Against the poetics of decadence: Latin America and the aesthetics of regeneration

2018 ◽  
pp. 116-143
Author(s):  
Michela Coletta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American Culture ◽  
Moral Conception ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Sociological Studies ◽  
Intellectual Elites

In the late nineteenth century, sociological studies often functioned as a channel between the psychological and criminological sciences and the traditional field of literature. I argue that Nordau’s work, which drew as much upon Italian criminology as it did upon Jean-Marie Guyau’s sociological theory of aesthetics, constituted a major path by which ideas of degeneration taken from the medical and criminological sciences came to be a fundamental tool of interpretation of modern Latin American culture. One of the main lines of argument in this chapter is that social theories on the degeneration of modern art were useful to vast sectors of the late-nineteenth-century intellectual elites to identify with the values of modern civilisation. By linking the development of literary modernismo to the wider engagement with questions about the features of modern civilisation, this discussion offers a new reading of modernismo as a movement that in its boom phase helped foster ideas of modernity as an essentially urban − and therefore transnational − phenomenon through notions of refinement, disease and degeneration. The second part of the chapter shows how Rodó’s seminal essay Ariel marked a turning point from decadent civilisation to the idea of Latin American culture by building on a moral conception of aesthetics.

‘Business Imperialism’ and Argentina, 1875–1900: A Theoretical Note

1980 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Economic Advantage ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
South American ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
British State

The facts are by now sufficiently clear for it to be common ground in any discussion of late nineteenth-century imperialism that the British State was disinclined to interfere on behalf of British capitalists with Latin American interests when these were threatened by local firms or States. Equally it is clear that British capitalists did not invest in Argentina in the belief that, by so doing, they were actively assisting the foreign policy of the British State. The State provided no grounds for this belief and no inducement to invest, and had it done so it is unlikely that the capitalists concerned – a pretty liberal bunch by and large – would have responded to any greater extent than they felt was consistent with their economic advantage. Again, there were not, in Britain, territorially ambitious militarists and aristocrats with their sights set on the South American republics. This element was quite adequately catered for in the Empire. In short, the models of imperialism favoured by Hobson, Schumpeter, and other conspiracy theorists, however appropriate they may be in particular cases, cannot be generalized and have very little relevance to Argentina.

Porfirian Commercial Propaganda: Mexico in the World Industrial Expositions

1977 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene Yeager
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Latin American Countries ◽  
Trade And Investment

Students of late nineteenth century history have long dismissed the world industrial expositions as glittering, but not highly significant reflections of the gilded age. What emerges from the literature of the period, however, is a sense of the overriding commercial importance of these exhibitions. Nineteenth-century observers consistently linked the fairs to the general growth of world trade and to the expanding commercial hegemony of the United States. More specifically, contemporaries agreed that the expositions served to develop trade and investment ties with Latin America. Among the Latin American countries represented in the expositions, Mexico was the most important and consistent participant.

Cultural Divergence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter offers a periodization of the literatures of the Americas from the late nineteenth century through the postwar period. After acknowledging the emergence of a brief “transamerican literary imagination” forged in the early nineteenth century, I chart the gradual breakdown of this shared literary imagination in the second half of the nineteenth century and the concomitant rise of two distinct modes of literary production in the hemisphere: the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of the reader. I track the emergence of these systems: in the United States, through the mid-nineteenth-century “American Renaissance,” the late nineteenth-century “age of realism,” the interwar “modernist” period, and the “postmodern” era of the second half of the century; in Latin America, through the modernismo of the turn of the twentieth century, the vanguardia movement of the 1920s and early 1930s, and the boom decades of the 1960s and 1970s.

scholarly journals La metáfora biológica en la obra de Manuel González Prada

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 111-122
Author(s):  
Camilo Rubén Fernández-Cozman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Authors

Manuel González Prada is one of the most important Latin American authors. He used the biological metaphor to criticize Peruvian society in the late nineteenth century. The metaphor of disease, animal and plant are three kinds of analog procedures that González Prada uses according to a naturalistic vision, heiress of Spencer's evolutionism. González Prada questions the imitation and lack of stylistic precision of writers in the nineteenth century, as well as conceiving that Peru is a sick organism

scholarly journals Framing the Latin American nutrition transition in a historical perspective, 1850 to the present

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-253
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Ablard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Nutrition Transition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Onset ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Global Food

Abstract This paper argues that many of the foundations and trends that led to the rise in obesity and other diet-related health problems in Latin America began to develop in the late nineteenth century. The tendency towards presentism in the nutrition transition literature provides a much abbreviated and limited history of changes in diet and weight. Whereas medical and nutrition researchers have tended to emphasize the recent onset of the crisis, a historical perspective suggests that increasingly global food sourcing prompted changes in foodways and a gradual “fattening” of Latin America. This paper also provides a methodological and historiographic exploration of how to historicize the nutrition transition, drawing on a diverse array of sources from pre-1980 to the present.

The Devil and Modernity in Late Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires

2002 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-233
Author(s):  
Kristin Ruggiero
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
New Approach ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Latin American Countries

In the late nineteenth century, the move away from classical criminology toward positivist criminology brought with it new categories of crime and new definitions of the criminal. A great deal of scholarship has focused on positivism's new approach, which grew out of research in Europe, especially in France and Italy, and later took hold in Argentina and other Latin American countries. It might be supposed that as a state's judicial and penal authorities and doctors of forensic medicine were becoming more professionalized and positivist at this time, and as state and society were becoming more secularized and urbanized, such a traditional figure as the devil would have disappeared from criminal court cases.

The Act or Process of Dying Out: The Importance of Darwinian Extinction in Argentine Culture

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Novoa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Process Variation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Intellectual Elites

ArgumentThe spread of Darwinian ideas by the late nineteenth century in Argentina transformed the intellectual elites' notion of progress and civilization. While before Darwin, union, harmony, and assimilation were the ideas most commonly associated with the civilizatory process; variation, struggle, and divergence dominated the post-Darwin discussion. More importantly, unlike in Europe, in Argentina the theory not only triggered interest in the process of speciation, but also its relationship with extinction. Extinction became the benchmark of progress, and the sign of success for the nation. If the country was civilizing itself, the “natural” elimination of inferior individuals, unfit for the struggle for existence, had to be proved and displayed. The origin of modernity was here associated with the existence of evolutionary waste that revealed the work of natural selection on behalf of national improvement.

The contradictions of late nineteenth-century nationalist doctrines: three keys to the ‘globalism’ of José Martí’s nationalism

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88
Author(s):  
Armando García de la Torre
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
National Level ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
History Narratives ◽  
The Right

AbstractScholarly literature on nineteenth-century nationalism concentrates on its strong exclusionary tendencies, while studies of the Cuban independence leader José Martí (1853–95) focus on his articulation of Cuban nationalism and pan-Latin American regionalism through his political activities and writings. This article identifies the globalism of Martí’s nationalism, moving beyond the national and regional frameworks to which studies of Martí have consigned the Cuban freedom fighter. It argues that the global history narratives that Martí wrote for children constitute critical and innovative components of his programme for national liberation and nation building, and encapsulate his nationalist ideology through three key components: the right to self-determination at the national level, the right to self-determination at the personal level, and a sense of global humanitarianism. The article’s transnational perspective places Martí, through his inclusionary, racially blind, humanitarian form of nationalism, as contradicting late nineteenth-century nationalist doctrines, and begs for ideas about the general intellectual climate of the period to be rethought.

scholarly journals The Creation of a Latin American Catholic Church: Vatican Authority and Political Imagination, 1854–1899

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 316-336
Author(s):  
FRANCISCO JAVIER RAMÓN SOLANS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
American Catholic Church ◽  
Insight Into

The principal aim of this article is to analyse the rise of a Latin American Catholic identity during the mid- to late nineteenth century. It examines the institutionalisation of this collective project via the foundation of the Latin American College in Rome in 1858 and the initiatives that led to the Latin American Plenary Council in 1899. This article also explores how this collective religious identity was imagined and how its limits were drawn. In doing so a new insight into how religions contributed to the imagining and defining of geographical spaces is offered.

scholarly journals ‘Pure Feelings, Noble Aspirations and Generous Ideas’: The Martí–Dana Friendship and the Cuban War of Independence

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael B. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jose Marti ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Radical History ◽  
Dominant Narratives

This article considers the friendship between the Cuban leader José Martí and the US journalist Charles Anderson Dana in relation to questions of transnationalism, print culture, modernist aesthetics, and the politics of dissent during the era of the Cuban War of Independence (1895–8). It investigates the radical potential and aesthetic difficulties of rendering genuine affection in print at a time in which American friendliness towards Cuba often served to mask imperialist intentions. I offer a reading of Charles Dana’s obituary for José Martí as a text that destabilizes assumptions about Cuban–American relations in the late nineteenth century by presenting an alternative political vision that incorporated the possibility of an autonomous Cuban subjectivity. In doing this, I resurrect the work of Charles Dana as a proto-modernist alternative vision of US culture that deployed the history of American Transcendentalism within the forms of late-nineteenth-century print media to register his opposition to the rise of modern press magnates such as W.R. Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. This article challenges dominant narratives on two fronts: first, by suggesting an alternative to normative accounts of the development of the late-nineteenth-century commercial press; second, by exploring the mutual interpenetration of Latin American and US American radical history.

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