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16 obres 207 Membres 2 Ressenyes

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Jorge Canizares-Esguerra is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin

Obres de Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

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Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge
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male
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Ecuador
USA

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An intriguing notion that runs counter to most standard comparisons of the British and the Spanish: that they were more similar than you think. In fact, that the English were so like the Spaniards the Atlantic was "Iberianized." Cañizares-Esguerra believes that the Spanish justified their American conquests by creating a "satanic epic" (a phrase used so often it becomes pedantic and annoying), demonizing the Indians and the wilderness. He then says the English did the same thing. The problem is, the "Spanish" tend to all be the religious, and the English is almost always the Puritans. Instead of a conscious copying or "Iberianization," it seems instead that Cañizares-Esguerra is merely underlining a common Christian and Western process of "otherization," making the unknown demonic or evil. All in all, a nifty, wordy book that misses the mark.… (més)
 
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tuckerresearch | May 14, 2011 |
This is an excellent 15 page article. Unfortunately it is a 200 page book. It makes the point that both Puritans and Conquistadors used the same sort of crusading rhetoric, portraying the Americas as a battle against Satan's minions. The English begin by portraying the Spanish as Satanic, but switched to the Native Americans as they became the bigger enemy. The larger point of the book is that the history of colonization should be examined as whole rather than broken into Latin America and the area that would become the United States.

The author claims that the book is a response to Huntington's "Who Are We?" which claims that America is fundamentally Anglo, an identity that is threatened by the recent illegal immigration from Mexico. This response fails at a number of levels. First, he takes the Puritans as an example of North American colonization even while he acknowledges that they were not typical of the majority of colonists. Second, his focus is largely on literature and rhetoric, without making any comparison of the structures, motivations and goals of colonization. Third, people actually read Huntington, which is at least interesting even if it is a xenophobic diatribe. The book is painful to read. If he wanted a good response to Huntington, he should have written a letter to the editor.
… (més)
 
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Scapegoats | Jan 23, 2008 |
University of Texas-Austin Professor of History Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has collected a few of his recent published pieces in Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (2007, Stanford University Press). Blurbed as "revisionist history at its best" by Johns Hopkins' Richard Kagan, this book reexamines some of the traditional conceptions of science as practiced in the American colonies of Spain (and to a lesser extent, Portugal). While the book's nature doesn't allow for a particularly cohesive narrative to develop, each essay stands alone very well.

Cañizares-Esguerra argues, primarily, that we must seek to understand what was happening in the scientific and natural history milieu of the Spanish colonies in order to achieve a broad understanding of the impact made by the colonies on the "Scientific Revolution" and the "Enlightenment" as they are traditionally defined. He claims that English and French hostility to Spain (as well as Spanish secrecy) has colored the historiography of the Scientific Revolution and marginalized to a large degree the important contributions to cartography, natural history and other sciences made in the early empire.

It was fascinating to me to read of the many institutions established very early in the colonial period to foster learning, investigation and science in the early colonies: twenty universities by the early eighteenth century, a network of pharmaceutical "labs" to identify profitable remedies from the native plants, and government-sponsored expeditions for various purposes. Clearly - and most particularly after a series of reforms instituted by the Bourbons - the colonies were not stagnated, backwards places, but rather were playing an important role in expanding human knowledge of the natural world.

In the fourth chapter, Cañizares-Esguerra discusses his hypothesis that 'modern' conceptions of race (as innate bodily and mental differences) emerged in seventeenth-century Spanish America, where creole (that is, American-born descendants of Europeans) consciouness developed a line of thinking which blamed inborn differences for the perceived deficiencies of the native peoples. By rejecting the idea that climate and astrology govern human nature (and thus that the American climate was responsible for the "backwardness" of the Amerindians ... and by extension the creoles themselves, eventually), it was necessary to find a more suitable explanation - that the Amerindians were descendants of Noah's cursed son Ham, and thus blighted no matter where they lived. Interestingly, Cañizares-Esguerra notes that this theory, while adopted willingly by the creoles themselves, never gained much credence in Europe, where it was ignored as just more colonial rambling. Nonetheless, this would seem an important precursor to the later conceptions of scientific racism that emerged.

Another chapter I found particularly intriguing concerned the influences of Latin American thinking and study on Alexander von Humbolt; Cañizares-Esguerra maintains that the idea of biodistribution theory that Humboldt would publicize had its roots in colonial thinking.

Quite an interesting take on things in these essays, all of which I enjoyed very much. We're seeing more and more with recent historiography that as much as we like to think we know, there's still a whole lot we haven't examined or wrapped our heads around just yet. Cañizares-Esguerra has done a good job in elucidating just a few of the many potential areas of new scholarship that colonial Latin America has to offer.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/02/book-review-nature-empire-and-nation.htm...
… (més)
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JBD1 | Feb 24, 2007 |

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16
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