Deconstructing the Enlightenment in Spanish America: Margins of Modernity

Sharman, Adam

Abstract

This book is about Enlightenment culture in Spanish America before Independence—there where, according to Hegel, one would least expect to find it. It explores texts from five cultural fields (science, history, the periodical press, law, and literature), including the journals of the geodesic expedition to Quito, philosophical histories of the Americas, a year’s work from the Mercurio Peruano, the writings of Mariano Moreno, and Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento. Each chapter takes one field, one body of writing, and one key question: Is modern science universal? Can one disavow the discourse of progress? What is a “Catholic” Enlightenment? Are Enlightenment reason and sovereignty monological? Must the individual be the normative subject of modernity? The above texts, the book contends, illuminate not only the contradictions of a marginalised colonial American Ilustración, but the constitutive aporias of the modern project itself.

Drawing on work by Derrida, but also on historical and philosophical accounts of the various Enlightenments, this incisive book will be of interest to students of Spanish America and scholars in the fields of postcolonialism and the Enlightenment.

Citation

Sharman, A. (2020). Deconstructing the Enlightenment in Spanish America: Margins of Modernity. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37019-0

• Book Type: Authored Book
• Publication Date: 2020-03
• Deposit Date: Jun 3, 2020
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 278
• ISBN: 9783030370183
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37019-0
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4564070
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-37019-0