Call for articles: Invented Traditions: Intellectuals, Political Identities and Public Uses of the Past in Latin America (19th-21st Centuries)
Since the 19th century, in several regions of Latin America, we have witnessed multiple instances of the “invention of traditions” – according to Eric Hobsbawm's classic definition – being applied, in general, to the construction of the Nation-State. The production of immemorial heroic narratives could thus be verified in such contexts, a production which would seek to give meaning and identity to then recent political units. As new governments would start putting modernization projects into practice, or as various peripheral regions were incorporated into the international capitalist economy, the original political mythologies would gather new impulses and developments, often including the dramatization of the imagined past, in rituals formalized by intellectuals, as if those were representative of popular culture. New collective movements and institutions would make use of already consolidated literate practices and scientific discourses, or of disciplines and areas of learning still in early stages of development, with the same intention of representing the past, the nation and/or the region: literature, history, geography, folklore, visual arts, humanities in general. Besides the nationalist – and regionalist – objectives, the following characteristics can also be highlighted: the countryside/city dichotomy, which would assign to the former the status of an enduring autochthonous past common to a certain broader space; the opposition to ideas of modernity, as a conservative reaction to social changes; the ambition to safeguard habits and customs perceived to be on the verge of extinction; an imaginary geography, which would elaborate symbolic boundaries correlating to physical and political borders; and the adaptation of local projects to more general invention strategies, fueled by the international economy of cultural products, such as the identification of characteristic attributes of the nation (costumes, drinks, food, dances, animals, landscapes and typical figures).
From the perspective of sociocultural history, supported by transnational history which focuses on the circulation of people, meanings, ideas and texts, this proposal for a thematic dossier has as its core objective to bring into dialogue new investigations focused on the role of intellectuals in the construction of cultural identities through the manipulation of the Latin American past. Papers analyzing traditions invented by civil sectors and/or directed by the State apparatus, with its political motivations, will be welcome; as well as those discussing political myths based on traditional historiography; and those reviewing the construction of national and regional stereotypes based on fabricated pasts and memory disputes.
Editors:
Dr. Jocelito Zalla, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (CAp/UFRGS, PPGH/UFRGS, Profhistória/UFRGS)
Dr. Matías Emiliano Casas, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Universidad Tres Febrero [Buenos Aires] (UNTREF)
