Transatlantic Studies and the Geopolitics of Hispanism

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
Abril Trigo
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Transnational Corporations ◽  
Global Strategy ◽  
Transatlantic Studies ◽  
Academic Goals ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Hispanic Studies ◽  
Cultural Turn

Transatlantic Studies are the outcome of a dual shift: a geographical displacement provoked by the geopolitical de-banking of area studies and an epistemological rift produced by the biocapitalist regime of accumulation. This combined shift translates profound geopolitical realignments, economic transformations and epistemological quandaries that make up our global age. If the geographical displacement from continental regions to oceanic ranges was meant to salvage area studies from their geopolitical obsolescence, and the epistemological displacement from hardcore, neo-positivistic and developmentalist social sciences to relativistic, postmodern and postcolonial multiculturalism was a response to the economically driven and globally experienced cultural turn, the emergence of Hispanic Transatlantic studies can be understood as the last-ditch effort of U.S. Hispanism to regain its lost prestige and, perhaps, its historical hegemony by taking part on this global geopolitical realignment. In a familiar way, the academic goals of U.S. Hispanic studies coincide once again with the global strategy of the ideology of Hispanism, confusedly entangled with the overlapping interests of Spanish capitalism and transnational corporations, in such a way that Spanish cultural and moral hegemony over the Hispanic world become an alibi for global economics and international geopolitics.

Comparative Area Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Köllner ◽  
Rudra Sil ◽  
Ariel I. Ahram
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Middle Range ◽  
The Social ◽  
Small N ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
Science Disciplines

Two convictions lie at the heart of this volume. First, area studies scholarship remains indispensable for the social sciences, both as a means to expand our fount of observations and as a source of theoretical ideas. Second, this scholarship risks becoming marginalized without more efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance and utility. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) is one such effort, seeking to balance attention to regional and local contextual attributes with use of the comparative method in search of portable causal links and mechanisms. CAS engages scholarly discourse in relevant area studies communities while employing concepts intelligible to social science disciplines. In practice, CAS encourages a distinctive style of small-N analysis, cross-regional contextualized comparison. As the contributions to this volume show, this approach does not subsume or replace area studies scholarship but creates new pathways to “middle range” theoretical arguments of interest to both area studies and the social sciences.

Area Studies and the Disciplines: A Rejoinder

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-31
Author(s):  
John W. Harbeson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Science Association

Robert Bates’ letter entitled “Area Studies and the Discipline” (American Political Science Association, Comparative Politics 1, Winter 1996, pp. 1-2) uses the occasion of the SSRC’s abolishing of area committees to announce that “within the academy, the consensus has formed that area studies has failed to generate scientific knowledge.” As someone who has done some of his most important work on African development issues, Bates deplores declining investment in area studies as a “loss to the social sciences, as well as to the academy,” at an inopportune moment, “just when our [political science] discipline is becoming equipped to handle area knowledge in a rigorous fashion.”

scholarly journals Globalization, Class and Culture in Global Systems

2000 ◽  
pp. 636-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global Age ◽  
The World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
Global Systems ◽  
Proper Account

The work of Immanuel Wallerstein has been criticized by certain anthropologists for not having taken culture into proper account. He has been accused of the sin of political economy, a not uncommon accusation, a re?ex of the 80’s and post-80’s anthropological jargon that might ?nally today be exhausted. Years earlier a number of social scientists were engaged in a critical assessment of the social sciences from a distinctively global perspective. Wallerstein, Frank and others were at the forefront of this critique which had a powerful impact on anthropology. The global perspective was not a mere addition to anthropological knowledge, not a mere of extension of the use of the culture concept, i.e. before it was local and now it is global, before culture stood still, but now in the global age, it ?ows around the world. It was a more fundamental critique, or at least it implied a more fundamental critique. This critique could only be attained from a perspective in which the very concept of society was re-conceived as something very different, as a locus constructed within a historical force ?eld which was very much broader than any particular politically de?ned unit.

scholarly journals Global History, Area studies, and the Idea of Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Global History ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Image Caption

In most history departments on the European continent Europe is History while the history of other regions only can be described as “area studies.” This paper investigates the long-term origins of these attitudes, since Humanism and the Enlightenment, down to Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries forms of history writing. It finally suggests to overcome area studies and decentralise social sciences.   Image Caption: Giovanni Maria Cassini, Globo terrestre, in Nuovo atlante geografico universale delineato sulle ultime osservazioni (Rome, 1790). © 2000 by Cartography Associates, under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence.

scholarly journals Lusotopie, Lusotopy. What Legacy, What Future?

Lusotopie ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-203
Author(s):  
Michel Cahen ◽  
Irène Dos Santos
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

AbstractThe introduction of this issue goes back over the history of the creation of the Lusotopie journal. It also questions the scope of the concept of lusotopy in the social sciences. The intellectual project of the journal, published from 1994 onwards, was complex and ambitious. Lusotopie is not a review of “cultural-area” studies, but a generalist review of political analysis, in the broadest sense, from an empirically-delimited research field: that of the area drawn by Portuguese history and colonization. It was both to escape the contemporary neo-imperial approach of “Lusophony” and to overcome the simply negative criticism of the ideology of Lusophony (in its literary, political and economic aspects), which as such does not provide a tool for understanding the realities produced by history.

Transatlantic Studies: The Discipline that Thinks Itself Beyond its Threshold

2019 ◽  
pp. 30-42
Author(s):  
Joan Ramon Resina
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Value ◽  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
Institutional Pressures ◽  
Transatlantic Studies ◽  
Hispanic Studies ◽  
Latin Americanism

Transatlantic studies can be seen as a response to institutional pressures to rationalize resources by collapsing former units into “super-regional” frames of reference. Transatlanticism proposes an inter-continental framework, bringing under its canopy the cognate but often alienated specialties of Hispanism and Latin Americanism. In the “new” discipline, the old system of Hispanic studies, featuring the culture of Castilian Spain and its linguistic legacy in the nations born of its former colonies, reasserts itself under conditions of scarcity associated with the implosion of the Humanities. An alternative to this “modern” paradigm could be a postmodern, ironic discipline. The mark of the postmodern is the retention of pre-modern elements within an incongruous structure operating with a different functionality. For transatlantic Hispanism, irony could translate into awareness of the discipline’s imperial origins, while recasting it according to a new principle of organization that no longer rests on the alleged universality of an imperial language that fixes cultural value. An ironic discipline takes stock of its limits, and by doing so leaves them conceptually behind. In this way, and in this way only, it thinks the “trans” of the “trans” and assumes its place in the post-postmodern university.

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