The research on modernity in Latin America: Lineages and dilemmas

Abstract

Conventional research on modernity has interpreted Latin American experiences as lagging behind, as expressions of an ‘incomplete’ or failed modernity, since they do not meet the conditions of a ‘complete’ achievement of modernity as described by theories developed within European and, later, US academia. Since the emergence of dependency theory in the 1960s, and more emphatically since the 1990s, after the dissemination of postcolonial and decolonial theories in the region, this still dominant interpretation has been challenged by new approaches which convincingly underline the interdependent development of global modernity. This article reconstructs part of these debates and identifies a number of different lineages in current research on modernity in Latin America: a first lineage which describes modernization in Latin America as a mimicry of European/Western modernity; a second lineage which characterizes modernity as a global transformation activated by the colonial annexation of the Americas into capital accumulation; and an intermediary lineage which also recognizes the importance of colonialism in shaping global modernity, but at the same time underlines the European origin of modern emancipatory imaginaries.