Postrevolutionary Affect and the Consolidation of Zionism: The Case of Mercedes Sosa

This essay traces the Zionist conversion of iconic revolutionary folk singer Mercedes Sosa to theorize the shifting forms of racial empire in the movement from the Dirty War to the War on Terror. I read Sosa’s story as emblematic of the thwarted revolutionary dreams of the late twentieth century and the subsequent forms of recolonization—and in this case Zionism as settler colonialism—that came to flourish in their stead. The arc of Sosa’s work spans the transitions of the epoch and their attendant affective economies: from the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s–1970s, to the deep sorrows of the early military regimes, to the infinite deferrals of justice that animated the neoliberal project. In closing, I examine solidarity responses to the 2014 attack on Gaza. Embodying the rejuvenation of joint decolonial struggle, they rupture the Zionist stronghold that has shaped dominant structures of feeling, overwhelmingly laying purchase on the popular imagination.