Introduction: Cultural activisms in Latin America in the 21st century. Practices, actors, legacies

Abstract

The German origin of the term “activism” is often recalled,  and the emergence of this term, at least in its current sense, barely a century ago. The term “Aktivismus” (Baumeister in Raunig, 2004) was a movement linked to the figure of Kurt Hiller and the expressionist political and  literary journal Die Aktion, edited by Franz Pfemfert and founded in 1911. The term then became widespread and  was no longer limited to this particular movement. Gerald Raunig recalls Walter Benjamin's criticism of the left-wing  intellectuals of his time - among whom he counted “activists” in the strict sense - in a famous speech in 1934, “The Author as Producer”. He objected to the separation or specialization of ‘men of mind’, who intended to  accompany the demands of the proletariat (Benjamin, 2004, p. 33) from a place separate from it. This highlights the lines of tension between the different ways of relating art and radical politics that marked the course of the twentieth  century, and that animate debates about the role of the engaged intellectual, the organic intellectual and the revolutionary intellectual up to the 1960s and 1970s (Gilman, 2004). This polarity also underlies the differentiation between the terms “activist art” and “activist art”, in which the very categories of artist, work, author and audience are redefined. Through a journey of ten concrete experiences, we propose to rethink these questions in the light of the challenges of the present, in the context of the social movements that mark the twenty-first century in Latin/s America/s, with the emergence of new actors and modes of organisation: student, feminist and transfeminist, LGBTI, “landless”, Zapatista, environmental, Afro-descendant, indigenous, migrant and undocumented movements, human rights groups.