‘Do you take “colonial” with your Early Modern?’ The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect.
- Fernando Herrero
- Jun 13
- 10 min read
EMRC online book launch: Fernando Gomez Herrero (Salamanca), ‘Do you take “colonial” with your Early Modern?’ The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect.
May 19 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Please join us on 19 May at 13:00 (UK time) to celebrate the publication of Dr Fernando Gomez Herrero’s new book, The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect (Anthem Press, 2025) – for further information about the book, see this interview on the Anthem Press website.
If the Early Modern is typically restricted to Europe and its imperial expansion and the “colonial” is part of the latter, The (Latin) American Scene proposes a focus on the American side, prioritizing the “colonial” including its post/de-colonial provocations. This presentation on the book, ‘Do you take “colonial” with your Early Modern?’, will illustrate some challenges, problems, troubles and dilemmas apropos historical studies of the Early Modern/colonial Euro-Americas in university life in between geopolitics and popular cultures, including in the UK.
Dr Fernando Gomez Herrero is currently Visiting Research Scholar at the Instituto de Iberoamérica, University of Salamanca, Spain. He has taught mostly in the U.S. (Duke University, Stanford U, Pittsburgh U, Oberlin College, UMass, Boston, Boston College) and the U.K. (University of Birmingham, University of Manchester) in the last three decades. He is the author of Good Places and Non-Places in Colonial Mexico: Vasco de Quiroga (1470-1565) (University Press of America, 2001).
Anthem Press will make discount flyers available to attendees.
We meet online on MS Teams: please sign up to our mailing list or email emrc@reading.ac.uk for the link.
This event is hosted in collaboration with the Reading Latin America and the Caribbean Network (R-LAC) and the Seminar on Race, Empire and Decoloniality.
My bullet points:
Thank you to the Reading Latin America and the Caribbean Network (R-LAC) and the Seminar on Race, Empire and Decoloniality at the University of Reading for the interest. Special thanks to Richard Blakemore for coordinating this. Particularly so at this juncture when I am noticing closures of positions on the European side of things about big world pictures currently undergoing big changes. It is clear that the Early Modern European horizon is not, has never been and will never be enough.
1. How do you take your tea? Milk, sugar, with biscuits? Cream tea? Afternoon tea? Do you eat your tea? Do you do it solo [or with others], English-style, Chinese style, Turkish style, perhaps with ice and lots of sugar sitting on the front porch as in North Carolina, USA? Do you do your Early Modern with your colonial? I propose that you might want to consider expansive timespaces, intelligently, radically not in the conventional Euro-expansion to faraway lands. Quick note: the UK is always already the “problematic cousin” of such European dimension.
2. So, I propose a big 16 inside a big 21 (big XVI-XVII centuries inevitably inside the big XXI century). There is no other way: minimum two temporalities but there are many historiographic instances in between. Timespaces: Europe and the Americas (Latin and Anglo, inevitably disrupting the conventional appropriation of the sign of “America” by the US (i.e. witness the quarrel over the toponym of “Gulf of Mexico/America” according to Trump administration). Know your languages: English, lingua franca, powerful yet insufficient to give us a richer picture.
3. So, I am talking about frames of intelligibility: Early Modern Europe and colonial Americas side by side so that we come and go and jump over one and all nationalistic overdeterminations, but also disciplinary limitations and institutional repressions. Add encircled social groups. How easy is it to contemplate the future of the past of timespaces that are not hegemonic and not really visible, audible in either the US or the UK –the Anglo Zone-- in mass media or conventional academic courses? Not easy.
4. Which brings me to the book in question. The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations (Anthem Press, April 2025). I bring to you 5 extensive conversations with 5 colleagues who have left their mark in US academy and beyond (Walter D. Mignolo, John Beverley, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa and Roberto González Echevarría). Last time I checked they are still around. Mine is a situationist knowledge production apropos the specific context of the US, poorly behaved superpower of the West, “dictator of meaning,” arrogating for itself the ownership and control of the West. I must say –without English -style indirection or understatement, that I see a tremendous subservience on the European side (UK included) and I am not just talking about the Trump2 era.
5. Why these 5? I wanted to address English/Spanish inside the US, where I was and where I hope to return soon. There are two other books in preparation.
6. I also wanted to address a preoccupation with the past, something not obvious in our accelerated, future-oriented societies of intergenerational memory fracture –including the old world and its quirky islands (i.e. UK). One formula, “agonies of historicity.” In particular, I wanted to see what senior colleagues had to say about the XVI century (Early Modern +colonial, Europe and the Americas, Spanish/English, literature and culture and many other things –and I wanted them to address some of these initiatives but also difficulties, tensions, problems.
7. “Foreign humanities: “ foreign-sourced, represented, vis-à-vis a native template. Travails, travels, immigrant scholarship, plights and flights of the humanities vis-à-vis the social sciences. I wanted to do that in a way that is not immediately subservient to institution, nation-state interests which tend to privilege de iure or de facto xenophobic frames of intelligibility in which such circumscribed foreignness is always already backward, insufficient, goes begging, is dangerous, threatening, must be annihilated, assimilated, contained, i.e. witness the rubric of “the languages” in the UK; see the circulation of big foreign entities (BRICS+, Lat Am nations, other European nations inside the UK; what about the dominant meanings in social media circulating about Russia, China, or smaller nations like Spain, Italy, France?). Ideally, I wanted –and I still want—to push for a radical openness to foreignness if only to destabilize the certainties of immediate timespaces, any. Let us then welcome a motley crue of knowledge producers.
8. The book allows for the reconsideration of 3 levels of analysis in relation to these five trajectories: big-picture geopolitics (i.e. Uncle Sam), middlebrow ‘storm in the tea cup’ university life (or cultures of historical scholarship, with the apple in the eye on the Early Modern/colonial focus) and popular cultures (consumerism, leisure, mass media, tourism, sports, whatever reaches you more easily or faster at the street level). I propose to you that we are dealing with major transformations at these three levels: decline of the West, and Europe in it, shrinking of a focus on historical dimensions inside university precincts, virtualized intensification of popular culture penetrating university life –is degrading it too strong a word?
9. The book gives you five situated biographies and a lifetime of scholarship devoted to Hispanophone and Anglophone intersections. These are five scholars –five different takes-- who have left the mark inside the entrails of the “philanthropic ogre” (Octavio Paz). Adorno brings chronicles of the Indies and the larger notion of narrativity, the figures of fiendishly poly-syllabic Guaman Poma de Ayala, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca among others, “decolonization” calls in the 1980s and the –in her case—agreeable association with Hispanism (knowledge of Spain); Beverley brings too many items: Postmodernity, Lat Am dimensions, institutional critique, “against literature” stance, cultural / subaltern studies, Left history of the US, debilitations of the European (Spain) dimension, testimonio literature (parallel to the greater visibility of the Latin American Boom and a lifelong engagement with the Baroque (of Indies, America—how big is this dimension in the Anglo world?—a question for you!); he also brings the concept of subalternity not only in relation to representation of dominated or minority groups but also in relation to knowledge practices inside institutional confines undergoing big transformations in the US since the 1960s (Baby Boom generation); González-Echevarría constitutes a passionate, non-negotiable love of “literature” across the wide expanse from 1492-to-mid-20th century, Spain-and-Latin-America, yet receiving the impact of post-structuralism (Foucaut et al.) entering the US via Yale U; our Yale representatives have received the maximum recognition in the US; Walter Mignolo signifies the insistingly dissident emphasis on the “colonial difference” that wants to debilitate and relativize Western hegemony (Europe-and-also-now-US dominant) in world history, cultures of scholarship included; a persistent focus on colonization processes that have not stopped by 1830 or 2025; he also signifies post/de-colonial solidarity desires that go along indigenous or Indian or subaltern or dominated social groups and knowledge modalities (those historically subsumed by the “tyranny of the alphabet”) also the desire not to be trapped within nation-state, superpower narratives and its institutional arrangements; José Rabasa means the maintenance of the post/colonial and a focus on “violence,” also epistemic violence, preoccupation with “history,” shared with the others, and historiography (the writing of history that does not necessarily fit and does not want to fit into alphabetic letters, dominant languages, the materiality of books (now massively superseded by digital technology, AI already!); his is also a refusal to go along “white” trajectories of conquest and domination, etc.; Rabasa holds on to a skepticism towards institutionality of ‘studies’ and welcomes a disruption of the very notion of “history” according to an initial Nietzschean inspiration, and nihilism, but also seeks proximities with indigenous practices; predilection for a belligerent and insurgent indigeneity as something other than white-narratives. In his case, Mexico brings pre-Columbian legacies ever so distant from and so close to the US. My interlocutors represent a clear clash with historians such as John H. Elliott, who is mentioned, to name but one historian who is close to and celebrated by the UK establishment. Perhaps I should mention the nationalities of origin: Argentinian (1), Cuban (1), Mexican (1), Spain (1), US (probably all with double nationalities, myself included). Neil Larsen writes the foreword (easy to google and find an extra conversation with me!). Dilemma: how do “minority” cultures of historical humanistic scholarship signify inside Uncle Sam? What about Britain? This book gives you five different (foreign) sensibilities and life trajectories of sustained scholarship doing just that.
10. We will have to learn to pass through US hegemony or the (liberal) West [[quirky UK gives us the West/west hesitation in the British press as though the lowercase made the same disposition more humble and palatable (think of the luxury magazine “How to Spend it” (HTSI) section of the Financial Times as one example of the same coyness with the name (money, West/est) still doing the same thing). Latin/Hispanic, uneven position, not quite proper West, first league, etc. We will have somehow learn to navigate better European disorientations of a certain (rich) West-centeredness petering out. It will not be easy.
11. Ours is the interregnum of American supremacy. This “externality” matters enormously. We will have to reframe and go beyond the [centrality of the] “Western question” (Toynbee & O y Gasset, 1950s). We will have to address inherited limitations, and declare these declining and insufficient and go through its historical forms of imperialism, colonialism and complicit universalism. Its autism, self-sufficiency and ‘splendid isolation,’ no more. Mainstream media, conventional university offerings give us a sorry sample of that. And we must start a genuine and profound self-critique (Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari, French sociologist Emmanuel Todd and others will help in this regard) and break open the philosophical and historical fields. Post/decolonial provocations: ‘west’ will be one among other options. “Colonial” –add prefixes, post/de/anti—is a convenor, a vector, a complex dynamic- a copula (Europe and Americas, white and non-white, English and Spanish, Spanish and nahuatl, etc. etc.), a “problematic” dimension to be sure that exceeds our historical imagination, a provocation, underrepresented, not properly curated, not fitting into national enclaves, institutions, etc. What if there was a trajectory from the colonial to BRICS+? There is a perceptible elimination and diminution of the term “colonial” (and with it, de/colonization, anti/post/decolonial impetus) and a doubling down on a certain (European-fortress) Early Modern in the UK and also Spain and you can sense a nervousness in certain quarters.
12. Hence, the book invites its readers to expand visions if only following five different paths (there is a dual print and audio component of this work in both dominant languages in the West put side by side, something that is not easy to witness in the Anglo Zone). The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect also invites all of us to a limiting self-consciousness: disrupt, upset, destabilize, unsettle conventions, that’s good, complexify understanding, welcome misunderstandings, etc. That is, one must relativize and expose observational national/istic platforms with their explicit/implicit supremacist ideologies, interests, etc. Elliott is but one name, exclusive UK-US sourcing of a professional circle is another (say “historians,” “linguists” as they are called in the UK or “philologists,” you name them, and what about your conventional Hispanist vocations subservient to “brand Spain”?). Ortega y Gasset called Toynbee a “tourist” in the history profession in 1948. I welcome his bravado. The accusation holds and yet Toynbee travelled the world and produced an internal critique of his own society inside the West that also holds. I admire his early work on the Greeks and Turks. We can learn something from these two neglected figures and we can certainly learn a few good things from the five interlocutors in the conversations that inform my book that comes out of the ground-zero of the US in the unipolar moment that is leaving us behind. We must catch up.
13. Intelligent response: go beyond ‘Area Studies’ frames of intelligibility of the so-called foreignness (surely a bigger dimension than any nativism), disengage from automatic declarations of faith about nation-state predilections, “you read me, I read you-also in the slang sense of the term “read” (return the gaze, the favour, bring some surprises, make yourself unpredictable!). Put the historical vignette or diorama inside concrete “situations” and see how these fare. Compare and contrast by all means, jump outside the “habitus” of the players involved in the interpretive game and the units covered. Let us check out the meeting points of intersection, not simply “Lat Am” and “Spain,” please, and refuse to stick the nose to the little spaces made available by institutional or nation-state “publicity” to those Early Modern and colonial vistas of the Euro-Americas in the last five centuries. We are holding a torn map of timespaces: subaltern Spain, subaltern Latin America and a declining Brexit island and now a US in internal turmoil exhibiting rough manners internationally. But the world is bigger than any of these units going alone. Now it is perhaps clearer for the new generations: Early Modern travails open up to imperial and colonial legacies passing through the Western question that is and always was insufficient and is now in severe state of disorientation. Our interpretative tasks are thus more difficult than ever and we would not want them any other way. I say that The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect helps in clarifying a few things informing the interpretive game and its possible gains.
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