Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
Abstract
Three decades of epistemological “revolutions” in the humanities and the social sciences seem to have spared no 19th-century concept. The very idea of Latin America, however, remains uncontested, firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and racial meanings. But Latin America has never designated a geographically or historically tangible reality with any empirical or conceptual rigor. The book is, first, a conceptual history of the term “Latin America” in its natural historical habitat --mid-19th-century re-definitions of empire and the cultural, political, and economic interactions among ... More
Three decades of epistemological “revolutions” in the humanities and the social sciences seem to have spared no 19th-century concept. The very idea of Latin America, however, remains uncontested, firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and racial meanings. But Latin America has never designated a geographically or historically tangible reality with any empirical or conceptual rigor. The book is, first, a conceptual history of the term “Latin America” in its natural historical habitat --mid-19th-century re-definitions of empire and the cultural, political, and economic interactions among intellectuals in the Spanish-, Portuguese-, French-, Catalan-, English-, German-, and Italian-speaking worlds. Second, the book constitutes a critique of the most powerful form of current “Latin Americanism,” namely, that which circulates in U.S.-based humanities and social sciences. Finally, the book advances a detailed proposal of what to do today with a seemingly inalienable term in the writing and teaching of history.
Keywords:
Latin America,
history,
European history,
Latino/a history,
intellectual history,
humanities,
education,
political philosophy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226443065 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2017 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226443232.001.0001 |
