Fantasies of Independence and Their Latin American Legacies.

Abstract

In my dissertation I investigate a claim of cultural autonomy at the heart of Latin American discourses of identity, and its relation to the concept of nature. When transitioning to the modern political nomos of the nation-state, once political independence had already been attained, Latin American Creoles asserted their cultural autonomy from Spain, elaborating it as a total rupture with the past. The originality of their new national cultures was supposed to derive from America’s status as a romantic state of nature: a landscape set outside the flow of history, a tabula rasa onto which an entirely new history could be written. I argue that rather than being the true basis of historical rupture, the concept of nature acted as an ideology that veiled, and thus perpetuated the imperial logic that Creoles claimed to overcome. In this way, nature became a central tenet of modern Latin American political theology, a territorialized concept of divinity (for romantics) and truth (for scientific-positivism), which, during different periods and under various guises, has served as an ideological ground of the independent nation. From independence onward, Latin American identity would be asserted time and again through depictions of America as a state of nature, consecrating a desire to destroy and displace the past as an a cornerstone of its culture, and thus perpetuating its founding myths. My dissertation investigates the origins of this claim of natural cultural autonomy, its repetition throughout the history of Latin American discourse, and the way in which it has been critiqued. First I investigate the post-independence period by reading the work of José María Heredia, Andrés Bello, Esteban Echevarría, and Domingo F. Sarmiento, and showing how José Martí adopted their vision of American nature for his thinking of Pan-Latin Americanism and Cuban Independence at the turn of the century. In subsequent chapters I describing how the question of cultural autonomy and nature continues to evolve and investigate the legacy of independence thinking through readings of Latin American literary thinkers such as Jorge Luis Borges, José Eustasio Rivera, Alejo Carpentier, and Augusto Roa Bastos.