Dialectics of authenticity

Architectural neo-populism in contemporary Latin America and strategies of global legitimisation

Abstract

This article examines the contemporary transformations of the Latin American architectural identity project, identifying a displacement from emancipatory pursuits toward forms of contemporary instrumentalization. Through a critical genealogy, it analyzes the emerging practices of a post-2010 generation that configure discursive narratives where categories of cultural resistance have been transmuted into devices of symbolic accumulation. The study articulates three analytical dimensions: the systematic inversion of critical regionalism categories (Frampton 1983); the mechanisms of authenticity production as commodity; and the operations of cultural difference neutralization through its global codification. The concept of 'architectural neopopulismo' is proposed to characterize practices based on rhetorics of local identity, social commitment, and sustainability. It reveals how how the modernity-tradition dialectic has become simulacrum where local specificity functions as communicative effect. Against this diagnosis, the notion of “americopolitanism” —derived from the concept of Afropolitanism (Mbembe 2021)— is outlined as a tactical category that assumes the multiple and contradictory condition of all contemporary identity, suggesting insurgent trajectories that operate from the interstices of cultural capitalism without seeking synthetic resolutions.