Fronteras y periferias en la historia del capitalismo: el caso de América Latina

Abstract

Frontier lands and remote territories have usually been studied in the context of national histories, as part of the formation of nations and their "imagined communities". However, the history of margins and peripheries, as we understand them today, is more closely related to the history of capitalism. In this paper, my aim is to situate them in this context, in order to shed light to the fact that one of the most important spatial strategies for the expansion of capitalism has been the transformation (through a series of discursive and material practices) of many historical regions in the planet into "no man's lands": into spaces subjected to a regime of exception. This regime defines both the model of development they will have to adopt, and the manner in which they are to be articulated to the world economy. This paper explores the regions categorised as peripheral in Latin America from this perspective. In order to denaturalize them as margins and peripheries, the notions that constitute them (eg. as wild and deserted lands teeming with riches) will be explored, exposing their function in obscuring the logic and the brutal rationality of capitalist interventions.