Nineteenth-Century Latin America Research Articles

Printing Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Latin America and the Caribbean

Printing Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Latin America and the Caribbean

Hero's Legacy: Martial Strength and Race in Republican Chile

This article examines the Roto Chileno war memorial in downtown Santiago as a complex site of Chilean identity making in the republican era. Conflating two separate nineteenth-century military victories over the combined forces of Bolivia and Peru, the memorial was a physical manifestation of an intricate process of identity construction that celebrated the mestizo heritage of average citizen-soldiers while also emphasizing the idea that Chileans were racially superior compared to other South American nations. The memorial being dedicated specifically to the roto, a mutable racialized term that can be perceived as pejorative even in the present, is therefore an especially evocative example of how this conceptual combination was visually rendered to access elements of white identity. Using fine art media coverage, this article highlights the entangled relationship between memory, nationalism, and race in late nineteenth-century Latin America to consider the role that militarism and masculinity play in the construction of whiteness.

"El evangelio del papel moneda de Miguel Antonio Caro: Dinero y poder en la Colombia decimonónica"

ABSTRACT: Miguel Antonio Caro is known as one of the most lucid conservative thinkers of nineteenth-century Latin America. His antiliberal thinking came to define what it meant to be a Catholic man of letters in Colombia and beyond. Today, he is mostly remembered for his work on linguistics, Latin translations, and the 1886 Colombian Constitution. However, Caro was also the most recalcitrant defender of paper money of his time. In press articles, he developed what can be described as a Hispanic Catholic theory of monetary signs. While he is often portrayed as an anti-modern ideologist, the financial dimensions of his writings reveal a very different picture. Vindicating a Spanish tradition of currency debasement that went back to Alfonso the Wise, the Colombian ultramontane conciliated his traditionalism with capitalism's global accumulation drive by equating paper money with God's infinite gift: the divine grace. He hence proposed a Catholic view of capitalist modernity that rejected the "evils" of utilitarianism but embraced Colombia's agro-exporter economic model as part of God's providential design. In his political-religious project, money is thus imagined as a key tool of the Christian oikonomia , that is, God's government of earthly affairs.

Scandal and Gender in Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Latin America - Introduction

Violating the norms of gender frequently provoked scandal. This section presents the connections between scandal and gender by introducing the articles that are included in this special issue. Scandals may not seem worthy of scholarly work, but they provide an entry into the interstices of gender performance and the ways that people disrupted social norms. Scandals have three components: the transgression, its dissemination, and the receptive public. Gossip about individuals was often at the heart of scandals but it was also an important social force that established community values. The news of scandalous conduct was often spread by murmurings but also by pasquines and in later periods, in newspapers. The definition of the word “scandal” has changed over time as have the elements that seem shocking have evolved. In this special issue, the authors show how space of honor such as convents, recogimientos, and the family home could be violated. Institutions such as the Church and the State tried to enforce a gender binary but many cross-dressed for their own amusement in dramas or as a disguise. Single women were often the most vulnerable to accusations of scandalous behavior, but young men also were the target of accusations of vagrancy when they surpassed their families’ tolerance for youthful antics.

Writing the Liberal City: literature and the contested experience of economic change. Bogotá 1849–1870

ABSTRACT Costumbrista literature has been repeatedly analysed as a strategy as well as an expression of the process of nation formation in nineteenth-century Latin America. However, it is also a powerful lens for exploring and interpreting the urban visions of literate elites during the turbulent period of liberal reforms and expansion of a capitalist market economy. Largely dismissed as picturesque and inconsequential, in its apparent simplicity, Costumbrismo casts light on how liberal and conservative elites attempted to capture the daily effects of the market economy, and express their anxieties about the increasing commodification of everyday life, the growing obsession with money, and the changes in their own experience of time. As I argue here, Costumbrista literature helped place the new economic order in the local imagination. But it was also a contested ground where writers shaped partisan distinctions and, in the process, established themselves as political elites.

New Methodologies for a Latin American Economic History on the 19th Century: The South-Central Andes

The economic literature of nineteenth-century Latin America has been dominated by its focus on the import-export complex and by comparisons with the United States and Western Europe, discussing why Latin America did not develop like the former regions. The use of import-export data is deficient in un- derstanding economic development of the region; comparisons about what Latin America is not does not help understanding how development occurred. Instead, the essay develops new concepts such as the internal economy, as well as methodologies and categories to analyze the changes in the Latin American economy from 1830 to 1920, using as a case study the south-central Andes.

New Methodologies for a Latin American Economic History on the 19th Century: The South-Central Andes

The economic literature of nineteenth-century Latin America has been dominated by its focus on the import-export complex and by comparisons with the United States and Western Europe, discussing why Latin America did not develop like the former regions. The use of import-export data is deficient in un- derstanding economic development of the region; comparisons about what Latin America is not does not help understanding how development occurred. Instead, the essay develops new concepts such as the internal economy, as well as methodologies and categories to analyze the changes in the Latin American economy from 1830 to 1920, using as a case study the south-central Andes.

Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Latin American Studies and Digital Public Humanities

Scholarship in colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American studies often does not reach beyond specialized academic audiences. The majority of work continues to be largely traditional in nature, with monographs, journal articles, and book chapters remaining the most common types of publications.Only a small portion of that production is distributed in an open-access format online, and even when that is the case, such scholarly output is generally not conceived with broader publics in mind, and engagement with stakeholder communities seldom plays a role in its creation.Digital methodologies and tools present opportunities to explore new modes of scholarly production and publication in these fields. Researchers working in a digital realm are designing and carrying out projects that speak to contemporary communities and involve diverse constituencies in new ways. Without seeking to supplant the more conventional scholarship that grounds their fields, these scholars are asking questions about how we conduct academic work in the twenty-first century and how we can make the products of our work relevant to larger audiences.This article examines five digital projects through which scholars of colonial and nineteenth-century Latin America are conducting work that looks outward from the academy towards inclusive scholarship: Ticha, the Biblioteca Digital Soledad Acosta de Samper, the Mexico team of the multinational project Oceanic Exchanges, Rendering Revolution, and coloniaLab. Through a commitment to producing scholarship for, and in collaboration with, diverse communities,these projects suggest models for conducting the work of colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American studies in the public sphere.Les études sur l'Amérique latine coloniale et du XIXème siècle ne s'adressent souvent qu'à un public universitaire spécialisé. Seule une petite partie de cette production est distribuée en ligne dans un format à accès libre, et même lorsque c'est le cas, cette production scientifique n'est généralement pas conçue pour un public plus large, et l'engagement avec les communautés concernées joue rarement un rôle dans sa création.Les méthodologies et les outils numériques offrent la possibilité d'explorer de nouveaux modes de production et de publication scientifiques dans ces domaines. Sans chercher à supplanter la recherche plus conventionnelle qui fonde leurs domaines, ces chercheurs posent des questions sur la manière dont nous menons le travail universitaire au XXIe siècle et sur la manière dont nous pouvons rendre les produits de notre travail pertinents pour des publics plus larges. Cet article examine cinq projets numériques dans le cadre desquels des chercheurs de l'Amérique latine coloniale et du XIXème siècle mènent des travaux qui s'éloignent de l'académie pour s'ouvrir à un public plus large : Ticha, la Biblioteca Digital Soledad Acosta de Samper, l'équipe mexicaine du projet multinational Oceanic Exchanges, Rendering Revolution et coloniaLab. En s'engageant à produire des études pour diverses communautés et en collaboration avec elles, ces projets proposent des modèles pour mener à bien le travail des études latino-américaines coloniales et du dix-neuvième siècle dans la sphère publique.

Checkmate: What was a King's worth in nineteenth-century Latin America?

Checkmate: What was a King's worth in nineteenth-century Latin America?

Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative ed. by Rocío del Águila and Vanesa Miseres

Reviewed by: Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative ed. by Rocío del Águila and Vanesa Miseres Elvira Sánchez-Blake Águila, Rocío del, and Vanesa Miseres, editors. Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative. The U of Arkansas P, 2021. Pp. 248. ISBN 978-1-68226-181-1. This book offers an engaging collection of essays about food culture and literature from the pre-Columbian times to the present spanning discussions of class, race, gender, and nationalisms. This volume is part of the University of Arkansas Press Series on foodways exploration in global food studies. The compilation offers a critical lens to examine broader cultural environmental and ethical issues around food as the center of literary criticism. The authors coin the term “gastronarrative” to describe the object of study (food and literature) and to refer to the methodology, which analyzes literary text in the context of culinary expression. They also establish the correlation between what one eats and who one is as the premises of gastronarratives. Thus, the book presents key moments in Latin American traditions in which foodways are central to the shaping of the continent’s identity politics with food at the core of the literary scene. Throughout the essays contained in the book, the authors do not limit the analysis to literature, but rather as they explain, “insert literary topics, metaphors, and strategies to discussions on food within the humanities” (11). The analysis includes manuscripts, magazines articles, cookbooks, menus, etiquette manuals, visual culture, and other resources to allow for narrato-logical and historiographical inquires. This also brings about the analysis of the intersection of race, gender and class, consumption and consumerism, culinary imaginaries, and a cartography of food culture in Latin America. Food Studies in Latin American Literature opens with a compelling introduction to the field of food studies and its intersection to literature. The analysis departs from Terry Eagleton’s concept of “edible écriture” in which “connections between food and literature allow[s] us to analyze power structures, coloniality, the paradoxes of modernity, and our own complexity as humans in terms of exchange” (4). The authors propose the idea of food as a narrative in and of itself as an expression of aesthetic, political and cultural statements. [End Page 139] They subscribe to Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic structure to create their “own gastrolinguistic sign” as a space where meaning is created. The essays also explore the traditions of Latin American food as rituals and cultural marks from pre-Columbian texts to well-known literary pieces of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. An important discussion deals with how food shaped the modern concept of citizenship, as a mark of national identity, social class, and racial distinction. The chapters in the book organize thematically in four different sections. Part I focuses on indigenous heritage and colonialism. One article discusses food and power as a means of resistance in colonial Andes by examining texts by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in Peru. Another text refers to the importance of potatoes as a subject or earlier chronicles of the seventeen century and its subsequent incorporation in European diets. A third article focuses on the culinary world of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, discussing the Recetario de Sor Juana, a collection of recipes attributed to the famous nun. It showcases the complex mestizaje of food reflecting the cultural diversity of eighteenth-century Mexican society. Part II illustrates the interaction of national identities, regionalisms and transnational food-ways in nineteenth-century Latin America. One chapter explores how the flow of immigrants affected the ways in which food was incorporated in the social fabric of Mexico and Peru. The argument is that in these countries the elites sought to create societies that were modern, progressive, and up to date looking like United States and Europe. Another essay centers on travel literature of the nineteenth century in Colombia to enlighten discussions of coloniality, race, class, and food. Other essays focus on travel journals where food was a symbol of class. One chapter is devoted to Argentine author Eduarda Mansilla’s Recuerdos de viaje, 1882...

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes Photographs Debates

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes Photographs Debates

Construction of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Latin America - Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America. By Nicola Miller. Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. $39.95 cloth.

Construction of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Latin America - Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America. By Nicola Miller. Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. $39.95 cloth. - Volume 80 Issue 1

Benedicto Sáenz 'Libera Me': Occidentalisms in Latin America Nineteenth-Century Sacred Music

This article uses concepts of Occidentalism and the musical analysis of a funerary responsory by nineteenth-century Guatemalan composer Benedicto Sáenz (1807-1857) to examine possible reasons why music from nineteenth-century Latin America remains relatively neglected in the region and beyond, unlike the better explored repertoires from colonial times and from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based on Latin American postcolonial notions of Occidentalism as the construction of the Western Hemisphere by Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and analysis of Sáenzs responsory Libera Me within the context of changing political, social, and musical trends in nineteenth-century Guatemala, I argue that nineteenth-century music in Latin America reflects local struggles to engage with two competing models of European modernity: the “first modernity” of the Spanish colonial empire and the “second modernity” of the Enlightenment, Liberalism, and the French Revolution. Responding to influences from both modernities, Libera Me expresses local European habiti that do not fit Orientalist narratives of Latin American Otherness or nationalist narratives of local distinctiveness which have influenced the musical historiography in the region.

Vendors' Capitalism: A Political Economy of Public Markets in Mexico City

Public markets in Mexico City have everything to satisfy human wants. Vendors hawk essential food items alongside everyday necessities. Ingrid Bleynat's Vendors' Capitalism takes the reader beyond this impressive range of goods to explore the historical significance of such markets and, most importantly, of their workers to Mexico's capitalist development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The self-employed workers (trabajadores por cuenta propia) in these markets, as the author maintains, were neither wage workers nor capitalists; with minimal capital, they managed to acquire goods offered inside and outside public markets. Myriad studies have shown that old and new forms of production coexisted in nineteenth-century Latin America and that historical actors variously resisted and embraced capitalist labor norms. Opposition and accommodation notwithstanding, scholarship in this field demonstrates a general consensus that capitalism bulldozed previous work arrangements, at least in most urban centers across the subcontinent. Bleynat's poignant study of Mexico City challenges this received opinion, persuasively demonstrating how these vendors—in interaction with other social actors—forged unique labor and political practices that endure to this day.Vendors' Capitalism is a fascinating window on the economic, social, and political world of a large segment of Mexican laborers. It begins in the mid-nineteenth century, when Mexico administered doses of economic liberalism, and ends in the 1960s, at the apogee of the developmental state. Bleynat elucidates Mexico's broad transformations through the eyes and experiences of street sellers, proprietor vendors, politicians, and policymakers. Based on extensive archival research and comprehensive analysis of the printing press, this book captures the public debate over the functioning of markets. It also emphasizes vendors' relevance to Mexico City's supply system and consumers—although the links between purveyors and vendors would have warranted further examination.Bleynat's study evokes discussions about what social scientists once called the informal sector. As other authors have asserted, the subsistence strategies of these laborers demanded a great deal of negotiation, political engagement, and permanent working arrangements. Yet vendors carved out precarious spaces in the labor market and the political system. Firstly, the disputes between the city and the federal authority left, on occasion, gaps as to who oversaw what. Although vendors could use these fissures to their advantage, different layers of public administration sought to regulate public spaces, control access to stalls, and increase tax collection. The extent to which government officials enforced such policies shaped vendors' livelihoods to the point that they lived under perpetual make-or-break conditions. Secondly, vendors never constituted a homogeneous group. Rich sellers rented out stalls (puestos), less affluent merchants ran these puestos, and viento vendors occupied booths outside the markets; they all had competing interests.Bleynat weaves well-crafted political and economic summaries into each chapter, describing how, over a century, the concerns of vendors collided and converged with the polity du jour. In 1860s Mexico, Catholic ethics provided philosophical sustenance to sellers' arguments, in part because their survival was predicated on charity. But as street vendors multiplied at the turn of the century, the city government became less sympathetic to their plight. Certain parties came to see peddlers as remnants of a bygone era, incompatible with Porfirian modernization. The elite framed them as traffic impediments and sanitary nuisances; other vendors labeled them unfit competitors. The 1910 revolution was still running its course when vendors reshaped their discourse. They used words like “labor” and “capital” in their petitions and recast the “bad government” in new terms. For most vendors, however, real gains rested more on their ability to renegotiate their precarious position within the new system than on structural economic changes. In the 1930s, they joined vendor organizations, taking up the revolutionary mantle of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana. But some of vendors' most basic demands—working on Sundays, for instance—were at odds with the traditional working-class agenda.Ingrid Bleynat masterfully takes the reader through similar conflicts over 100 years of Mexican history. One of the book's vital themes is how state intervention in favor of the traditional workforce or established sellers often clashed with peddlers' interests. From the early years of liberalism to the era of developmentalism, urban renewal and market building delivered some benefits to organized vendors. Street sellers, however, continued to suffer repression outside the markets and remained at the margins of economic and political systems. Yet they were in plain sight. In Bleynat's work, they also embody the limitations of Mexico's capitalism. As such, the argument that Vendors' Capitalism presents is of tremendous value to scholars of Mexico and Latin America and to any observer of global capitalism in the era of the gig economy.

The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte

Reviewed by: The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte Elizabeth Chant Uriarte, Javier. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. New York and London: Routledge, 2020. 306 pp. Javier Uriarte's The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America represents an innovative contribution to the well-established field of nineteenth-century Latin American literary studies. Via an analysis of works by four authors—Sir Richard Francis Burton, William Henry Hudson, Francisco "Perito" Moreno, and Euclides da Cunha—and working across the national contexts of Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, Uriarte brings these texts and milieus into an insightful dialogue that illuminates how the multifaceted notion of the desert was constructed and interpreted through travel writing in response to the conflicts that waged in each country during the post-independence period. Uriarte's Introduction underscores the importance of understanding the desert as a created space, highlighting the singular role of war in this process across these four nations. Notably, he observes that the trope of the desert as an "elemental void" (Uriarte Introduction) was maintained by both foreign travelers and Latin American politicians alike in the nineteenth century, thus rationalizing The Desertmakers' selection of texts from across languages and borders in order to properly examine the construction of said space. By focusing on travel narratives, The Desertmakers is able to emphasize the particularly unique approach to travel writing that the situation of war provides, especially the "violent spatial reconfigurations" that it imposes (Uriarte Introduction). As such, the three concerns of the book's subtitle, "travel, war, and the state", are shown to be interdependent in the fabrication and maintenance of the desert primarily as a psychological [End Page 303] milieu. Here, war is defined as "the necessary instrument of desertification", paving the way for state mapping and railways to "do the work of expansion" (Uriarte Introduction). Thus Uriarte elucidates the intertwining of the imagined desert with the tangible outputs of capital expansion and state consolidation in nineteenth-century Latin America, a concern of all four authors examined in this study, as they both abhor and encourage the incursions of capitalist modernity into the countryside. Chapter One examines British expeditioner Sir Richard Francis Burton's (1812-90) Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay (1870). Focusing on one of this experienced traveler's less studied texts, Uriarte traces the image of the ruin in Burton's narrative, identifying it as one of the first accounts to feature a vision of South America as a ruin prior to an act of destruction, in this case the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70). While Uriarte's reading of Burton's transformation from "witness" to "adventurer" in his later writings is shrewd, this chapter's insights into the construction and understanding of Paraguayan space are particularly discerning (Uriarte ch. 1). Uriarte notes how the territory is "blurry and appropriable" in the text and argues that "Paraguay is evidence of the perverse logic of the warlike gaze that can see only the desert that war itself has created" (Uriarte ch. 1), making reference to the apparatus that supported state incursions into the desert and thus worked to create new kinds of voids. The second chapter of The Desertmakers assesses the Anglo-Argentine naturalist William Henry Hudson's (1845-1922) The Purple Land (1885), a semiautobiographical novel featuring the violence and conflict that marred Uruguay in the 1860s and 70s as its backdrop. Uriarte centers his reading around the issue of Great Britain's informal empire in the region, charting how the fictional Anglo-Argentine narrator Richard Lamb's journey gradually yields a critique of imperial endeavors. The "positive valuation of nature" (Uriarte, ch. 3) that underpins Lamb's perspective and has informed much of the scholarship on Hudson's writing is therefore connected by Uriarte to Hudson's own observations of state oppression and violence. Further, Hudson's criticism of the British Empire is interpreted by Uriarte as a potential explanation for his absence from the English literary canon, especially since the desert encountered here is a marginal territory far from the British imperial center. Chapter Three reads Argentine naturalist and statesman Francisco "Perito...

Michael McCartan’s Books Luminary or Lunatic?

This is a first attempt to put Fr. Michael John McCartan in the cartography of the Irish chaplains in Argentina under the shadow of Fr. Anthony Fahy, a renowned priest leader of the Irish community in that country. The aim of this article is to motivate historians to look for more information and contextualize McCartan’s actions and impact in the diasporic Irish communities of nineteenth-century Latin America. This is a work-in-progress, and we are indebted to Roberto di Stefano for his generous assistance with this topic and for providing Edward Walsh with a copy of McCartan’s opus in the Mitre Museum, Buenos Aires.

Alberto Blest Gana: 100 Years Later

Abstract Blest Gana at 100 is a special edition for Open Cultural Studies. Alberto Blest Gana was a Chilean writer who wore many hats during his long life, dying in 1920 at the age of 90. One of the most prominent authors of nineteenth-century Chile and Latin America, he went to military school and later held political and diplomatic appointments, all of which caused him to travel and live abroad. In fact, nel mezzo del cammin of his life, Blest Gana transferred to Europe and eventually settled in Paris, never to return to his country of birth. His fiction and non-fiction conveyed a vast array of experiences and insights from his life in Chile and overseas. To commemorate the 100 years since his death, contributors to Blest Gana at 100 approach his oeuvre from innovative and fresh scholarly angles and thus generate new perspectives on the Chilean author’s most celebrated texts, such as Martín Rivas and El ideal de un calavera. They also examine the early days of his literary career; revisit critical scholarship on Blest Gana from the past; bring less explored texts, such as Mariluán and Los Trasplantados (the latter written and published in Paris) to the foreground; research the background to his work as a columnist and discover the extent to which it informed his literary career; and examine the urban social practices in Blest Gana’s award-winning novel La aritmética en el amor. From these analyses, we hope to foster an ongoing conversation of lively and invigorating Blest Gana scholarship.

History of technology in nineteenth and twentieth century Latin America

AbstractThis essay focuses on recent trends in the history of technology in nineteenth and twentieth century Latin America. It emphasizes the English‐language historiography, especially economic, social, cultural, and political approaches. The essay argues that historians, using sociocultural and political discourses that often stress local and national innovations, inequities, and political wrangling, need to work in greater dialog with economic historians and science and technology scholars in order to create much needed synthesis works for the field.

The Senses of Democracy: Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America by Francine R. Masiello

Reviewed by: The Senses of Democracy: Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America by Francine R. Masiello Jerónimo Arellano Masiello, Francine R. The Senses of Democracy: Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America. U Texas P, 2018. 325 pp. There was a time, not long ago, when central categories of historical experience such as emotion and sense perceptions were conceived of as atemporal entities, hardwired into the brain and closed off to the influx of culture. One of the most generative movements in contemporary critical thought across the humanities and social sciences has been the reconceptualization of these forms of experience, restaging their relationship to the fluctuations of social and cultural history. Brand new fields have emerged in the process: we now have lines of scholarship with rubrics such as the history of emotions and the history of the senses. But this shift in focus has also yielded, more broadly and beyond the bounds of these new disciplines, a portable toolkit and a new sensibility attuned to the turbulent intersections between the visceral interiors of the body, the wiring of the nervous system, and the rise and fall of artistic and cultural forms. It is tempting to see Francine Masiello's latest book, The Senses of Democracy: Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America, as a prime example of this new sensibility (one that, it should be noted, has by now been well-established in multiple fields but is still somewhat a rarity in Latin Americanist criticism—thus the allure and future traction of Masiello's book). Charting what she calls "the evolution of sense work" in Latin America across roughly two centuries (2), Masiello approaches the human sensorium as a site molded by political and cultural forces, but also as a force field that is enlisted by artists and cultural agents to nurture forms of indiscipline, rebelliousness, and disobedience recruited against political and market forces. The Senses of Democracy is also, in many ways, a love letter to the vibrant feedback loops that, passing through the senses, connect subject and world—"love" is understood here not as a form of sensuous self-indulgence but, rather, as a mode of dogged attention to the details of felt experience. Five chapters—each of them ripe with sensorially-charged scenes—anchor the narrative of The Senses of Democracy. Although Masiello's book moves from the past into the present, it does not entertain linear chronologies. Instead, it is a book made up of swaths and flashes of "sense work"—"the ways in which the senses take form in culture" (3). In the first chapter, "Sensing the Early Republic," Masiello pieces together key moments in nineteenth-century Latin America in which "social, political, and literary life were tied to a regime of perception" (20). Masiello recasts canonical works as well as key debates in Latin American culture, such as the dichotomy between "civilization and barbarism," by paying attention to how they recruit sensory responses in order to intervene in the public culture of Latin America in the nineteenth century. Building upon these entanglements between the politics of culture and the plasticity of regimes of perception, the following chapter explores how women writers in Latin America develop methods of sense work that question the gendered authoritarianism of State power, challenging the exclusion of women from political life. Chapter three moves to the twentieth century, offering an account of the ways in which avant-garde artists in Latin America such as Roberto Arlt wrestled [End Page 307] with the shock of modern technologies that radically transformed the relationship between the sentient body and the lived world. Chapter four investigates two concrete, local scenes of sense work unfolding in subsequent decades: first, the activities of the Contorno group, a collective of dissident Argentine writers and intellectuals who developed a robust critique of the effects of mass violence on the sentient body during the government of Perón, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception; second, the intersections between the work of writer Juan José Saer, poet Raúl Zurita, and visual artist Guillermo Núñez, found in a shared concern with the physicality of the tortured body and the body in pain in...

Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910) by Vanesa Miseres

Reviewed by: Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910) by Vanesa Miseres Natalie Love Miseres, Vanesa. Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910). Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2017. 240 pp. ISBN: 978-14-6963-580-4. Mujeres en tránsito provides an innovative, multifaceted study of the travel narratives of four female writers who ventured to South America from Europe, travelled within their home territory of South America, or departed from the region to explore Europe and the United States during the transitory period of nation formation in nineteenth century Latin America. These writers include the French Peruvian Flora Tristan, the Argentines Juana Manuela Gorriti and Eduarda Mansilla, and the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner. According to Miseres, while these authors of dissimilar backgrounds write under different models and travel to diverse places for distinct motives, what connects them is their "imaginario transnacional" that allows them to challenge predominate notions of national identity in turn of the century Latin America (14). Rather than defining the nation as a homogenous entity with clearly established cultural, geographical and political borders, Miseres shows how these female travellers writing from the margins develop a more complex vision of a nation composed of heterogeneous identities and fluid boundaries that permit contact with diverse regions, histories and voices. By describing these women as "in transit," Miseres does not simply refer to the displacement of these authors from one geographical place to another, but the way in which their travels place them in a continual movement between two or more cultures, leading them to negotiate identity on a personal, national and international level. In her discussion of Tristan's Peregrinaciones de una paria, Miseres describes how the author's voyage to Peru from her birth country of France to claim her paternal inheritance leads the author to envision herself as a "paria," an individual with an ambiguous national identity who lacks a full sense of belonging to one particular nation or another. According to Miseres, Tristan simultaneously identifies with and distances herself from her French and Peruvian nationalities as a strategy to expose the political inefficiencies of the Peruvian Republic, while highlighting opportunities for female agency. Upon clinging to her "yo europeo" Tristan establishes her authority as an outsider who sees behind the corruptness of Peru's educational, military and religious institutions (39). However, by reclaiming her South American origins, Tristan appeals to readers from the country and crafts a fictional bond with Peruvian women who share her transitory sense of identity and use it as a mechanism to subvert patriarchal control. By analyzing Gorriti's discourse on traveling within the South American homeland, Miseres displays how the author destabilizes dominant political ideologies of nineteenth century Argentina, while uncovering histories and voices marginalized by national projects that looked to unify the population under a homogenous identity. In her speech to El Club Literario de Lima, Gorriti utilizes the topic of traveling through "la tierra natal" to reject the hegemonic notion of the "Grand Tour," a trip made by the aristocratic youth to educate themselves in the high society of Europe (87). In the author's voyage to her home of Salta after a long exile in La tierra natal, [End Page 158] Gorriti challenges "the official history" of Argentina by evoking the country's colonial past, indigenous roots and political tensions between the Unitarians and Federalists (101). Finally, in Peregrinaciones de una alma triste, Gorriti reverses discriminatory classifications of gender, class and race established by the dominant sector through the liberating local travels of the female protagonist. Eduarda Mansilla travels from France to the United States with her diplomatic husband, placing her in a cultural, linguistic and political triangulation between Argentina, Europe and the United States. Miseres highlights Mansilla's transnational vision in Recuerdos de viaje by showing how the author authoritatively judges various aspects of United States society from a trained ideal of beauty and a series of "escenas de traducción," both of which are products of her elite Argentine status and knowledges acquired during her travels through Europe (137). From her European/South American perspective...