'Performing Latin Americanism: Body, Technology, Activism'

Gordon-Burroughs, J. (Organiser)
Gibbings, J. (Organiser)
Macintyre, I. (Participant)
Javier Uriarte (Participant)
Fernando Degiovanni (Invited speaker)

Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Period	27 Apr 2021
Event type	Seminar

Documents & Links

In 1911, the Argentine intellectual Manuel Ugarte started a two-year lecture tour of Latin America and the United States with a crucial question in mind: can Latin Americanism be an embodied practice? His visit to every single country in the Western hemisphere—an almost logistical impossibility at the time—was conceived as a deliberate tour de force against dematerialized, aesthetically oriented, utopian formulations of continental unity put forward a few years earlier by influential turn-of-the-century writers such as José E. Rodó, José Martí and Rubén Darío. Formulated at a time US expansionism in the region, Ugarte’s project of continental integration signals the crisis of humanism as Latin Americanism’s ideological foundation. My paper will explore an alternative history of Latin Americanisms—one founded on embodied performances, communications networks, and social activism. This will allow us to rethink the material, situated foundations of a specific form of transnationalism whose political and epistemological imperatives continue to concerns its defenders and critics up to the present.