Pensar el siglo XIX desde el siglo XXI: Nuevas miradas y lecturas edited by Ana Peluffo (review)

This collection of essays on the nineteenth century, entitled Pensar el siglo XIX desde el siglo XXI: Nuevas miradas y lecturas, will prove beneficial for an array of scholars given its interdisciplinary nature, with articles ranging from history to literary and cultural studies, all of which move towards a common goal: to reengage and destabilize many of the models, paradigms, and dichotomies traditionally employed in understanding this quintessential time period in Latin American history.

The compilation begins with an introduction from the editor, Ana Peluffo, who discusses the origins of the book project, which arose out of a profound cross-disciplinary need to reexamine nineteenth-century texts and their respective critical approaches. From there, the anthology is comprised of eleven critical essays, which explore diverse and intersecting themes, while dismantling some of the fundamental binaries on the nineteenth century, such as civilization/barbarism, urban/rural life, masculinity/femininity, and tradition/modernity. Of particular interest are the compilation’s reflections on the region’s heterogeneous populations and its minority and marginalized members, which several of the essays argue fall outside of the classic models of nation building frequently applied to this timeframe.

The collection begins with an essay debating nation and modernity from the critical lens of Graciela Montaldo, who contributes important reflections on borders, marginal identities, bio-politics, and transcultural processes. Montaldo focuses on the tension between lettered citizens and the heterogeneous and often uncontrolled masses, disarming the binary between chaos and order as traditionally conceived. The following articles examine a wide range of topics including the fictionalization of the Argentine Plata Region vis-à-vis travel chronicles by naturalists Charles Darwin, Francisco Moreno, Florentino Ameghino, and Bruce Chatwin. This is done in an analysis by Fermín Adrián Rodríguez, followed by a piece by William G. Acree, Jr., calling for the expansion and reevaluation of the nineteenth-century literary canon to include nontraditional and popular texts.

Other essays include Brendan Lanctot’s reexamination of the Rosas regime (1829–52), and Beatriz González-Stephan’s unique analysis of historical panoramas in dialogue with masses traditionally excluded from the lettered culture. Cristina Iglesia’s article sheds new light on the author-dandy figure of Lucio Mansilla and the hybrid genre of the causerie, which she argues is a text produced at the margins of political power. The compilation also includes visual analyses, including Andrea Cuarterolo’s fascinating look at photography and teratology in nineteenth-century Latin America, surveying the contrast between medical and anthropological photography with regard to the construction of physical and racial alterity. Paola Cortés-Rocca provides a cultural reading of urban imaginaries in her piece, which analyzes fin-de-siècle chronicles by canonical modernists including Martí, Darío, and Gutiérrez Nájera, focusing principally on the delicate and challenging construction of masculine subjectivities during this period.

In the collection’s concluding articles, Juan Pablo Dabove and Susan Hallstead survey consumerism, banditry, and gender in El Zarco by Ignacio Manuel Altamirano; Thomas Ward compares liberal feminism and radical anarchism in the works of Matto de Turner and González Prada; and, finally, Martín Monslave Zanatti provides a critical analysis on La Sociedad Amiga de los Indios and its intermediary role between the indigenous populations and the emerging Peruvian state during the second half of the nineteenth century.

As can be seen in this brief summary, this collection provides a range of valuable and novel approaches from which to confront the nineteenth century, both via a number of the region’s canonical works, as well as its emerging body of non-traditional literary and visual materials. The compilation’s articles are written in a lucid and readable prose, which will prove accessible and recommendable to readers from a range of disciplines.