras) as well as the experience of Bolivia where the redrafting of the national Constitution (2006-2009) was met with violent opposition. Relying on secondary sources to reference these complementary cases, this dissertation contrasts the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian constituent processes on three different levels ripe for comparative analysis: 1) between nationalities and nation-states, 2) between postcolonial/modern nation-state actors and transnational subaltern subjects, and 3) between the embodied experiences of citizens and non-citizens. More than assessing the institutional capacity or the extent of revolutionary transformation of the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian states as a result of these constitution-making processes, this dissertation explores the effects these processes have had in the revolutionary imagination forged by transnational organizations and mobilization of Afro-Amerindian social movements and human rights activists focused on queer and feminist struggles. Ultimately this dissertation maps the transnational circulation of (geo)political projects calling for the refounding of the nation and the reinstitutionalization of the state as mechanisms to address postcolonial inequalities. In other words, it constitutes a (geo)political (auto)ethnography (Pratt, 1991, 1992) of the challenge to reimagine the modern nation-state in 21st century Latin America by focusing on the performative gesture of convening participatory constituent assemblies in Venezuela (1999) and Ecuador (2008-2009) so as to explore the renewed historical significance of the right to “freedom of assembly” (Butler, 2013, 2015; Osterweil, 2015) and contemporary enactments of renewed forms of postcolonial (trans)nationalism.

Last modified

• 03/26/2018

Creator

• Ricardo Daniel Sánchez Cárdenas

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2J39X

Subject

• Sociology

Keyword

• Venezuela
• revolution
• Ecuador
• postcolonial constitutionalism
• constituent power
• democratization

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright