Latin American
Critical Book Review
Civantos, Christina. Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab
Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006.
Orientalism was a term coined by the postcolonial theorist Edward Said to describe the reduction of Middle Eastern or East Asian culture to a kind of exotic literary trope. Said discusses this development mainly in relation to European powers and their colonial possessions, but Christina Civantos in her 2006 text Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity examines the phenomenon of Orientalism specifically in a Latin American context. Argentina was one of the most ethnically diverse societies of Latin America. The debate over colonialism, Nationalism, Orientalism took on a unique character in the country because of its cross-section of identities. European, Indian, and Arabs were all determined to create their unique subjectivity in relation to the nation.
The history of Arabs in Argentina is a fairly little-known part of the nation's past, but by examining the dual claims of Euro-Argentineans and Arab Argentineans over the native figure of the gaucho, Civantos presents a kind of case study of the difficulty of pinning down the question of what or who is really Argentinean. The wandering, footloose cowboy herding cattle on the plains seemed to be a...
While this may not sound controversial now, at the time it was, as Brazilian scientists and doctors would typically attempt to conform to whatever had recently been discovered in Western Europe without trying to generate any of their own original contributions to their fields. The Escola Tropicalista Bahiana, on the other hand, would attempt to merge tropical medicine with the latest European advances, in an effort to producing medical
Latin American History What were the main external and internal threats facing the Spanish Empire in the Americas from the 16th -19th centuries? The Spanish Empire, by virtue of the timing of the discovery and placement of colonies in the New World, was the first global empire. Spain, however, was very dependent upon the resources it could export in order to battle England and France for hegemony on the seas and
Latin American History For the first two generations of Latin America's radicals, liberals and democrats, the legacy of the colonial past was a terrible burden that their countries had to overcome in order to achieve progress and social and economic development. That legacy included absolutism, arbitrary rule, aristocracy, feudalism, slavery, oppression of the indigenous peoples, lack of public education and the overwhelming power of the Catholic Church, backed by the state.
Latin America Revolutions Except for the glaring exception of Brazil, the Latin American revolutions established republics from Mexico to Argentina, although the new governments were never particularly liberal or democratic. They certainly did not grant equal citizenship to, much less social and economic equality, while women, slaves, servants, and indigenous peoples mostly remained under traditional patriarchal controls. Some revolutionaries like Jose Morelos in Mexico and Batista Campos in Brazil did demand
System of castas/Latin American History Among many contributions of Mexico to the present American culture few are considered more significant than the concept of Mestizaje referring to the racial and cultural and synthesis. Mexico came out to be a fusion of the old and new world, particularly after the Spanish invasion during 16th century. Ever since the inception of the conquest the interracial sexual unions among Indians, Europeans, Africans and Asians
Latin America: Political or Apolitical Forrest Colburn argues in his book, Latin America at the End of Politics that ideological conflicts between the conservative and liberal ideologies have lost their pull in Latin America and a new more apolitical consensus about government has emerged regionally. This work will analyze and evaluate Colburn's claims regarding the new ideology of Latin America. Specifically, the work will compare Colburn's theories with the case material
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