The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810-1930

摘要

Spanish American republics were founded in defiance of the model of one language/one culture/one nation-state model that came to dominate European nationalism. Initially, many of the independence leaders hoped - faute de mieux - that the heady forces of liberty and sovereignty would suffice to sweep away the obstacles (racial, regional, economic) to create the modern political communities that they fully expected to become far superior to monarchical, slave-owning, imperialist Europe. But when it rapidly became evident that the implementation of liberal values tended to bring about illiberal outcomes, the importance of imagining some kind of cultural community increased correspondingly. From the 1830s onwards, the conditions of the present seemed to be so dire that they diminished nation-builders' confidence in the future and exacerbated their need for a past. As Rebecca Earle emphasises, history - an important element in all nationalisms - thus came to play a far greater part in nineteenth-century Spanish American nationalisms than might have been expected at the outset, given the future-oriented impetus of their oudook. Her fascinating study of the search of Creole elites for a useable past, in particular their changing and diverse views about the place of the pre-Columbian past in national histories, is a major contribution to the historiography of Spanish American nationalism.