Latin America and the Problem of Multiple Modernities

Abstract

This chapter presents a few remarks on the relevance of research on Latin America and its patterns of citizenship, as seen within the framework of multiple modernities. The first multiple modernities have been the United States and the different societies of South and Central America and the Caribbean that were defined as ‘Latin America’ since the midnineteenth century - the societies discussed in the chapter. The idea of multiple modernities presumes that the best way to understand the contemporary world is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs, with a wide set of tensions, ambiguities and antinomies. From the very beginning of the discourse about modernity, of the attempts within modern societies to understand the nature of this new era or civilization, there developed two opposing evaluations thereof, attesting indeed to the inherent contradictions of modernity. Keywords:citizenship; Latin America; midnineteenth century; modernities