Challenging the common view that Latin America has lagged behind Europe and North America in the global history of science, this volume reveals that the region has long been a center for scientific innovation and imagination. It highlights the important relationship between science, politics, and culture in Latin American history.
María del Pilar Blanco is associate professor of Spanish American literature and fellow and tutor in Spanish at Trinity College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination.
Joanna
Page is
professor of Latin American studies at the University of Cambridge. She is the
author of several books, including Decolonizing Science in Latin
American Art.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Latin America?s scientific landscapes
Introduction
María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page
1. Bone Tales: Patagonian Monsters and the Paleontological Imagination
Gabriela Nouzeilles
2. Nation as Laboratory: Rethinking Science Writing in Mexico?s República Restaurada (1868-1876)
María del Pilar Blanco
3. Natural Histories of the Anthropocene: Santiago del Estero, Argentina, in the 1930s
Jens Andermann
II. Latin America as the site of knowledge production
Introduction
4. Empathy, Patients? Needs and Therapeutic Innovation in the Medical Literature of Early Viceregal Mexico
Yarí Pérez Marín
5. Between Potosí and Nuevo Potosí: Mineral Riches and Observations of Nature in the Colonial Andes, ca. 1596-1797
Heidi V. Scott
6. Indigenous Medicine and Nation-Building: Hermilio Valdizán?s Medical Project
Edward Chauca
III. Science and the modern nation
Introduction
7. Postcolonial Social Sciences of Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: Land Surveys, Comparative Political Sociology, and the Malleability of Race
Lina del Castillo
8. ?Una nueva y gloriosa nación?: Patriotic Lyrics and Scientific Culture in the Forging of Political Emancipation in Río de la Plata
Miguel de Asúa
9. Inventions and Discoveries in Letters to Perón: Dialogue and Autonomy in the Popular Technical Imagination in Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s
Hernán Comastri
IV. Utopian convergences between science and the arts
Introduction
10. Modernismo, Spiritualism, and Science in Argentina at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: An Analysis of National Magazines
Soledad Quereilhac
11. Doing Poetry with Science: Unthinking Knowledge in Sarduy, Perlongher, and Eielson
Julio Prieto
12. The Science of Reading Fiction: New (Post-Darwinian) Metaphors to Live By
Joanna Page
V. Science, epistemology, and the critique of modernity
Introduction
13. Laboratories of Universality: A Genealogy of Solitary Latin American Inventors
Carlos Fonseca Suárez
14. The Politics of Relativity: Radical Epistemologies and the Revolutionary Potential of the Scientific Imaginary in José Carlos Mariátegui
Brais Outes-León
15. Beyond Empiricism: Rolando García?s Theory of Complex Systems and the Epistemological Consequences of a Non-linear Universe
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
Bibliography
Index
