Notes on Emerson in Latin America

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Englekirk

A number of chapters—some definitive, others suggestive—have already appeared to afford us a clearer picture of the reception of United States writers and writings in Latin America. Studies on Franklin, Poe, Longfellow, and Whitman provide reasonably good coverage on major representative figures of our earlier literary years. There are other nineteenth-century writers, however, who deserve more extended treatment than that given in the summary and bibliographical studies available to date. A growing body of data may soon make possible the addition of several significant chapters with which to round out this period in the history of inter-American literary relations. Bryant and Dickinson will be the only poets to call for any specific attention. Fiction writers will prove more numerous. Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Hearn, Hart, Melville, and Twain will figure in varying degrees of prominence. Of these, some like Irving and Cooper early captured the Latin American imagination; others like Hawthorne, and particularly Melville, were to remain virtually unknown until our day. Paine and Prescott and Mann will represent yet other facets of American letters and thought.

Author(s):  
Nicola Miller

This chapter recounts the Latin American countries that welcomed foreign innovation and expertise for technically demanding infrastructure projects. It mentions how the American continent's first railways were built by Spanish American engineers under contract to the respective states, contrary to the common belief that British or US American companies always led the way. It also focuses on the visibility and intensity of public concern about the relationship between science and sovereignty in late nineteenth-century Latin America. The chapter reviews the overlooked history of resistance in Latin American countries on handing over infrastructure projects to private companies, especially if they were foreign owned. It disputes conceptions of the role of the state and provides further evidence for the argument that free-market liberals did not have their own way in nineteenth-century Latin America.


2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Brown ◽  
Gabriel Paquette

The independence of Latin America from colonial rule in the first decades of the nineteenth century is generally held to have broken the bonds which had linked Europe to the Americas for three centuries. This article contends that a re-examination of the decade of the 1820s reveals the persistence, as well as the reconfiguration, of connections between the Old World and the New after the dissolution of the Iberian Atlantic monarchies. Some of these multi-faceted connections are introduced and explored, most notably commercial ties, intellectual and cultural influences, immigration, financial obligations, the slave trade and its suppression, and diplomatic negotiations. Recognition and appreciation of these connections has important consequences for our understandings of the history of the Atlantic World, the ‘Age of Revolutions’, and Latin American Independence itself.


Author(s):  
Pablo Palomino

This chapter tells the history of the German-born Uruguayan musicologist Francisco Curt Lange and the Latin-American Music Bulletin he created, a musicological project intended as a forum for musicians and music-related figures from all over Latin America, and the United States, interested in creating a regional field of musicological studies and musical promotion. It examines policies about disc collection, score printing and distribution, musical ethnographies, folklore, musical analysis, conferences, concerts, and regional institutions promoted by the Bulletin, and traces relevant aspects of Lange’s professional journey between Germany, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, among other places. The chapter also highlights the changing place of the United States, both as a subject of musicological study and as a site of music-related hemispheric initiatives, in the history of this Latin Americanist project.


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 735-742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Brickhouse

Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts. A World Not to Come concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz, Ambassadors xi).


1981 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-367
Author(s):  
Claude Pomerleau

French Catholicism inspired one of the most ambitious missionary movements in the history of Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century. French missionaries went to Latin America to build a new Church. In France, new missionary societies were founded for this task. Older, established religious societies were renewed in order to participate in the missionary movement of the day. French missionaries travelled across the globe establishing a network of missions linking the continents to France, and France to Rome. The missionary revival constituted the leading edge of religious renewal sweeping Europe and France during the nineteenth century.The Latin American Church was especially receptive to French religious currents. Latin American religious leaders were preoccupied with internal struggles and absorbed with social and political conflicts. They disposed of few resources and of limited energy for evangelization and religious renewal within their newly-formed nations. The French were anxious and able to supply what was needed in Latin America. The French saw the missionary challenge as a struggle against secularization and liberalism, even though that battle was far from over within France itself.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-253
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Ablard

Abstract This paper argues that many of the foundations and trends that led to the rise in obesity and other diet-related health problems in Latin America began to develop in the late nineteenth century. The tendency towards presentism in the nutrition transition literature provides a much abbreviated and limited history of changes in diet and weight. Whereas medical and nutrition researchers have tended to emphasize the recent onset of the crisis, a historical perspective suggests that increasingly global food sourcing prompted changes in foodways and a gradual “fattening” of Latin America. This paper also provides a methodological and historiographic exploration of how to historicize the nutrition transition, drawing on a diverse array of sources from pre-1980 to the present.


1991 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 71-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Bethell

It is in my case a particular honour to address the Royal Historical Society. As president of the Society for four years in the 1960s, Professor R. A. Humphreys, the first holder of the Chair of Latin American History in the University of London which I have been privileged to hold since 1986 (and, incidentally, my teacher both as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate student), gave a series of distinguished presidential addresses on aspects of British and United States policy towards Latin America, and Anglo-American rivalries in Latin America, during the nineteenth century. But it seems that I am the first historian of Latin America to present a paper to the Society on a specifically Latin American theme.


Author(s):  
Pablo Palomino

This book reconstructs the transnational history of the category of Latin American music during the first half of the twentieth century, from a longer perspective that begins in the nineteenth century and extends the narrative until the present. It analyzes intellectual, commercial, state, musicological, and diplomatic actors that created and elaborated this category. It shows music as a key field for the dissemination of a cultural idea of Latin America in the 1930s. It studies multiple music-related actors such as intellectuals, musicologists, policymakers, popular artists, radio operators, and diplomats in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, and different parts of Europe. It proposes a regionalist approach to Latin American and global history, by showing individual nations as both agents and result of transnational forces—imperial, economic, and ideological. It argues that Latin America is the sedimentation of over two centuries of regionalist projects, and studies the place of music regionalism in that history.


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Rhett McNeil

Brazilian literature is traditionally understood to have developed in relative isolation from the literatures of Hispanophone Latin America, inhabiting a peripheral cultural space within the already peripheral sphere of Latin American literature. Perhaps the most striking example of this traditional conception is the commonly held assumption of the complete literary-historical separation of two of Latin America’s most renowned fiction writers: the Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. Machado de Assis, in particular, is often regarded as inhabiting a double cultural periphery, as both a Latin American and a Brazilian, who, furthermore, wrote in a “minor” language, never traveled outside of his own country, and rarely ever left his native Rio de Janeiro. Another enduring belief, tangential to the tale of Brazil’s cultural isolation, is that Machado de Assis’s work went untranslated, by and large, until about half a century after his death. Yet the early translation history of Machado’s work offers a fascinating insight into the literary ties that connect his work to the dominant literary cultures of the Americas and Europe and provides an intriguing literary-historical link between Machado de Assis and Jorge Luis Borges. Curiously, the connection between Machado and Borges, whose countries share a border, follows a route of translational cultural exchange through France and Spain, and involves a prolific translator who was both the first Spanish translator of Machado’s short fiction and the mentor of a young Borges: Rafael Cansinos Assens. Thus, the early history of Machado’s fiction in translation demonstrates that Machado is a much less peripheral figure than previously imagined, and that, through Machado, Brazilian literature is more intimately intertwined with the literatures of Hispanophone Latin America and the cultural capitals of Europe than critics and scholars have recognized.


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