Idea of Latin America

ISBN-13: 9781405100861 / Angielski / Miękka / 1991 / 220 str.

Walter D. Mignolo

Opis

The Idea of Latin America is a geo-political manifesto which insists on the need to leave behind an idea which belonged to the nation-building mentality of nineteenth-century Europe.

• Charts the history of the concept of Latin America from its emergence in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century through various permutations to the present day.
  
• Asks what is at stake in the survival of an idea which subdivides the Americas.
  
• Reinstates the indigenous peoples and migrations excluded by the image of a homogenous Latin America with defined borders.
  
• Insists on the pressing need to leave behind an idea which belonged to the nation-building mentality of nineteenth-century Europe.

Spis treści

Acknowledgments.

Preface: Uncoupling the Name and the Reference.

1 The Americas, Christian Expansion, and the Modern/Colonial Foundation of Racism.

2 “Latin” America and the First Reordering of the Modern/Colonial World.

3 After “Latin” America: The Colonial Wound and the Geo–Political/Body–Political Shift.

Postface: After “America”.

Notes.

Index

O autorze

Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wanamaker Professor and Director of Global Studies and the Humanities at the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. His recent publications include Local Histories / Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000) and The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995). He is founder and co–editor of the journal, Disposition, and co–founder and co–editor of Nepantla: Views from the South.

Blurb

The term "Latin" America supposes that there is an America that is Latin, which can be defined in opposition to one that is not. This geo–political manifesto revisits the idea of Latinity, charting the history of the concept from its emergence in Europe under France′s leadership, through its appropriation by the Creole élite of South America and the Spanish Caribbean in the second half of the nineteenth century, up to the present day.

Reinstating the indigenous peoples, the enormous population of African descent and the 40 million Latino/as in the US that are rendered invisible by the image of a homogenous Latin America, the author asks what is at stake in the survival of an idea which subdivides the Americas. He explains why an "American Union" similar to the European Union is at this point unthinkable and he insists on the pressing need to leave behind an idea of Latinity which belongs to the Creole/Mestizo mentality of the nineteenth century.