M auricio T enorio -T rillo . Latin America

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo’s Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea examines the persistence of the idea of Latin America—an idea that should have withered away long ago, together with the obsolescence of racial theory. Through many metamorphoses, this nineteenth-century idea has survived into the present and still shapes the institutional study of the Americas. Two intellectual and political currents rooted in preoccupations about empire and race, iberismo and latinité, gave initial impulse to the idea of uniting Ibero-American and “Latin” peoples. Over time, the idea mutated into something else, turning into a multidisciplinary field of research and teaching called “Latin American studies.” In the United States, the idea acquired the form of a grotesque simplification that the author calls the “text-book version” of Latin America. Few have resisted the temptation of this idea—among them, nineteenth-century Brazilian scholars and art historians. Furthermore, the idea never penetrated beneath the superficial waters of academic discourse. Popular music and poetry in Latin America remained immune to this term, until the canción de protesta (protest song) in the 1960s and 1970s disseminated the utopia of a continental revolution among the masses. Yet by the late 1980s, this movement ceased and popular music regained its global, hybrid, and polysemic condition.

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Empire · Genius · Latin Americans · Literature · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Temptation · Theology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy