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Geographies of Modernity in Latin America: Uneven and Contested Development

  • Chapter
When Was Latin America Modern?

Part of the book series: Studies of the Americas ((STAM))

Abstract

Modernity as it is most commonly understood comprises a constellation of knowledge, power, and social practices that first emerged in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and slowly extended over space (Gregory 1994: 388–92). This definition contains two components making it instantly recognizable: namely, its Eurocentrism and its underlying model of spatial diffusion from a core “modern” area. In other words, our concepts of modernity contain within them a distinctively geographical perspective, a mental map for reading the world and the position of Latin America within it A critical reading of this underlying spatial language of modernity engages us in an analysis of Eurocentricism in our theory and the spatial processes behind modernity’s materiality. In this context, my chapter attempts to extend existing critiques of the framing of modernity (e.g., Mignolo 2000), while additionally asking us to push our understandings of modernity further in order to provide a more updated spatial theory than diffusionism.

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Authors
  1. Sarah A. Radcliffe
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Nicola Miller Stephen Hart

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© 2007 Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart

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Radcliffe, S.A. (2007). Geographies of Modernity in Latin America: Uneven and Contested Development. In: Miller, N., Hart, S. (eds) When Was Latin America Modern?. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603042_2

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