Latin American Intellectuals Research Articles

Argentine exiles in Spain: Translation as a practice of solidarity

s part of its solidarity activities with Chilean, Uruguayan, and Argentine exiles in Catalonia, the NGO Agermanament led by Father Josep Ribera and the Lliga dels Drets dels Pobles published a register of exiles organized according to their professional activity in the magazine Agermanamentin 1979. The categories included in the list were “visual artists, doctors/psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, musicians, actors and singers, publicists, jurists, architects, and photographers”. Translatorswere not included in the list, even thoughtheirprofessional status had been recognized by the UNESCO in 1976 and thousands of Latin American exiles who had fled dictatorships and arrived in Spain without refugee status were working as translators. Due to the toll on the publishing sector, heavily damaged by political and cultural repression, numerous exiled Latin American intellectuals and writers entered the Catalan publishing industryas translators, proofreaders, and editors. Thisarticle aims to shed light on the quantitative and qualitative importance of translation as a practice of solidarity within the publishing sector during the Spanish transition to democracy. I want to show that members of the Latin American diaspora contributed to the constitution of a transnational publishing space, which was possible thanks to the solidarity of local publishers and exiles who created a labor network through the commission of translations.

“The Political Dimension of the Unification-Disintegration Paradox in Mantra (2001) by Rodrigo Fresán”

Rodrigo Fresán’s writing had a significant impact on Southern Cone literature when his first book, Historia argentina, was published in 1991. Despite its high sales and favorable reviews, which earned Fresán the status of a celebrity writer, his works have often been criticized for possessing “an esthetics of insensitivity and/or an ethics of indifference” (Freidemberg). This essay refutes these accusations of postmodern shallowness in Fresán’s writing and instead proposes an examination of the “politics of literature” (Rancière) in his 2001 work Mantra. The purpose of this essay is to challenge the aporias of the theory of “littérature engagée” derived from Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy that were debated among Latin American intellectuals during the 1960s and 1970s. The main objective of this essay is to demonstrate that Fresán’s writing is not only literary but also political in nature. In Mantra, we can observe a system of heterogeneities that disrupts the realm of experience, creating a non-dialectical paradox between the forces of unification and disintegration that elicits an emotional response and challenges the illusion of a concrete, complete identity. This, in turn, allows us to reconsider central themes such as memory.

Masculinity and Nation in Lorenzo de Zavala’s Viaje a los Estados Unidos del Norte de América (Journey to the United States of North America) (1834)

ABSTRACT This article explores how Mexican politician, Lorenzo de Zavala, engaged with issues of masculinity and nation in his 1834 travelogue, Viaje a los Estados Unidos del Norte de América (Journey to the United States of North America). The first published Mexican travelogue of the United States, this understudied text illuminates the post-independence period in which Latin American intellectuals imagined a hemispheric republican future originating in the Americas. This travelogue engaged with debates about nation-building and the role of male citizens. By conceptualising androcentrism as a symbolic marker, Zavala’s interpretation of the U.S. man informed his notion of an idealised citizenry. This notion was racialized and excluded subaltern populations. Additionally, this text can be interpreted as a precursor to twentieth-century valorisations of multi-ethnic identity discourses. Zavala imagined the emergence of a borderlands population that combined the characteristics of both countries’ citizenries. This travelogue provides greater meaning by contributing to the ongoing, ambivalent textual relationship between Mexico and the United States.

Latin American green criminology

This article traces the trajectory of green criminology in Latin America from the 1960s’ liberation criminology to the current Southern green criminology. The purpose of this genealogical account is twofold: first, it uncovers the evolution of the Latin American criminological engagement with green crime, and second, politically it reclaims the epistemological power of the South by highlighting how critical thinkers on the continent anticipated ideas now in vogue in English-speaking criminology. The memory exercise that is this article builds on the premise that true decolonising projects must recall and build on the histories of endogenous thought of (neo)colonial locations. The article is based on an archaeological exploration of the engagements of Latin American intellectuals with the study of environmental crime and harm, combined with the author’s field observations.

The LATAM’s Laozi: The Reception and Interpretations of the Laozi in Latin America

The Laozi has a long and variegated exegetical history inside and outside of China. This history shows the flexibility of a text that is always able to transform and adapt to the specific cultural context and historical period in which it emerges. Due to the expansion of Orientalism among Latin American intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century, the Laozi, among other texts, began to propagate, producing a series of translations and original interpretations of the text. These works are the products of several Latin American writers who engaged with the Laozi mainly through the mediation of European and North American interpretations. From these cross-cultural interactions emerged some original interpretations and translations that created different ways of reading the Laozi. In this paper, I outline the major characteristics of the Laozi’s translations and interpretations in Latin America’s sub-regions. I draw a tentative sketch of what could be defined as the Latin American Laozi’s experience, better called the LATAM’s Laozi.

Representation of India in Travel Writings by Latin American Women in the 20th Century

This paper examines the representation of India in the works of Latin American women writers in the 20th Century. With the advent of Modernism in Latin America in the late 19th Century as a turn-of-the-century movement, Latin American intellectuals started engaging with India such as Rubén Darío in Azul (1888). However, it was Gabriela Mistral, a Nobel laureate from Chile, who although never travelled to India, may be considered the first Latin American woman writer who engaged with India through the appreciation of Tagore in her literary repertoire. Furthermore, in the 20th Century Cecília Meireles, one of the most famous Modernist poets from Brazil visited India in 1953 upon being invited by Jawaharlal Nehru. She noted in her diary that as paradoxical as it sounds, it is much easier to understand India if one knows Brazil. She drew similarities between the fundamental issues of the two countries then. She wrote the anthology Poemas Escritos Na Índia (1961). Another important performance artist is Josefina Báez who would combine yoga and her lived experience in the three spaces of New York, La Romana in the Dominican Republic and India to produce zany dance dramas like Dominicanish (2001). She uses the classical dance form of Kuchipudi originating in the south of India to restructure her Dominican cultural identity in New York. Another contemporary Mexican writer, Margo Glantz, wrote her work Coronada de Moscas (2012), which is a travelogue based on her three sojourns in India accompanied with photographs by Alina López Cámara. The paper analyses the works by the above-mentioned Latin American intellectuals vis-à-vis representation of India in them and focuses on what it is to travel to India and write on it for Latin American women in the 20th Century. This has been done using the theoretical perspective of bell hooks (Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 1984) and Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes, 1992).

The Debt at Stake: A Decolonial Reading of The Hunger Games

In this article, I propose to understand the insights of 20th century Latin American intellectuals on environmental injustice and its connection to colonialism and neo-colonialism as a reading apparatus to expand —and even subvert— the symbolic meaning of popular dystopian narratives such as The Hunger Games (2008) and its prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020) by Suzanne Collins. I assert that reading these narratives as an allegory of the exchanges between the Global South and the Global North exposes blind spots of the latter regarding its performance and responsibility in the ever-growing ecological debts and the footprint of extractivism in the South. I complement this allegoric reading by comparing both novels from Paulo Freire’s critical hope perspective, which re-signifies the novel by understanding it as a narrative sketched out by utopian thought, not as a postapocalyptic dystopia; that is, read from a present that we can transform.

A Kaleidoscopic Gaze of India through Julio Barrenechea’s oeuvre

Latin American intellectuals have included India in their imagination since the advent of Modernism, a turn-of-the-century movement in the early 20th century. Nevertheless, the idea of India in Latin American imagination has been primarily mediated through a rather fixed European lens. Within the body of Latin American scholarly encounters, the works of Julio Barrenechea are worth mentioning. They have not been critically examined extensively in academia. The present study is an attempt to reflect upon the works of the author that resulted from his experiences during his sojourn as the Ambassador of Chile in India. He wrote Sol de la India, which was published in 1969 in New Delhi, during his stay in India. Another work titled La India no misteriosa based on his Indian experience was published posthumously in 1982 in Santiago. The first work is a collection of poems while the latter is in prose. Barrenechea has described with grace and sympathy the spiritual greatness of India but at the same time, he engaged critically with the distressing social and economic realities of the nation. In the present study, the researchers analyze the theme of his works encompassing India, which as such incorporate an essentially “Chilean gaze”.

Twice American: Hispanic Writers in the United States

Taking as a starting point the most traditional experience of exile, this paper encourages a debate about the expatriation experience that has affected many Latin American intellectuals residing in and producing their works in the United States of America. Most have decided to write in Spanish in a country that, according to the dominant narrative, is based on a pluralist and tolerant society. But racism and discrimination are still rooted there, and all those who do not ‘belong’ are literally treated as ‘aliens’, especially if they are part of the Latino/Hispano community. This study aims to emphasise the cultural and literary impact that this wave of transnational and extraterritorial writers may have in the future. Moreover, it highlights the use of Spanish language as a political stance in a context which, in a not-so-distant future, will be increasingly influenced by Spanish-speaking people, who are still wrongly considered a minority.

José María Torres Caicedo and the Politics of International Law in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Abstract The mid-nineteenth century was the formative period of doctrines that dominated international law debates in Latin America until well into the twentieth century. José María Torres Caicedo (1830–89) is one of the least-known international law scholars from those years. Torres Caicedo’s vast experience as a diplomat provided him with a sharp political instinct, which nurtured his academic work about international legal affairs. A look into his writings exposes the politics behind present-day principles, such as sovereign equality and non-intervention. It also reveals the stance of Latin American intellectuals with regard to the Eurocentric notion of the ‘civilized State’. In the field of the law of aliens, Torres was a major influence in the development of the Calvo Doctrine. His contributions to international law are all the more relevant, as historians place Torres as one of the first authors designating Central and South America as ‘Latin America’. This term was closely intertwined with Torres Caicedo’s views on foreign policy and international law.

Latin America and the Global Cold War

Latin America and the Global Cold War

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)

Entre a longa tradição intelectual e os novos vocabulários teórico-práticos, o lugar da Opção decolonial

Latin American intellectuals from different institutions, mostly from Hispanic-American countries, gathered at the end of the 1990s to form the Modernity/Coloniality group. Since the previous decades, their work had as a common point the concern to update the Latin American critical tradition, in the light of postcolonial studies. The publication "La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales", organized by Edgard Lander in 2000, by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), presented the group’s ideas to the academic debate. The Portuguese version of this collection was made available by the CLACSO virtual library in 2005. This perhaps explains a certain mismatch in the use of “decolonial” terminology in the Brazilian academic environment, which has been observed more clearly in recent years.

Gandhi’s Satyagraha and its Legacy in the Americas and Africa

The article addresses the impact of Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas in the US, Latin America and Africa, especially on important political figures. The influence of Gandhi’s ideas in Latin America started very early in the twentieth century. By 1930 and perhaps even earlier, important Latin American intellectuals began to refer to Gandhi, one of whom was José Carlos Mariátegui. Gandhi’s non-violent struggle also had a great impact in America, particularly in the 1950s and the 1960s, the years of peak resistance against the Jim Crow laws––a collection of state and local statutes that legalised racial segregation which had existed for about 100 years from the post-Civil War era until 1965. In the twenty-first century, the Satyagraha philosophy motivated those who were involved in the struggle for human rights, the defenders of indigenous peoples and those fighting against globalisation. We can include among them the Argentinian Nobel Peace Prize awardee Adolfo Pérez Esquivel whose work in the defence of human rights and non-violent resistance forcefully showed the influence of Gandhi and his powerful legacy.

Exílio chileno de Mário Pedrosa

Com base em uma ampla pesquisa de fontes primárias em arquivos de instituições no Brasil e no Chile, este artigo apresenta um panorama sobre o exílio chileno de Mário Pedrosa, durante o Governo Salvador Allende (1970-1973). Busca-se analisar as principais iniciativas culturais fomentadas pela Unidade Popular, uma coligação de partidos de esquerda, com objetivo de compreender a conjuntura na qual o autor brasileiro foi convocado. Pedrosa fez parte de um contingente de intelectuais latino-americanos exilados que colaborou ativamente na área acadêmica e, de forma ainda mais direta, na política cultural chilena, ao ser convidado para conceber o Museu da Solidariedade. Seguramente, essa instituição, formada exclusivamente por obras doadas, foi o empreendimento mais importante do governo popular, no entanto essa entidade inseriu-se em um programa cultural e político mais amplo, sendo necessário compreender o contexto geral no qual Pedrosa filiou-se. Apesar de ter se envolvido diretamente na criação do Museu, foi nas cooperativas de artesanato que Pedrosa enxergou o maior potencial comunitário da arte, cujo caráter revolucionário o crítico exaltou no artigo "Arte Culta e Arte Popular", escrito em 1975.

THE HISTORY OF ARGENTINE ART IN LIGHT OF DECOLONIAL STUDIES

At the end of the last century, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies set in motion a “detachment” from the dominant modes of knowledge acquisition in the social sciences and humanities. In the 1990s, Latin American intellectuals debated the colonial side of modernity and the cultural, theoretical and practical hegemony that the central countries maintained. In the field of art, this resulted in the problematization of the Eurocentric canons present in the artistic system and the lack of independent theoretical and visual thinking. In light of these problems, this article investigates one of the features of coloniality in force in the Histories of the Visual Arts “with capital letters” in Latin America and particularly in Argentina; that is, the neutralization of diversity in the construction of a national art. To this end, we have used the transdisciplinary qualitative methodology, which articulates different areas of knowledge (history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, art history) from a decolonial interpretive perspective. In the theoretical analysis and historiographical reflection, a decentration is observed in the history of national art promoted by the Institute of Aesthetic Research (Faculty of Arts, National University of Tucumán), which interrupts the disciplinary canon favoring the emergence of the American, in both the folkloric and the ancestral.

Pensamento/ação freiriano: pistas para uma epistemologia descolonial que cimente uma Ecologia Humana contra-hegemônica

This study aimed to analyze the contributions of the Freirean thinking/action in the construction of a decolonial epistemology that orients a Latin-American Human Ecology of counter-hegemonic inclination. Through a literature review of the Freirean production and the Latin-American intellectuals of the Human Ecology, it was done the interlocution of knowledge and perspectives, resulting to announce Paulo Freire as a classic in the genealogy of decolonial thinking and in the reinforcing of a Human Ecology engaged with social, cognitive and environmental justice, signaling emancipatory processes coming from different fronts of struggle, in such a special historical time of rise of oppressions articulated by capitalism with patriarchy and colonialism.

Mário Pedrosa e José Carlos Mariátegui

Este artigo pretende investigar e problematizar acerca dos diferentes níveis de proximidade e similaridade dos percursos intelectuais e políticos de dois pensadores latino-americanos: Mário Pedrosa, no Brasil, e José Carlos Mariátegui, no Peru. Eles provavelmente sejam parte de uma mesma geração de militantes e intelectuais latino-americanos que buscava na interpretação crítica da realidade, traduzida em trajetórias comuns das metodologias e práticas de investigação, da reflexão teórica, além de suas atividades políticas, os caminhos para construir perspectivas de superação dos limites estreitos do desenvolvimento econômico e cultural em seus países. E, nesse sentido, busca-se referências para esta investigação não apenas nos debates historiográficos, mas no diálogo entre as correspondências e obras mais significativas de Mariátegui e Pedrosa. Após uma breve exposição biográfica e comparativa dos dois autores e de suas atividades políticas, pretende-se expor os pontos de contatos de suas reflexões e atividades nos campos da economia e do pensamento político e de suas contribuições comuns no terreno da crítica cultural.

O Conselho de Educação Superior nas Repúblicas Americanas

Este artigo tem como objetivo examinar a trajetória do Conselho de Educação Superior nas Repúblicas Americanas no período de 1958 a 1978. O Conselho, objeto ainda não investigado pela historiografia da educação brasileira, foi criado em 1958 pelo Institute of International Education (IIE) e sediado em Nova York. Era financiado, inicialmente, pela Carnegie Foundation, a Carnegie Corporation e a Ford Foundation. O Conselho abrigou, em seus quadros, intelectuais estadunidenses e latino-americanos com o intuito de elaborar recomendações para a solução dos problemas relativos ao ensino superior no continente americano. Através de uma pesquisa de caráter documental que examinou os Relatórios Anuais do IIE, o Arquivo Anísio Teixeira sob a guarda do Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil da Fundação Getúlio Vargas e os Relatórios Anuais da Comissão de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de nível Superior (CAPES) foi possível mapear as decisões do Conselho e avaliar o potencial de cooperação ou intervenção nas políticas públicas para ensino superior na América Latina.

Hacia la Hispanidad, a través de Londres. La influencia de la estancia británica de Ramiro de Maeztu en la creación de un ideario hispanoamericanista (1905-1934)

En su influyente ensayo Defensa de la Hispanidad (1934), Ramiro de Maeztu reivindicó la colonización española de América y argumentó que los rasgos culturales compartidos que resultaban de esa experiencia histórica debían vertebrar una colaboración entre las naciones de habla hispana. Pese a la creencia de que Maeztu desarrolló estas ideas en 1928-30, cuando era embajador en Argentina, sus textos periodísticos muestran que muchas estaban articuladas ya en 1911-12, cuando era corresponsal en Reino Unido. Esto nos anima a revisar el papel del Londres eduardiano en la génesis del ideario hispanoamericanista de Maeztu. Por un lado, le permitió entablar amistad con intelectuales hispanoamericanos como los redactores de la revista Hispania; por otro, le expuso a los debates que los británicos libraban acerca de su propio Imperio. La Hispanidad aparece así como parte de un movimiento de revisión de la colonización europea y el devenir de los antiguos proyectos coloniales.