Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Placing Latin America in Modern World History Textbooks

2004; Duke University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-84-3-411

1527-1900

Susan K. Besse,

History and Politics in Latin America

Most two-volume world history textbooks divide the history of the world somewhere around 1500, associating the conquest and colonization of the Americas with the birth of the modern world system. Precious metals, commodities, and slave labor from the New World and Africa spurred the development of mercantile capitalism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the maturation of European absolutist states. These, in conjunction with encounters with different peoples, gave birth to a synergy of political ideologies and philosophical tools that propelled Europe to world domination. Hence, the invention of America involved the simultaneous invention of Europe as the “West.”Yet, in most of the earliest world history textbooks, which were typically Western civilizations texts with a few new chapters grafted on, Latin America barely enters the narrative. William McNeill’s 712-page, 1997 edition of A History of the Human Community (first published in 1963 as The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community), includes less than 20 pages about Latin America. McNeill’s thematic focus on contacts among strangers as the motor force of creative invention and historical change leads him to recognize the key role of China in world history. However, Latin American peoples and civilizations do not count among those that “achieved unusual creativity and then impelled or compelled those around them (and, in time, across long distances) to alter their accustomed style of life.”1Recent world history textbooks have been beefed up with additional pages about peripheral regions in general, and Latin America in particular, but this has not automatically rescued these areas from irrelevance. Even Peter Stearns, who includes a lengthy chapter on twentieth-century Latin America in his 2002 edition of World History in Brief, concludes that the region “has always occupied a somewhat ambiguous place in world history.” First, it does not fit neatly into either “Western” or “non-Western” societies, but is better seen as a “syncretic civilization.” Second, although Stearns judges that continuing dependency makes Latin America a full participant in the world economy, it participates “not always influentially.” Latin Americans “have generated neither dramatic cultural forms nor catastrophic military upheavals of international impact. Nationalism and literary preoccupation with issues of Latin American identity follows from a sense of being ignored and misunderstood in the wider world.”2 Somewhat apologetically, Stearns predicts that the region will have an increasing international impact in the twenty-first century thanks to its growing population, economic advances, and new cultural self-consciousness.Indeed, in the United States (where the Hispanic population has recently surpassed the African American population and continues to grow rapidly), it is easy to make a case for expanded coverage of Latin America in world history textbooks on the grounds of academic inclusion. Increasing numbers of His-panic students will demand to learn more about their heritage, and other citizens of the United States will benefit from an awareness of the culture of minority populations with whom they live and work. These are important, but insufficient, reasons for increased coverage of the region in world history courses. New chapters that make up for past omissions—compensatory history—will accomplish little. Such additions are unlikely to convince either skeptical instructors or overburdened students that the new material is “significant” and thus worthy of much (or any) attention in a crowded semester. Like new sections about women pasted into old androcentric textbooks, such additions do not provoke a reconceptualization of the story; thus, they do nothing to overcome the marginalization of the history of Latin America in the field of world history.Latin America will only be featured more prominently as globalization changes not only our present lives but also the ways in which we question the past. As Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have argued, neither triumphal narratives of the rise of Europe, nor a string of regional histories, can account for a global present that they define as being marked simultaneously by “accelerating integration and proliferating difference.” Rather, an intellectually compelling and relevant history requires attention to the multiple and competing pasts of the many actors who are currently debating the terms of global integration.3 By combining structuralist and postcolonial approaches, it is becoming possible to imagine new narratives that integrate macroanalysis of global systems with serious attention to the everyday lived experiences, ideas, and values of diverse peoples drawn together in relationships of conflict and collaboration.4In my view, the most innovative textbook on modern world history (and one of the very few to do away entirely with separate regional narratives) is Robert Tignor et al., Worlds Together, Worlds Apart. Its central theme of interconnection and divergence plays out in discussions of transregional “exchange and migration, conflict and resistance, and alterations in the balance of power.”5 Like other recent texts, it tells stories of individuals—some famous, some not—who critiqued and resisted change, as well as those who brought about change. But it takes this beyond the anecdotal level, especially in an interesting chapter entitled “Alternative Visions of the Nineteenth Century.” Here the authors focus on dissident intellectuals and grassroots rebels who challenged the values and institutions of capitalists, modernizers, and nation builders. These include African and Asian prophets, European utopians and Marxists, and anticolonial insurgents in India and the Americas. This chapter (which appealed immensely to my students) places subaltern agency at center stage and reveals modernity to be a profoundly polarizing phenomenon. Rather than creating the Enlightenment utopia of a homogeneous and unified humanity, modernity created chasms—still widening today—between rich and poor, believers and nonbelievers, modernizers and traditionalists. In so doing, the chapter provides an important context for understanding the deep historical roots of late-twentieth-century revolutionary movements, Third World and Native American nationalisms, and religious fundamentalism.Shifting from narratives that emphasize progress toward ones that emphasize cross-cultural interactions opens many possibilities; not only does it decenter Europe, but it also moves beyond narratives that measure significance by traditional standards of influence and acknowledges the agency (and not just the victimization) of Latin American societies and peoples. It is not that the traditional themes—conquest and colonization, slavery, racism, wars of independence, nation building, imperialism and neocolonialism, economic development and dependency, and twentieth-century revolutions and social movements—are misguided. Rather, the challenge is to rethink how we discuss these themes in ways that include Latin America as more than a mere appendage of Europe (and later, the United States) and as more than the hapless victim of conquest and exploitation. Although the spread of European power was profoundly disruptive and violent, it was never simply imposed from outside; rather, it always involved complex negotiations with and among local elites and populations, who pursued their own agendas and formulated their own visions in their engagement with European actors and culture. The story of Latin America’s integration into the global sphere is the story of gradual absorption and contestation of Western power into the fabric of local, daily life. Conversely, as the work of Anthony Pagden and others has demonstrated, the New World left a deep and lasting imprint on European culture.6Typically, world history textbook chapters that discuss the conquest and colonization of Latin America are more about European history than about the history of the peoples of the New World. Students usually have many pages to read about European motives and technological advances in shipbuilding, navigation, and mapmaking. In contrast, skimpy information about Native American societies often includes only what is judged necessary to explain their vulnerability to conquest: some combination of technological inferiority, internal political divisions, initial confusion about the identity and motives of the Spaniards, centralization and weakness of leadership, and susceptibility to disease. Furthermore, by conceptualizing the conquest as an event or a series of events and not a process, textbooks quickly displace Native Americans as historical actors.Likewise, a focus on the Columbian exchange is an insufficient means to include colonial Latin America in a global narrative, because it does not involve reconceptualizing Eurocentric paradigms.7 Students should be aware of the catastrophic impacts of disease on Native American populations, the massive global ecological changes that resulted from the conquest of the Americas, population increases that followed the spread of New World crops to Europe, Africa, and Asia, and the commercial revolution sparked by the entrance of vast quantities of silver into the world economy. Yet, this “scientific” analysis of changes in material culture, separated from the important history of cultural confrontations that challenged European notions of human nature and their sense of their place in the universe, communicates a politically charged message about the inevitability and desirability of European world domination. And in the end, it continues to leave Latin American peoples and societies out.In focusing on the Columbian exchange and explaining why Europeans conquered, most textbooks largely ignore the fascinating new literature on cross-cultural encounters that is surely of equal or greater interest and relevance to generations that are living in a world of increasing ethno-racial hybridity and transnational citizenship. Moreover, few historians would dispute that three centuries of Spanish hegemony depended less on military might than on cultural factors and political alliances. Thus, emphasizing the processes of cultural conflict and collaboration is not only relevant to presentist concerns but also key for understanding the dynamics of conquest. Thanks to pioneering new work, we now know much more about how different Native American societies thought about and represented what was happening in their world, how they negotiated relationships with the Spaniards, how they selectively adopted and reconfigured elements of European culture and technology, and how they resisted other demands for change.8 We know that Christian missionaries had far more limited success in erasing traditional religious beliefs than they liked to admit and that European control was often tenuous or incomplete, dependent on the collaboration of indigenous elites, and frequently contested. As Steve Stern has shown, it took many generations for the Spaniards in Peru to impoverish local communities to the extent that they became dependent on the Spanish colonial economy and thus drawn into the Spanish cultural sphere.9 Outside the centers of economic dynamism, conquest took longer; it was delayed until the late nineteenth century in southern Argentina and Chile and into the twentieth century in regions of the Amazon basin. In our own times, the surprising and remarkable revitalization of the struggles of indigenous peoples illuminates the paradoxical strength of localized quests for identity and security within the relentless march toward global integration.Studying the physical and cultural borderlands where Europeans, Native Americans, Africans, and Asians met opens important discussions about the varying and continually changing ways humans have defined the supernatural, physical space and nature, time, value and exchange, health and illness, community and identity, gender, and the “other.” It points to the schisms between abstract, formal scientific knowledge and local forms of knowledge; furthermore, by questioning the possibilities of subaltern forms of knowledge, it challenges the notion of a universal reason. As nonwhite and non-Christian immigrants to the United States and Europe are changing (or upsetting, in the view of many) the demographic and cultural landscape of the West, the history of Latin America can provide illuminating examples of how heterogeneous cultural communities came into being through interaction across boundaries of race, religion, language, and cultural differences. If we seek to tame the violence that has characterized most of such encounters up until now, we would do well to introduce our students to some of the literature on cultural encounters and ethno-racial hybridity. Perhaps greater understanding of the complexities of such encounters can help reduce the cultural myopia that breeds fear.Authors of world history textbooks have had little difficulty incorporating the historiography on the slave trade and plantation economies in Latin America and the Caribbean, since these themes fit well within a structuralist analysis of mercantilism. But again, like chapters on the conquest of the New World, most textbooks pay far less attention to racism and racial mixture, slave rebellion, and the cultural dimensions of slave societies. The case of the Haitian Revolution is instructive. Almost all world history textbooks now include some mention of this “unthinkable history,” to use Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s words.10 If it was “unthinkable” to contemporaries, who did not believe that slaves could envision freedom, much less organize a successful mass revolt, its radical claims remain problematic within the narrative of “the rise of the West,” and thus its significance continues to be trivialized. At best, abbreviated narrative accounts pay tribute to the triumph of the slaves in defeating the French Empire, abolishing slavery, and declaring a black republic. Nevertheless, Stearns says explicitly what other textbook authors imply: that the “Haitian Revolution did not have widespread repercussions.”11 In a boxed insert, “History Debate: Causes of the Abolition of Slavery,” Stearns introduces the debate between historians who emphasize the rise of humanitarian ideas versus those who emphasize the material self-interest of sectors of the British population.12 Interpretations that emphasize the role of slave resistance and revolts in hastening the demise of slavery are not mentioned. Yet the threat posed by the Haitian Revolution to racism, slavery, European imperialism, and the plantation system loomed large in the minds of both slave owners and slaves. This shaped the political choices made by terrified slave owners in Cuba, the United States, and beyond, it influenced the behavior of slaves throughout the Western Hemisphere, and it had an impact on the timing of abolition. How else can one explain that Western powers ostracized Haiti throughout most of the nineteenth century? Moreover, the revolution’s legacies have persisted, as indicated by the publication of C. L. R. James’s brilliant Black Jacobins in 1938, during the height of the pan-African movement, and its later use during the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement as a central text in many literacy classes for African Americans in the South.In a more international vein, the Haitian Revolution also presented the French bourgeoisie with thorny dilemmas rooted in the contradictions between the ideals of liberté, egalité et fraternité, on the one hand, and their material interest in maintaining colonialism, plantation production, class hierarchy, and racism, on the other. As C. L. R. James has shown, understanding the Haitian Revolution is as important for understanding the nature of the French Revolution as vice versa. The Haitian Revolution may have been a “response” to the French Revolution, but Haitian slaves drew upon their own experiences to develop an independent sense of freedom and justice and to articulate independent claims. French revolutionaries, compelled to respond to the radical challenge presented by Haitian slaves, hesitated and wavered. Their self-interested responses shed an often disconcerting light on the nature of bourgeois revolution and classical liberalism.13 Clearly here, as elsewhere, approaching European history from the outside looking in gives us a significantly different perspective on a world in which local rebels compelled international ruling elites to adjust to circumstances they could not entirely control.By the time they reach the twentieth century, most textbook authors give up the string of regional or national narratives in favor of thematic chapters on global developments. But focus on the two world wars, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and the cold war leaves Latin America on the sidelines. In addition, there seems to be great reluctance to conceptualize the history of Latin America within the larger struggles of former colonized nations. As many of Latin America’s leading intellectuals have argued—from José Martí, to Aimé Césaire, to Leopoldo Zea, to Pablo Neruda, to Gabriel García Márquez, among others—the twentieth-century history of the continent mirrors the history of the rest of the so-called Third World in the struggle against European racialist discourses, imperialist aggression, and neocolonial economic exploitation. From the Mexican Revolution on, Latin American intellectuals, artists, and musicians have drawn inspiration from African and indigenous cultural roots in refashioning their national identities.14 Pioneering interpretive efforts in the 1960s and 1970s proposed new frameworks with which to analyze the position of Latin America and other Third World regions in the international sphere: economic dependency, cultural colonialism, pedagogy of the oppressed, and liberation theology.15 Revolutionary movements in Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cuba, Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, and El Salvador reflected global crises in the organization of power, production, and culture. Although they arose from local conflicts and followed their own chronologies, they were played out within international contests of power. They paralleled African and Asian anticolonial and revolutionary movements that struggled to achieve national sovereignty, economic development, and social justice. The creative and diverse ways that Latin American revolutionaries have defined socialism and communism and have dealt with problems of socioeconomic, religious, racial, and gender divides provide interesting counterpoints in a global narrative of twentieth-century revolutions.The different chronology of Latin America’s formal independence has not exempted the continent from the dilemmas—shared by nearly all Third World nations—of how to build stable nations from populations that are ethnically and culturally diverse and economically polarized, nor does it place Latin America in a different position vis-à-vis the neoliberal policies of the IMF and the World Bank. While most Latin American countries experimented with state-led import-substitution development programs from the 1930s to the 1950s, these have been dismantled in favor of export-oriented production, free trade, and privatization. The economic, environmental, and human consequences are similar worldwide. Indeed, Latin America has been at the forefront in dealing with changing patterns of the global division of labor, including the commercialization of agriculture, massive urban and international migration, growing numbers of women in the formal work force, shifting patterns of family organization, rising consumerism, widespread access to international networks of communication, and accentuated socioeconomic polarization.New historiography on women and gender systems presents both enormous potential and challenges for conceptualizing a gendered world history that can bring together the histories of “center” and “peripheral” regions.16 Most promising is the literature concerning the issue of gender and colonialism, with its possibilities for cross-cultural comparisons of how imperial expansion affected not just women and gender systems but also class and racial/ethnic representations and interactions. Two pioneering, but very different, books suggest ways in which the lives of anonymous women in Latin America tightly intertwined with global struggles for power. Verena Martínez-Alier’s study of judicial cases of seduction and elopement in nineteenth-century Cuba illustrates how church and state regulations on sexuality and marriage sought to maintain hierarchies of race, class, and gender and how interracial couples maneuvered to escape the constrictions.17 Irene Silverblatt demonstrates how the gendered discourse of first Inca, and later Spanish, empire builders feminized, and thereby subordinated, colonized men (along with all women), contributing to the consolidation of ethnic, class, and political hierarchies.18 These books place women within a larger global context and provide models for a history that can explain important links between gender systems and political power, without obscuring class and racial differences among women or ignoring women’s agency. The lives and experiences of Latin American women also shed light on more recent global trends, including the gendered ways in which modern nation-states construct citizenship, as well as the differential impacts on men and women of economic development and shifting trends of the international division of labor.19 Finally, the history of the rise of feminisms (conceived of in the plural) can no longer be told as a story of the diffusion of ideas from Europe and the United States. Latin America women of different classes and ethnicities, in revolutionary movements and through daily struggles for survival, have found distinctive ways to link women’s rights to larger movements for social and economic justice.20 Their voices, as recorded in the now abundant testimonial literature of Latin America, tell alternative narratives.21The recent trend in world history to prioritize the theme of technology and environment is not one that will give us tools to integrate better the history of Latin American societies into the global narrative. Nor will “big history.” I find it interesting and stimulating to ask the sorts of questions that underlie “big history,” but these should not be the ones that frame world history curricula. The search by two of the leading proponents—Fred Spier and Jared Diamond—for a single, all-encompassing theoretical framework that can unify all knowledge is illusory and dangerous. Moreover, the answers to the big questions they pose—which falsely claim greater scientific merit by drawing on hard data and subordinating culture to the realm of the epiphenomenal—are not ones that can help us in the contemporary world to explain such short-term phenomenon as racism, sexism, religious fundamentalism, rapidly shifting patterns of imperial power, and so on. In short, these frameworks of analysis do not contribute to our understanding of our near and distant neighbors nor to imagining how to build stable and just societies.22 We need to ask questions that will make inquiry into the histories and cultures of all the world’s peoples—including Latin Americans—relevant.The historical experience of Latin America since 1492 mirrors the global present, in which the multiple pasts of Native Americans, Europeans, Africans, and Asians have collided and intertwined, producing increasingly integrated, yet heterogeneous, modern societies. That Latin America cannot be neatly defined as either Western or non-Western should not be seen as a “problem.” Rather, the problem lies in paradigms that naturalize and universalize the experiences of Europe and that rank the societies of the world according to the degree to which they achieved the technological advancement and social and political modernity of Europe. Only when we frame new questions that move beyond strongly materialist and developmentalist measures of historical influence and significance will Latin America seem relevant. No amount of pressure for equal attention can substitute for a paradigm shift that charts intellectually compelling paths for how to write a culturally sensitive, socially inclusive world history: one that asks how major global transformations have been experienced by people whose impact has been deemed insignificant and that gives priority to analyzing gender, race, racial mixture, and cultural syncretism. As we move in this direction, Latin American voices will begin to count for more than a few distracting passages.