Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #5: latin america 171
presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush as the imponderable spirit that
keeps Western civilization alive.
Blindness is not a feature that can be attributed to those living and making
local histories engendering and enacting global designs as universal
models. Perhaps one of the most salient features of the late eighteenth century
in western Europe was the fact that it was projected from hegemonic
local histories and embraced by subaltern ones as a model to be imitated.
The confl uence of the industrial revolution in England with the social revolution
in France, together with the powerful philosophical contribution
of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, became a desirable model for others, including
rising nation-states (e.g., in the Americas), imperial states in decay (e.g.,
Spain), nations peripheral to the modern/colonial world (e.g., the North
Atlantic world), and countries that joined in the standards of civilization at
the end of the nineteenth (e.g., China and Japan). Spain is an interesting case
for my argument. I would like to quote Leopoldo Zea’s description of the
situation of Spain at the turn of the eighteenth century vis-à-vis the global
order and the interior confl ict and borders of the modern/colonial world:
The fi rst half of the nineteenth century witnessed a constant struggle
for liberalism in Spain, which, though repressed again and again, sought
to change her into a modern nation. It was a version of liberalism
perpetually battling the forces of theocratic Spain and the interests of
Western Europe that were turning Spain into a new economic colony
for the profi t of the West. The liberal struggled in vain to establish a
national bourgeoisie, a middle class which, as in Western Europe [e.g.,
France, England, Germany, Holland], would contribute greatly to the
new Spanish nation. [. . .]
What liberalism could no longer do was to carry out the necessary
social, political, and economic reforms to transform Spain into a
modern nation. In Spain, as in Spanish America during the same period,
old privileges remained in force and prevented the establishment of
a middle class that might have acted as a springboard for the nation’s
progress. 31
There is more to it, however, as Philip Silver has shown in his analysis
of Spanish romanticism and intellectuals and their reaction to Napoleon’s
invasion of Spain at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 32 The Spanish
were caught in a double bind: they envisioned a modernization of Spain following
(and imitating) the northern (French and English) model, but they
could not of course endorse Napoleon’s invasion. The decision to imitate