LATIN AMERICA AND BEYOND

Abstract

Leopoldo Zea was born in Mexico City in 1912 and is a unique survivor, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, of a generation that lived through the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. Regarding that event as a model for the nationalist and anticolonialist revolutions that were destined to occur elsewhere, Zea subsequently became a spokesman for the antiimperialism of the American subcontinent post-1945, choosing to interpret the situation of many Spanish American nations as essentially neocolonialist. Thereafter, he responded to the dual clarion-calls of the Cuban Revolution and francophone writing that began to circulate in Spanish America from the mid-sixties. Under the influence of the Cuban Revolution, Zea would give a tricontinental focus to his writing and inscribe the contemporary trajectory of the Americas within the wider narrative of decolonization that was unfolding in parts of Africa and Asia. Around the same time, Zea met a range of high-profile individuals including Léopold Sédar Senghor, Jawharlal Nehru, and Aimé Césaire, and initiated with them a dialogue that would revolve around issues of the Third World. However, it was the work of Fanon which stirred the deepest response in him: a volume of essays published in 1974 bears the multiple marks of Fanon’s universalism, his refashioned humanism, and the Martiniquan’s comparative perspective on decolonization in Africa and the Americas. It is also through the prism of Negritude that Zea reinterprets American indigenismo as a rejection of the racialist discourses of a Eurocentric white mythology to which he opposes the racial and cultural mestizaje of societies such as those of Cuba, Mexico, and Peru. The comparative perspective of his essay, ‘Negritud e indigenismo’ (‘Negritude and indigenismo’), is one amongst many pointers to the crucial role played by Leopoldo Zea in promoting a transcontinental dialogue between the peoples of Latin America and the rest of the world throughout the second half of the twentieth century.