Latin American Intellectual History

Undergraduate

In his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Gabriel García Márquez described Latin America as a place of feverish imagination: “a reality not of paper,” but of lived experience, “an unbridled reality” that, when transplanted to the page, seems hallucinatory and unreal. This course puts García Márquez’s dictum to the test. An introduction to the last two centuries of Latin American intellectual production, our seminar follows attempts by pensadores and letrados y letradas to set Latin American realities down on the page—and to govern by means of the written word. The thinkers are many and of many stripes—politicians, novelists, theologians, and economists, to name a few—but most have received comparatively little attention from intellectual historians, who continue to have a sweet tooth for “philosophers” rather than “essayists” (the latter are more common in Latin America). Intellectual historians also largely study the European and North American contexts, consigning Latin Americans to the status of interlocutors with other regions’ ideas. Latin America’s Black and indigenous intellectuals got an even rawer deal. Ignored by many of their compatriots, their writings were nevertheless of crucial importance to the cultural life and organization of the polities they inhabited. We consider them, too, addressing the silences of the archive when necessary. WR , HU Th 1:30pm-3:25pm