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

post what?! (not) an abbreviated introduction 25
Where Is the Real Me?! Identity
We are now ready to move on to the issue of identity, and more specifi cally,
to identity categories, which will assume center stage for the remainder of
this book. With these few introductory pages behind us, we can now be more
specifi c about the goals of this book. In short, it is about how authors over the
past two centuries have constructed Latin American identity. These writers,
all of them major literary and political fi gures, described Latin America, or
portions of it, in the belief that they were availing their readers of truths. In
disseminating their discoveries, these authors were driven by a deep civic
responsibility. They wanted to share their ideas with their fellow citizens in
hopes of building support for public policies that would accord with these
truths and thereby improve society for everyone. In other words, they were
modernists. In this book we will show how these authors operated within
discursive fi elds and constructed identities, rather than discovering them.
We have said that René Descartes was foundational in the “discovery” of
the individual, in the modernist conception of that word. Thereafter, thinkers
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries like John Locke and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, among others, theorized social and political systems in
accordance with this newly discovered individual. But it was the Romantics,
in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, who pushed the notion of the
individual to unprecedented heights. They said that each individual was a
distinct being, possessing an essence or core that was uniquely theirs. The
Romantics certainly credited their early modern forerunners for discovering
individuality and for releasing it from the confi nes of premodernity. But they
believed early modernists had limited humanity’s potential with an overly
mechanistic approach to life, a legacy of the scientifi c revolution. This stifl ed
true individual expression, according to the Romantics. They advocated releasing
the individual from the bounds of early modern convention, calling
for the exploration of humanity’s more complex, emotional side. Borrowing
from Descartes, the Romantics insisted that each of us feels distinctly and,
therefore, that each of us exists uniquely.
We can see the presence of this Romantic individual even now, in the
early twenty-fi rst century. Take, for instance, the following example from
Joseph Bailey, author of numerous books about relationships and personal
health:
Most of us go through life gaining only glimpses of our true or natural
self. . . . Our true self is the essence of who we are, unencumbered by
history or culture or learned ideas of who we think we are. That true