Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America

This collection is the first concerted attempt to explore the significance of classical legacies for Latin American history – from the uses of antiquarian learning in colonial institutions to the currents of Romantic Hellenism which inspired liberators and nation-builders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• Discusses how the model of Roman imperialism, challenges to Aristotle’s theories of geography and natural slavery, and Cicero’s notion of the patria have had a pervasive influence on thought and politics throughout the Latin American region
• Brings together essays by specialists in art history, cultural anthropology and literary studies, as well as Americanists and scholars of the classical tradition
• Shows that appropriations of the Greco-Roman past are a recurrent catalyst for change in the Americas
• Calls attention to ideas and developments which have been overlooked in standard narratives of intellectual history

Preface
1. Introduction: Classical Traditions and Controversies in Latin American History (Andrew Laird)
2. The Early Circulation of Classical Books in New Spain and Peru (Natalia Maillard Álvarez)
3. Gardens of Origin and the Golden Age in the Mexican Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (1552) (Alejandra Rojas Silva)
4. Comparison and Seeing in the Mediterratlantic (Byron Ellsworth Hamann)
5. The Inca Garcilaso in Dialogue with Neoplatonism (Erika Valdivieso)
6. Universal History and New Spain’s Indian Past: Classical Knowledge in Nahua Chronicles (Andrew Laird)
7. The Exemplary Power of Antiquity: Humanist Rhetoric and Ceremony in Seventeenth-Century New Spain (Stuart M. McManus)
8. Plato and the Guarani Indians (Desiree Arbo)
9. Classicism in Modern Latin America from Simón Bolívar to Roberto Bolano (Robert T. Conn)
10. Classical Motifs in Spanish American Nation-Building: Looking Beyond the Elites (Nicola Miller)
11. Greece and José Martí (Elina Miranda Cancela)
12. Pedro Henríquez Urena’s Hellenism and the American Utopia (Rosa Andújar)
13. Born with the Wrinkles of Byzantium: Unclassical Traditions in Spanish America, 1815-1925 (Eric Cullhed)
14. Envoi: Whose Classical Traditions? (Jorge Canizares-Esguerra)
Contributors
Index

"Spanning half a millennium, Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America offers an impressive demonstration of the vibrancy of the classical tradition in a wide range of social domains and practices: education, the book trade, public ceremonies, the visual arts, popular culture and, above all, the process of nation-building. The contributors vividly reveal the impact of Greek and Roman culture on creole and indigenous authors and actors in the Americas, from the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Chimalpahin to José Martí and Roberto Bolaño. While there have been several influential studies of the ways in which knowledge of classical antiquity informed early European impressions of the New World, the focus of this volume is on the importance of the afterlife of Greece, Rome and Byzantium within Latin America itself."
—David A. Lupher, University of Puget Sound

"The twelve chapters contained in the book are wide in scope, not only spatially and thematically, but also chronologically, reaching as far as works of the late twentieth century. They also display a remarkable involvement of researchers from different disciplines (coming not just from the field of classical studies), which produces an appealing crossover of approaches, which will certainly benefit readers."
—International Journal of the Classical Tradition (2021) 28(2):255-257

Andrew Laird is John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities and Professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University.

Nicola Miller is Professor of Latin American History at University College London.

Ancient Greece and Rome have long been prominent in Latin America. The model of Roman imperialism, challenges to Aristotle’s theories of geography and natural slavery, and Cicero’s notion of the patria have had a pervasive influence on thought and politics throughout the region. Yet despite their role in shaping beliefs and social realities over the course of five centuries, conceptions of European antiquity in the Caribbean, Mesoamerica and the South American continent have received little systematic study.

This collection is the first concerted attempt to explore the significance of classical legacies for Latin American history – from the uses of antiquarian learning in colonial institutions to the currents of Romantic Hellenism which inspired liberators and nation-builders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The volume brings together essays by specialists in art history, cultural anthropology and literary studies, as well as Americanists and scholars of the classical tradition. In showing that appropriations of the Greco-Roman past are a recurrent catalyst for change in the Americas, this book also calls attention to ideas and developments which have been overlooked in standard narratives of intellectual history.