The study of capitalism has recently re-emerged as a critical focus in a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Yet this re-emergence is itself marked by the unequal and uneven development of global capitalism. Popular challenges to crisis-driven restructuring have flourished throughout the globe, from Maoist revolt in central India, to student agitation in Argentina, to los indignados in Spain, to near civil war in Greece, to protest against education restructuring in Mexico, to the claims of undocumented migrants across the Americas. Yet at the same time, the New York Times hails the turn in U.S. history departments from the study of “women, minorities, and other marginalized people” to the study of “bosses, bankers, and brokers who run the economy” (April 6, 2013). Thus, as is often the case with intellectual trends in the global north, and specifically in the U.S., perspectives from the global south have been eclipsed or marginalized. To counter this trend, the Tepoztlán Institute takes as its theme for its 2014 annual conference perspectives from the global south on the deep histories and ongoing, uneven developments of global capitalism.

We seek work from scholars and activists on capitalism as a world system whose transnational dynamics are also granular and local; as a political economic formation that reaches back to the 15th century and speculates upon the future; as a regime of power with which the women, minorities, and other marginalized people have long struggled, collaborated, compromised, improvised, and evaded. We encourage work that elaborates, undoes, or otherwise pushes past critical commonplaces that crowd debate in the global north, such as “neoliberalism,” “globalization,” “citizenship,” and “equal rights.” We welcome direct engagement with traditions and innovations in critical thought that has emerged from the global south--from the colonial period to the present--as the rise of capitalism finds its deep roots in European colonialisms in the Americas.

As the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational Histories of the Americas enters its second decade, we also plan to revisit the category of the transnational itself in light of current studies of and movements within global capitalism. In the wake of recent financial crises, the rise of a so-called “left-wing” governments in Latin America, the continuing corporatization of universities, and the market orientation of cultural and intellectual production, we hope to engage lively discussions of how transnational phenomena function as agents or outcomes of, as well as critical challenges to, capitalism.