Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
Accepted Paper:
Nature, space and history in twentieth-century Argentina: revisiting the historicist paradigm
Michela Coletta
(University of Warwick)
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to explore the ways in which twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals reformulated the region's identity by reappraising nature as an essential component of modernity.
Paper long abstract:
The idea of the primitiveness of the American continent with respect to civilised Europe was fully established in the eighteenth century, as European scholars laid the ground for a theory of the inferiority of the natural world in the Americas. The philosophical peak of the debate was reached in the early nineteenth century, when G.W.F. Hegel gave his famous Lectures on the Philosophy of History placing Europe in the realm of 'history' and America in the realm of 'nature'. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals reformulated the region's identity by reappraising nature as an essential component of modernity. Ultimately, this paper aims to shed new light on Latin America's original and often neglected contribution to ongoing debates about the nature/culture divide in the Western world.