The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas ed. by Federico Luisetti, John Pickles, Wilson Kaiser (review)

Book Reviews archiving the stories of Latin American women through the mediums of TV, radio, and theatre. In her essay “Echoes of Injustice,” on “artistic activism,” theatre scholar and director Christina Marı́n explains how, through plays that deal with the topic of femicide “we actively bear witness . . . and denounce the impunity that plagues Ciudad Juárez” (186). By encouraging the spectators to critically reflect, she asserts that theatre productions such as these can be a source of education for performers and spectators alike. The focus of Part III is on recording the stories of organizers themselves, highlighting the formation of their “oppositional consciousness,” a term coined by Chicana feminist scholar Chela Sandoval. Similar to Marı́n, part of what draws anthropologist Erica Lorraine Williams to her research on Brazilian sex workers is inspired by personal experience, namely the fact that each author could be and, in Williams’s case, actually was, mistaken for one of the subjects of their research. In turn, in “Feminist Tensions,” Williams explores how “my racialized and gendered body was implicated in the context of my research in multiple and shifting ways-from being seen as a sexually available Brazilian woman by Italian tourists, to a sexually available negringa (foreign black woman) by caca-gringas (Bahian male hustlers,) and even to my political identities of being a sex worker rights advocate,” revealing that for many women academics of color, “taking risks” in their research is not a choice (216). The strength of this volume lies in the intersection of fascinating case studies on contemporary feminist activism in the Americas with ample conversation about feminist methodological practices. As Shelly Grabe elucidates in her article “Rural feminism and Revolution in Nicaragua,” “I entered into these relationships with no formal training in feminism and rather, became a student of activists who have devoted their lives to social change. In doing so, I learned a women of color, decolonial, rural feminism that largely influences most of the work I do today” (284). Each author argues for the importance of self-reflexivity in research and models feminist activist methodology as a commitment to justice. This reflection of methodological practices can be highly useful for graduate students, junior and more senior scholars who want to ensure that their research is accountable to and useful for the communities that they study. Lucinda Grinnell Women’s and Gender Studies Program Montgomery College THE ANOMIE OF THE EARTH: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND AUTONOMY IN EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS. Federico Luisetti, John Pickles, and Wilson Kaiser (eds.). Durham and London: Duke UP, 2015, p. 260, $24.95. Luisetti, Pickles, and Kaiser have put together a provocative collection of essays determined to identify and theorize an emerging anomic 305 The Latin Americanist, June 2016 response to the neoliberal and globalizing tendencies of contemporary politics. The essays engage social and political movements like the Zapatistas, decolonial movements in South America, and Occupy in the US through an interestingly Western frame that includes Italian autonomism and Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth. The resulting conversation explores and preserves the tensions inherent in challenging European hegemonic structures in non-European spaces using European categories. The anomie of the title derives from the project’s engagement with Schmitt’s “second nomos,” that is, the submersion of the newly “discovered ” world by Europeans beginning in the seventeenth century. As Walter Mignolo notes in his excellent foreword, the multiple nomoi of the “new” world were redefined in Schmitt’s second Western one through physical and cultural violence. Anomie points to ongoing efforts of resistance movements to shake off this second nomos and replace it with anomic, localized cultural and intellectual practices. Italian autonomism offers an approach, as Joost de Bloois argues here, by articulating a savage anthropology that opens up the idea of autonomy itself to the possibility of different and counterhegemonic nomoi. Several of the essays here suggest that these nomoi, local and self-generating, emerge from lives lived in real spaces and in resistance to the definitions of hegemonic others. Geographies, commons, and forms of life serve as the contexts in which the targets—neoliberalism, capitalism and state power—are challenged. The resistances themselves take the form of reclamations. The...