Abstract

The thesis maps aspects of the Sandinista nation-building project subsequent to the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. Part one charts the broad discursive and institutional terms of the articulation of this project, drawing on a large body of literature on Sandinismo, and integrating this analysis from secondary sources with discourse analysis and a consideration of the deployment of power/knowledge. Part Two uses like methods in considering aspects of the national literacy campaign mounted in 1980. The critical positioning of the thesis is informed by an account of the experience of the most marginalized of campesino ("peasant") sectors in the context of the Sandinista development and agrarian reform projects. These projects prioritized modernized production, and not the redistribution of lands for small-unit production which was widely desired. For several reasons, campesino aspirations should have been accommodated to a much greater degree. The thesis considers why this failed to happen. Part One of the thesis finds that, despite the heterogeneity of Sandinismo, it was articulated in significant part within corporativist structures of political representation and by way of modernist, Marxist-inflected knowledges and discourses positing a historical "logic of necessity" and a necessary order of change--including a certain knowledge of "development/historical unfolding" and a knowledge of subjectivity articulated in dichotomous and Manichean terms. Part Two of the thesis finds that the tight articulation of the literacy campaign to the Sandinista development and social project proved problematic, that a predominant literacy campaign discourse constructed marginal rural inhabitants in terms of lack, that this articulates to the knowledge systems charted in Part One of the thesis, and that the specificities of a structured "dialogue" process by way of which rural recipients of literacy instruction were to participate in the articulation of Sandinismo constrained and shaped what might be spoken. The thesis analysis is suggestive of factors contributing to a conjunctural shift in the terms of popular identification and social movement practice in the late twentieth century.