The Inventions of America: Latinoamericanismo in the Xxth Century

3 units

This course surveys what Santiago Castro Gómez has termed the birth of Latin America as a philosophical problem, in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, and the different incarnations of this philosophical and cultrual problem in the writings of Latin American essayists throughout the 20th century. The course will be divided in three sections. First, we will closely read foundational figures of the first decades of the 20th century -- like Alfonso Reyes, José Vasconcelos, José Carlos Mariátegui, Gilberto Freyre, and Pedro Henríquez Ureña -- in order to discuss different cultural ideologies, such as Mestizaje, cosmopolitanism and idigenism, as well as their literary and intellectual genealogies. Through these readings, students will analyze the re-formulation of the notion of Latin America in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Then we will move to mid-century intellectuals -- Leopoldo Zea, Edmundo O'Gorman, and Roberto Fernández Retamar -- to discuss the continuities and ruptures of those ideas before and after the Cuban Revolution. The second part will focus on the philosophical question of America as a historical being, as well as the consequences of this idea in intellectual projects of cultural emancipation. Finally, we will turn to authors from the last quarter of the century -- Enrique Dussel, Angel Rama, Antonio Cornejo Polar, and Román de la Campa -- in order to assess the reinvention of latinoamericanismo and its founding principles in the contexts of postcoloniality and cultural studies. The aim of this course is not only to familiarize students with the backbone of Latin Americanist thinking but also to engage in an advanced-level critical and theoretical reading of these foundational figures in terms of their literary and philosophical genealogies -- thinkers such as Hegel, Spinoza, Heidegger, and Foucault, among others -- and the consequences of their thinking in contemporary Latin American literary and cultural studies.