#birkbeckvoices

This is the third session of J. Beverley’s Masterclass organised by the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS) during Birkbeck’s Arts Week, May 2017. John Beverley is Distinguished Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. That the conjunction of postcolonial struggle and structuralism in the 1960s produces a kind of earthquake in academic knowledge and institutions, particularly in the domain of what the French call the human sciences. The shock effect of that earthquake may be named for sake of convenience "theory," and the disciplinary outcome of theory “studies" (cultural, postcolonial, queer, women's, Africana, Atlantic, global, global Pacific, etc.). The core issue is the relation of culture and politics, or to use Raymond Williams' term "cultural materialism". As the revolutionary vanguardist political formations of the 1960s, epitomized by the armed struggle in Latin America, collapse or are defeated, theory and studies nourish and in