Ecrire l'histoire de l'Amerique latine, XIXe-XXe siecles (review)

This collection arises from a conference that brought together European and Latin American scholars to discuss the relationship between the historical enterprise and the process of nation-state formation in Latin America. Coeditors Michel Bertrand and Richard Marin took as their founding assumption Paul Valéry's maxim that all civilizations are the fruits of their own histories. Seeking to elaborate that point by using postmodernist theoretical language to explore various case studies, the volume falls short of its ambitious goals. It does not escape the fatal flaw common to most conference proceedings: its articles are inconsistent in both the originality of their questions and the quality of their presentation. Although the full richness of Latin American intellectual life in the national period cannot possibly be revealed in a series of brief, specialized studies, the collection does provide a clear snapshot of the ways that certain historians still approach intellectual history. Six of the eleven articles focus on a single author, while four articles discuss a specific theme within a single national tradition. Only one attempts to draw together historiographical trends across national boundaries; not insignificantly, the subject of that piece is the memory of the (intact) imperial past.

Bertrand and Marin begin by defining Mesoamerica as Europe's "Other," commenting upon the layers of civilizations that coexist in the same space. They quite rightly point out that the first histories of precolumbian cultures were written by the vanquished under the steely gaze of their new masters. These early chroniclers often wrote "in a frenzy" not only to preserve the memory of their traditions but also to secure their own privileges within an emerging colonial system. Thus, colonial historians became intermediaries, though not disinterested ones, between the indigenous and European worlds. Following independence, new generations of historians arose to glorify and justify the postrevolutionary order. Their sons, trained by the liberal states, devoted themselves to the production of histories that would identify and affirm the appropriate and desired national traits. "Liberals, conservatives, centralists, federalists—all exhibited their preference for a certain past" (p. 14). These observations trail behind the work of Antonello Gerbi, Rolena Adorno, David Brading, Nicolás Shumway, and Doris Sommer.

The biographical articles tend to be descriptive, simply summarizing the contents of a major figure's oeuvre. Pierre Vayssière describes Chilean historian Jaime Eyzaguirre's preference for Hispanic culture within a patrician aristocracy. Milton Carlos Costa describes Brazilian writer-activist Joaquim Nabuco's obsession with "the Religious Question" as expressed through his condemnation of the Jesuits' stranglehold on Brazil's intellectual life. Three articles discuss the presence of Latin America in French historical thought: Michel Bertrand on the work of Abbé Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, Denis Rolland on Lucien Febvre and the Annales school, and Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas on the "unknown [Fernand] Braudel." In all these cases, the link between historian and his imagined past is clear; the connection between his intellectual work and the practical business of nation building is not. It is not enough simply to assert that historians collaborated in the process of national formation; to convince readers that their subjects' publishing activities had concrete results, the authors must attempt to determine the impact of their ideas on the public that they imagined they served.

The most interesting articles aspire to move beyond the redaction of a single person's masterwork to undertake an examination of a particular genre or intellectual movement as a whole. Eugenia Roldán Vera's insightful article about Mexican primary-school textbooks reveals the way that the liberal state consolidated its position by formulating a vision of the Mexican past that sought to reconcile its Spanish and indigenous heritages. An exhaustive 11-page chart includes all known titles and editions of these primary-school texts, something that will...