Yet Another History of History

La tarea verdadera consiste ante todo en examinar los orígenes, los perjuicios y los procesos de las verdades recibidas. En una palabra, hacer cuestión expresa de la historia de la historia. ¹

—Edmundo O'Gorman (1947)

In the last five years or so a reflexive history of history has begun to take shape in the nations of, or at any rate in some relation to, that grand subject-object of modern history named "Latin America." In a word, this history takes its object of study to be the productions and production of history itself. For some of its practitioners this newer history of history is closely linked to "the new intellectual history." That history, which began to appear in the Latin American field in the 1990s, is not merely a history of what intellectuals have written and thought in the past; it is a history that isitself intellectual in the best sense of the term. To hijack Dominick La Capra's witty remarks on the significance for European intellectual history of Hayden White's critical opus, one might say without undue hyperbole that this newer history of history is reopening the possibility of thought in Latin American history. ²

This is so because in revisiting the ways in which Latin American histories have been researched, written, and read the newer history of history both retraces and—knowingly or not—questions the epistemological foundations and realist regimes of representation that underwrite contemporary understandings of Latin American pasts. That is, the newer history of history, like the new intellectual history, is often reflexive: its subject-object and limits of inquiry are its own tropos. As a turning inward that, in one way or another, responds to a general crisis of history, it seeks to get to the bottom of its own practice and knowledge.

What is perhaps most exciting—and intellectually challenging—about this new work is that those received limits (its bottom) now appear to be much less constraining (deeper, wider) than was previously thought. Not so long ago it was dreamed—under the somnic trance of liberal, dependency, and Marxian mantras—that this part of the world had no intellectual history worth thinking and writing about. It was at most a "tragic story": in the first instance, of colonial derivations in the "Scholastic" mode; and in the second (that is, after Independence), of "aping Europe." "Intellectual history," if it could be said to exist, was a province of Europe, not Iberian America. Such dismissals now appear quaint, if not "tragic." The newer history of history in this part of the world now brims with surprises. And yet it is also something of a hall of mirrors, a haunted house of whispering voices, and its historians invite us to linger in its labyrinthine corridors.

This is not to say that the kind of writing under review here (by no means an exhaustive sample of recent work...