Hunting Family Faculty Fellow
About
“Afterlives of Revolution: Political Attachments in Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua”
The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which once led Nicaragua’s Marxist-inspired Sandinista Popular Revolution (1979-1990), returned to power in 2007, leaving behind its traditional red and black aesthetics and adopting a fuchsia pink palette. This symbolic shift represented a deeper transformation of the Sandinista project, now embracing Christian idioms of prosperity and salvation, adopting “family values,” and forming alliances with old adversaries, including the economic elites and religious leaders who had once vehemently opposed the revolution. Alongside these new partnerships, the FSLN government kept minimum wages at record lows, opened Nicaragua to new extractivist industries, implemented a complete ban on abortion, and criminalized labor strikes and demonstrations in the name of peace and stability. Building on eight years of archival and field research between 2014 and 2021, this book traces the striking transformations of Nicaragua’s revolutionary left tradition and its efforts to re-enliven political passions and popular support in a context where it could no longer promise lasting structural changes. Drawing on scholarship in feminist and queer theory, I argue that to understand political attachments to Sandinismo in this new context, we must consider the underlying economy of affects that undergirds them, and the discursive, material, and aesthetic forms through which they circulate.
Luciana Chamorro is an Assisstant Professor of Anthropology.
