Reinventing Modernity in Latin America

Reinventing Modernity in Latin America
Author: N. Miller
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2007-12-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230610102

This is an exploration of how Latin America developed an alternative modernity during the early twentieth century, one that challenges the key assumptions of the Western dominant model.

Decadent Modernity

Decadent Modernity
Author: Michela Coletta
Publisher: Liverpool Latin American Studi
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786941317

How did Latin Americans represent their own countries as modern? Through a comparative analysis of Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, the book investigates four themes that were central to definitions of Latin American modernity at the turn of the twentieth century: race, the autochthonous, education, and aesthetics.

La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina

La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina
Author: Cecilia Tossounian
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2019-12-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1683401255

In this book, Cecilia Tossounian reconstructs different representations of modern femininity from 1920s and 1930s Argentina, a complex period in which the country saw prosperity and economic crisis, a growing cosmopolitan population, the emergence of consumer culture, and the development of nationalism. Tossounian analyzes how these popular images of la joven moderna—the modern girl—helped shape Argentina’s emerging national identity. Tossounian looks at visual and written portrayals of young womanhood in magazines, newspapers, pulp fiction, advertisements, music, films, and other media. She identifies and discusses four new types of young urban women: the flapper, the worker, the sportswoman, and the beauty contestant. She shows that these diverse figures, defined by social class, highlight the tensions between gender, nation, and modernity in interwar Argentina. Arguing that images of modern young women symbolized fears of the country’s moral decadence as well as hopes of national progress and civilization, La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina reveals that women were at the center of a public debate about modernity and its consequences. This book highlights the important but underappreciated role of gendered figures and popular culture in the ways Argentine citizens imagined themselves and their country during a formative period of cultural and social renewal.

Transnational Perspectives on Latin America

Transnational Perspectives on Latin America
Author: Luis Roniger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197605311

Latin America is a region made up of multiple states with a diversity of races, ethnicities, and cultures. In 'Transnational Perspectives on Latin America', Luis Roniger argues that a regional perspective is significant for understanding this part of the Western hemisphere. He claims that geopolitical, sociological, and cultural trends molded a contiguity of influences, shaping a transnational arena of connected histories, cross-border interactions, and shared visions, complementing the process of separate nation-state formation.--

Transnational South America

Transnational South America
Author: Ori Preuss
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2016-01-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317435206

At the crossroad of intellectual, diplomatic, and cultural history, this book examines flows of information, men, and ideas between South American cities—mainly the port-capitals of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro—during the period of their modernization. The book reconstructs this largely overlooked trend toward connectedness both as an objective process and as an assemblage of visions and policies concentrating on diverse transnational practices such as translation, travel, public visits and conferences, the print press, cultural diplomacy, intertextuality, and institutional and personal contacts. Inspired by the entangled history approach and the spatial turn in the humanities, the book highlights the importance of cross-border exchanges within the South American continent. It thus offers a correction to two major traditions in the historiography of ideas and identities in modern Latin America: the predominance of the nation-state as the main unit of analysis, and the concentration on relationships with Europe and the U.S. as the main axis of cultural exchange. Modernization, it is argued, brought segments of South America’s capital cities not only close to Paris, London, and New York, as is commonly claimed, but also to each other both physically and mentally, creating and recreating spaces, ways of thinking, and cultural-political projects at the national and regional levels.

Republics of Knowledge

Republics of Knowledge
Author: Nicola Miller
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691176752

"Republics of Knowledge tells the story of how the circulation of knowledge shaped the formation of nation-states in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina, Peru and Chile, during the century after Iberian rule was defeated in the 1820s. Most immediately, the author has sought to provide a cross-disciplinary approach to the history of knowledge, combining the methods of global intellectual history with a new way of thinking about nations as experienced and enacted as well as how they are imagined, and in so doing offer a new interpretation of the history of independent Latin America to illustrate its wider significance in the making of the modern world. By bringing these lines of inquiry together within a transnational framework, Nicola Miller shows how evidence from the pioneering nations of Latin America can invite historians to rethink many of their general theories about how knowledge travels and how a sense of nationhood is created. The book is designed to stimulate debate about the significance of knowledge not only in Latin America but in all modern societies. As Miller explains, Latin America is usually regarded as an exception to general theories, notably of colonialism, nationalism and liberalism; and yet it was in that part of the world, not in Europe, that the Age of Revolution brought the founding of a second wave of modern republics, and it was in Latin America that pioneering attempts were made to apply liberal principles in societies with inherited caste divisions and corporate institutions. It was there that some of the richest debates about the vexed relationship between collective identities and individualism took place"--

No Apocalypse, No Integration

No Apocalypse, No Integration
Author: Martin Hopenhayn
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2002-01-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822380390

Winner of the Premio Iberoamericano Book Award in 1997 (Spanish Edition) What form does the crisis of modernity take in Latin America when societies are politically demobilized and there is no revolutionary agenda in sight? How does postmodern criticism reflect on enlightenment and utopia in a region marked by incomplete modernization, new waves of privatization, great masses of excluded peoples, and profound sociocultural heterogeneity? In No Apocalypse, No Integration Martín Hopenhayn examines the social and philosophical implications of the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of leftist and state-sponsored social planning in Latin America. With the failure of utopian movements that promised social change, the rupture of the link between the production of knowledge and practical intervention, and the defeat of modernization and development policy established after World War II, Latin American intellectuals and militants have been left at an impasse without a vital program of action. Hopenhayn analyzes these crises from a theoretical perspective and calls upon Latin American intellectuals to reevaluate their objects of study, their political reality, and their society’s cultural production, as well as to seek within their own history the elements for a new collective discourse. Challenging the notion that strict adherence to a single paradigm of action can rescue intellectual and cultural movements, Hopenhayn advocates a course of epistemological pluralism, arguing that such an approach values respect for difference and for cultural and theoretical diversity and heterodoxy. This essay collection will appeal to readers of sociology, public policy, philosophy, cultural theory, and Latin American history and culture, as well as to those with an interest in Latin America’s current transition.

Modern Poetics and Hemispheric American Cultural Studies

Modern Poetics and Hemispheric American Cultural Studies
Author: J. Read
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2009-07-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230623344

As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the integration of cultures within nations has become more and more relevant. Read takes a poetic approach to the concept of cultural conflict within nations and adds a new perspective that has rarely been seen in debate.

Media Laboratories

Media Laboratories
Author: Sarah Ann Wells
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2017-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081013456X

Winner, LASA Best Book Published in 2017, Southern Cone Section, Humanities category Media Laboratories explores a pivotal time for South American literature of the 1930s and ’40s. Cinema, radio, and the typewriter, once seen as promising catalysts for new kinds of writing, began to be challenged by authors, workers, and the public. What happens when media no longer seem novel and potentially democratic but rather consolidated and dominant? Moving among authors from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and among the genres of fiction, the essay, popular journalism, and experimental little magazines, Sarah Ann Wells shows how writers on the periphery of global modernity were fashioning alternative approaches to these media. Analyzing authors such as Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, and Felisberto Hernández, along with their lesser-known contemporaries, Media Laboratories casts a wide net: from spectators of Hollywood and Soviet montage films, to inventors of imaginary media, to proletarian typists who embodied the machine-human encounters of the period. The text navigates contemporary scholarly and popular debates about the relationship of literature to technological innovation, media archaeology, sound studies, populism, and global modernisms. Ultimately, Wells underscores a question that remains relevant: what possibilities emerge when the enthusiasm for new media has been replaced by anxiety over their potentially pernicious effects in a globalizing, yet vastly unequal, world?

American Imaginaries

American Imaginaries
Author: Jeremy C.A. Smith
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2022-09-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 178660969X

American Imaginaries examines the diverse societies and nations of the Western hemisphere as they have emerged across the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exploring cities, capitalism, nations, nationalism, and politics from both comparative and transnational perspectives, the book develops a unique approach based on the paradigms of civilizational analysis and social imaginaries. In addition to providing a fresh perspective on the Americas, American Imaginaries gives proper analysis of multinational and intra-national regions and, crucially, the civilizational force of resurgent indigenous nations. The book also covers regions often underemphasized in histories of the hemisphere, such as Central America and the Caribbean. The book will appeal to scholars and students of history, Atlantic studies, comparative and historical sociology, and social theory. In addition, it will gain audiences amongst academics and graduate students who follow debates about modernity, civilizations, historical constellations, and social imaginaries.