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This book is about Enlightenment culture in Spanish America before Independence-in short, there where, according to Hegel, one would least expect to find it. It explores the Enlightenment in texts from five cultural fields: science, history, the periodical press, law, and literature. Texts include 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 book's premise is that the above texts not only speak to the contradictions of a doubtless marginalised colonial American Ilustración but illuminate the constitutive aporias ofthe so-called modern project itself.
Drawing on the work of Derrida, but also on both 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.
List of contents
1. Introduction: How Not to Write the History of the Spanish American Enlightenment.- 2. Science: Three Degrees of Modernity: The 1735 Franco-Hispanic Expedition to Quito and the question of universal science.- 3. History: Conjectures on Commerce and the "Stages of Civilisation": Philosophical Histories of America.- 4. Periodical Press: Faith and Knowledge in the Mercurio Peruano.- 5. Law: Prologue to Revolution: Mariano Moreno Translates Rousseau.- 6. Literature: The Idle Noble and the Noble Citizen: El periquillo sarniento and the Invention of the Mexican Individual.- 7. Conclusion.
About the author
Adam Sharman is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nottingham, UK. His books include
Tradition and Modernity in Spanish American Literature,
Otherwise Engaged: After Hegel and the Philosophy of History, and the co-edited
1812 Echoes: The Cadiz Constitution in Hispanic History, Culture and Politics.
