Today's call for diversity in the United States quite often reduces itself to body counts. René Zavaleta Mercado (1937-1984) confronted the question of respecting diversity in the analysis of social reality in the twentieth century. Luis Tapia’s “Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia,” now translated into English for the first time, confronts this question not only in terms of mere inclusion and exclusion but in terms of a “motley” social situation, devising methodology to represent its demand. It is time that we in the United States take this text out of its silo and use it to think diversity beyond the inevitably hierarchized “intersection” model. 

Speakers:

• Luis Tapia, CIDES, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University
• Bruno Bosteels, Columbia University