Science And The Creative Imagination In Latin America

This book considers the relationship between the humanities and the sciences in a Latin American context. The geographical emphasis is important, given the prominent role of science in the formation of the region's nation-states and its strong presence in Latin American cultural output. Most of the chapters focus on fictional narratives and scientific discourses. Questions of consent, resistance, and ideology in both fields are considered. The historical study of interplay between science and the novel helps identify what people were expected to believe at a given time, and reveals how these beliefs were sustained. This book provides insight into the connection between individual self-understanding and the surrounding world of science, within the broader question of the place of science in Latin American culture.Chapters include:• Darwin in South America: Geology, Imagination and Encounter•Walking Backward to the Future: Time, Travel and Race• Natural Parts and Unnatural Others: A reflection on Patrimony at the Turn of the 19th Century• On the Transition from Realism to the Fantastic in the Argentina of the 1870s: Holmberg and the Six of Córdoba• Literature and Science in Martinez Estrada's Work• The Nature Effect in Latin American Science Publications: The Case of the Journal Redes•Two Scientific Traditions in Martín Fierro• Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in Contemporary Spanish American Fiction• Constructing Postcoloniality: Scientific Enquiries in Cien Años de Soledad• Holograms and Simulacra: Bioy Casares, Subiela, Piglia• The Desert Poetics of Mario Montalbetti: Writing, Knowledge, Topologies

This book considers the relationship between the humanities and the sciences in a Latin American context. The geographical emphasis is important, given the prominent role of science in the formation of the region's nation-states and its strong presence in Latin American cultural output. Most of the chapters focus on fictional narratives and scientific discourses. Questions of consent, resistance, and ideology in both fields are considered. The historical study of interplay between science and the novel helps identify what people were expected to believe at a given time, and reveals how these beliefs were sustained. This book provides insight into the connection between individual self-understanding and the surrounding world of science, within the broader question of the place of science in Latin American culture.Chapters include:• Darwin in South America: Geology, Imagination and Encounter•Walking Backward to the Future: Time, Travel and Race• Natural Parts and Unnatural Others: A reflection on Patrimony at the Turn of the 19th Century• On the Transition from Realism to the Fantastic in the Argentina of the 1870s: Holmberg and the Six of Córdoba• Literature and Science in Martinez Estrada's Work• The Nature Effect in Latin American Science Publications: The Case of the Journal Redes•Two Scientific Traditions in Martín Fierro• Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in Contemporary Spanish American Fiction• Constructing Postcoloniality: Scientific Enquiries in Cien Años de Soledad• Holograms and Simulacra: Bioy Casares, Subiela, Piglia• The Desert Poetics of Mario Montalbetti: Writing, Knowledge, Topologies

Highlighting the relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history Challenging the common view that Latin America has lagged behind Europe and North America in the global history of science, this volume reveals that the region has long been a center for scientific innovation and imagination. It highlights the important relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history. Scholars from a variety of fields including literature, sociology, and geography bring to light many of the cultural exchanges that have produced and spread scientific knowledge from the early colonial period to the present day. Among many topics, these essays describe ideas on health and anatomy in a medical text from sixteenth-century Mexico, how fossil discoveries in Patagonia inspired new interpretations of the South American landscape, and how Argentinian physicist Rolando García influenced climate change research and the field of epistemology. Through its interdisciplinary approach, Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America shows that such scientific advancements fueled a series of visionary utopian projects throughout the region, as countries grappling with the legacy of colonialism sought to modernize and to build national and regional identities.

Science in Latin America has roots that reach back to the information gathering and recording practices of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations. Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and colonists introduced European scientific practices to the continent, where they hybridized with local traditions to form the beginnings of a truly Latin American science. As countries achieved their independence in the nineteenth century, they turned to science as a vehicle for modernizing education and forwarding "progress." In the twentieth century, science and technology became as omnipresent in Latin America as in the United States and Europe. Yet despite a history that stretches across five centuries, science in Latin America has traditionally been viewed as derivative of and peripheral to Euro-American science. To correct that mistaken view, this book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of science in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present. Eleven leading Latin American historians assess the part that science played in Latin American society during the colonial, independence, national, and modern eras, investigating science's role in such areas as natural history, medicine and public health, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, politics and nation-building, educational reform, and contemporary academic research. The comparative approach of the essays creates a continent-spanning picture of Latin American science that clearly establishes its autonomous history and its right to be studied within a Latin American context.

Early science fiction has often been associated almost exclusively with Northern industrialized nations. In this groundbreaking exploration of the science fiction written in Latin America prior to 1920, Rachel Haywood Ferreira argues that science fiction has always been a global genre. She traces how and why the genre quickly reached Latin America and analyzes how writers in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico adapted science fiction to reflect their own realities. Among the texts discussed are one of the first defenses of Darwinism in Latin America, a tale of a time-traveling history book, and a Latin American Frankenstein. Latin American science fiction writers have long been active participants in the sf literary tradition, expanding the limits of the genre and deepening our perception of the role of science and technology in the Latin American imagination. The book includes a chronological bibliography of science fiction published from 1775 to 1920 in all Latin American countries.

Challenging the common view that Latin America has lagged behind Europe and North America in the global history of science, this volume reveals that the region has long been a center for scientific innovation and imagination. It highlights the important relationship between science, politics, and culture in Latin American history.

Characters are made, scripted, and invented, but Creators and Created Beings in Twentieth-Century Latin American Fiction explores what occurs when literary creations become creators themselves. Representing Latin American fiction’s increasingly skeptical gaze in the early- to mid- twentieth century, these literary creators breach the metafictional frame in order to problematize themes including life and death, gender and sexuality, and technology. Drawing upon a diverse range of literary works by canonical and non-canonical authors including Jorge Luis Borges, Horacio Quiroga, Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortázar, María Luisa Bombal, Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Arlt, Juan José Arreola, Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, Clemente Palma, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Pedro Angelici, this study excavates critical ontological and epistemological inquiries and delves into questions of identity, power, scientific knowledge, and the transformative nature of fiction.

Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens. While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change and environmental justice.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. The early twentieth century was awash in revolutionary scientific discourse, and its uptake in the public imaginary through popular scientific writings touched every area of human experience, from politics and governance to social mores and culture. Feeling Strangely argues that these shifting scientific understandings and their integration into Hispanic and Lusophone society reshaped the experience of gender. The book analyzes gender as a felt experience and explores how that experience is shaped by popular scientific discourse by examining the “strange” femininity of young protagonists in four novels written by women in Spanish and Portuguese: Rosa Chacel’s Memorias de Leticia Valle (published in Argentina in 1945); Norah Lange’s Personas en la sala (Argentina, 1950); Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Spain, 1945); and Clarice Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem (Brazil, 1943). It pairs each novel with a broad scientific theme selected from those that captured the contemporary popular imagination to argue that the young female protagonists in these novels all put forth visions of young womanhood as an experience of strangeness. Building on Carmen Martín Gaite’s term chicas raras, Rankin proposes this strangeness as constitutive of a gendered experience inextricable from affective and material engagements with the world.

From the Popol Vuh to postmodernism, imagery of the natural world has played an important role in Latin American literature. In contrast to the rise of ecocritical scholarship in Anglophone literary studies, Latin American literary ecocriticism has been slower to take root. This volume of eleven essays seeks to advance the ecocritical conversation among Latin Americanists, furthering insight into the relationship between humans and their environments. The essays address regions as diverse as Patagonia and the Chihuahua Desert.