The paradoxes of (anti-)imperialism: Reason, religion, and resistance in the Latin American 'arielista' essay, 1898--1921
Item
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Title
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The paradoxes of (anti-)imperialism: Reason, religion, and resistance in the Latin American 'arielista' essay, 1898--1921
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:66b06241de11:11877
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identifier
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12510
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Creator
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McDaniel, Shawn,
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Contributor
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Oscar Montero
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Latin American studies | Latin American literature | Latin American history | Arielismo | Arielistas | Latin American Intellectual History | Latin American Philosophy | Rodó | José Enrique | U.S./Latin American Relations
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Abstract
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This project analyzes the concept of arielismo in the Latin American essay during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The principle argument of this study is that arielismo, far from a coherent, literary movement, is in reality rife with ambiguities, contradictions, and constant semantic shifts. Therefore, my analysis highlights the origin of the term, its ubiquity, as well as its limitations by focusing on the personal, sociopolitical, historical, and geopolitical contexts that inform the important but imprecise journey of arielismo in Latin American cultural history. Arielismo appears to be a fluid concept loosely based on Jose Enrique Rodo's essay, Ariel (1900).;Most of this investigation is dedicated to the study of a series of essays and essayists that critics tend to call 'arielistas', a tendency I interrogate by underscoring the different ways in which the so-called ' arielistas' from various Latin American countries such as Cuba, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Uruguay, subvert or diverge from the fundamental precepts of Ariel. Specifically, I study the ways in which a variegated group of Latin American intellectuals, from the right and left, diplomats and anarchists, negotiate the discrepancies between reason and spiritualism, between elitism and democratic participation, between critical autonomy and religious hegemony, and between idealism and pessimism, in their respective projects, which were written in an time of frequent U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.;My readings of arielismo reveal that a Latin American anti-imperialist subjectivity, far from uniform, is marked by numerous paradoxes. As I will underscore throughout this investigation, those paradoxes reveal arielismo to be a terrain in which complex and contradictory negotiations aimed at assimilating intellectual and personal resistance and emancipation with traditional sociocultural structures. This is a dichotomy that people around the world continue navigating. Therefore, in a broader context this study examines the tensions between reason and religious faith (or between positivism and metaphysics) in various emancipatory projects and, at the same time, between the politics of agency and dependency in globalizing processes during the last century.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Hispanic & Luso Brazilian Literatures & Languages
