Introduction: The Flesh of Justice in Latin America

The introduction to this special issue, “Subversive Religion and More-thanHuman Materialities in Latin America,” conceptualizes the transformative force of practices often gathered under the rubric of “popular religion,” including Indigenous, Black, and campesino ritual as well as vernacular Catholicism and Pentecostalism. Rather than treating these practices as manifesting an essential alterity to either the modern state or the “West,” we frame them as struggles to build a new world order both against and otherwise than frameworks. Exploring the materiality of these struggles across several dimensions—of the earth, of religious objects and rituals, and of the sovereign body—we describe the constitution of what we call the “flesh of justice” and probe its subversive effects. Drawing on the distinctive tradition of Latin American Marxism to contest the separation of the subaltern “otherwise” from the domain of modern politics, we offer two analytics for engaging with the flesh of justice in Latin America: subversive cosmopolitics and theopolitics.