Paula Lezama

Paula Lezama is a doctoral student of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She holds an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of South Florida, and a BA in Economics from Universidad del Valle, Colombia. Following Sylvia Wynter, she understands uneven geographical and economic progress as well as the untimely death and the production of humans as waste, or what Wynter calls the archipelagos of the dyselected, as the product of racial capitalism. These populations are always already outside the community of Man, understanding Man in its current Homo Economicus version, as the Western onto-epistemological archetype of the human against which all others are cast as inferior, irrational, unproductive, and incapable of adapting to Western modernity. Under homo economicus libidinal reign, instead of the whip, Black fungibility is actualized by Adam Smith’s hidden hand. Thus, her interest in tracing the convergence of Blackness, Poverty, and Homo Economicus in the Longue durée.