Culture and the Collective Consciousness: Nelly Richard and Crítica Cultural

French born but Chilean based, Nelly Richard is an influential figure within contemporary Latin American cultural studies, though she has often taken issue with the use of this term to describe her work. A leading proponent of psychoanalytical and feminist understandings of the social, Richard, editor of the Revista de Crítica Cultural between 1990 and 2008, is an innovative thinker responsible for creating a way of approaching cultural analysis which has been dubbed crítica cultural. Her conceptual framework privileges theoretical insights gleaned from structuralism, which in French includes what is commonly referred to in the Anglo academy as post structuralism. Our discussion of her work focuses on her vision of the role of the social sciences in Latin America today. Richard questions the conceptual underpinning of these disciplines and argues for a more thoroughly contextualised understanding of the relationship between knowledge production and power.

Richard, Nelly. “The Social Sciences: Front Lines and Points of Retreat”. In The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation and Poetics of the Crisis. London: Duke University Press, 2004.
Beasley-Murray, Jon. “Reflections in a Neoliberal Store Window: Nelly Richard and the Chilean Avant-garde”. Art Journal 64 (3): 126–129. PDF
Pino-Ojeda, Walescka. “Critica cultural y marginalidad: Una lectura al trabajo de Nelly Richard”. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Año 25, No. 49 (1999), pp. 249-263. PDF
Del Sarto, Ana “Cultural Critique in Latin America or Latin-American Cultural Studies?” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, Volume 9, Issue 3, 2000. PDF