The Specter of Races

Anke Birkenmaier's sweeping critical panorama is an engaging chronicle of national dramas, local re-articulations, and transnational networks of scholars, writers, and artists that made the inter-War era a paradigm-shifting point in debates about theoretical constructs of "race" and "culture."Impressively wide-ranging, it is an homage to the historical moment that saw the final dislodging of a racist positivism's "razas de librería" (invented, "bookshelf races," in José Martí's late nineteenth-century formulation) and a definitive intellectual dethroning of eugenics' conventional pseudoscience.Emphasizing the novel synergies, the less strictly racial-pecking-order-inclined visions of acculturation, the transculturation, and the greater cross-fertilization and revitalizing expansion of scholarly fields (history, archeology, sociology, linguistics, literature, and the arts) these all produced, it similarly highlights the more amply humanistic anthropology and holistic fresh perceptions of Latin American national cultures, their transnational connections, and the wider cohesiveness these new articulations, fusions, and convergences give rise to.It is precisely its contestatory disposition, the synergetic features, and the methodological innovations then introduced, Birkenmaier argues, that make this period a genuine precursor of our own era's "canon wars," as well as contemporary postcolonial, cultural, Global South, and interdisciplinary studies.Her lens takes in areas of the Caribbean, Europe, and South America, stretching across at least four languages.Against each setting's sociohistorical particularities and, more often than not, highly charged political landscape, her larger survey pivots around the intellectual trajectory, evolving scholarly activity, and impact (as thinkers, promoters of new ideas, scholarly journals, and institutional structures, as well as nodal points in growing transnational networks of dialogic connection) of some of her chosen moment's most signally representative

Art · Fyodor · Humanism · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Transculturation · Vision · Anthropology · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law