Turning Hegemony On Its Head: The Insurgent Knowledge of Américo Paredes

We argue that Paredes pioneered a new approach to intellectual work through his labors as a scholar-activist, especially through his deployment of what Michel Foucault would subsequently call insurgent knowledge. He explored the dynamics of domination and resistance as they actually happen in history: in particular places and particular times in particular contexts. Paredes recognized the political significance of the dialogic dimensions of expressive culture; the power of discourse and ideology in social relations; the subversive potential of humor; and the composite, conflicted, and contradictory nature of social identities. Perhaps most important, his work illuminates the richly generative scholarly significance of local vernacular knowledge. Paredes showed how the experiences, injuries, and aspirations of aggrieved communities can become encoded in seemingly simple and ordinary stories and songs. He demonstrated how folklore functions as a social and political force, as a repository of collective memory, a site of moral instruction, and a mechanism for bringing communities into being through performance. Paredes drew upon the survival strategies of one aggrieved people to fashion epistemological grounding for important new forms of critical and activist scholarship.