The Invention of Humboldt is a game-changing volume of essays by leading scholars of the Hispanic world that explodes many myths about Alexander von Humboldt and his world. Rather than 'follow in Humboldt's footsteps,' this book outlines the new critical horizon of post-Humboldtian Humboldt studies: the archaeology of all that lies buried under the Baron's epistemological footprint. Contrary to the popular image of Humboldt as a solitary 'adventurer' and 'hero of science' surrounded by New World nature, The Invention of Humboldt demonstrates that the Baron's opus and practice was largely derivative of the knowledge communities and archives of the Hispanic world. Although Humboldtian writing has invented a powerful cult that has served to erase the sources of his knowledge and practice, in truth Humboldt did not 'invent nature,' nor did he pioneer global science: he was the beneficiary of Iberian natural science and globalization. Nor was Humboldt a pioneering, 'postcolonial' cultural relativist. Instead, his anthropological views of the Americas were Orientalist and historicist and, in most ways, were less enlightened than those of his Creole contemporaries. This book will reshape the landscape of Humboldt scholarship. It is essential reading for all those interested in Alexander von Humboldt, the Hispanic American enlightenment, and the global history of science and knowledge.

The global phenomenon of decolonization was born in the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The First Wave of Decolonization is the first volume in any language to describe and analyze the scope and meanings of decolonization during this formative period. It demonstrates that the pioneers of decolonization were not twentieth-century Frenchmen or Algerians but nineteenth-century Peruvians and Colombians. In doing so, it vastly expands the horizons of decolonization, conventionally understood to be a post-war development emanating from Europe. The result is a provocative, new understanding of the global history of decolonization.

The Invention of Humboldt is a game-changing volume of essays by leading scholars of the Hispanic world that explodes many myths about Alexander von Humboldt and his world. Rather than 'follow in Humboldt's footsteps,' this book outlines the new critical horizon of post-Humboldtian Humboldt studies: the archaeology of all that lies buried under the Baron's epistemological footprint. Contrary to the popular image of Humboldt as a solitary 'adventurer' and 'hero of science' surrounded by New World nature, The Invention of Humboldt demonstrates that the Baron's opus and practice was largely derivative of the knowledge communities and archives of the Hispanic world. Although Humboldtian writing has invented a powerful cult that has served to erase the sources of his knowledge and practice, in truth Humboldt did not 'invent nature,' nor did he pioneer global science: he was the beneficiary of Iberian natural science and globalization. Nor was Humboldt a pioneering, 'postcolonial' cultural relativist. Instead, his anthropological views of the Americas were Orientalist and historicist and, in most ways, were less enlightened than those of his Creole contemporaries. This book will reshape the landscape of Humboldt scholarship. It is essential reading for all those interested in Alexander von Humboldt, the Hispanic American enlightenment, and the global history of science and knowledge.

The global phenomenon of decolonization was born in the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The First Wave of Decolonization is the first volume in any language to describe and analyze the scope and meanings of decolonization during this formative period. It demonstrates that the pioneers of decolonization were not twentieth-century Frenchmen or Algerians but nineteenth-century Peruvians and Colombians. In doing so, it vastly expands the horizons of decolonization, conventionally understood to be a post-war development emanating from Europe. The result is a provocative, new understanding of the global history of decolonization.

Insisting on the critical value of Latin American histories for recasting theories of postcolonialism, After Spanish Rule is the first collection of essays by Latin Americanist historians and anthropologists to engage postcolonial debates from the perspective of the Americas. These essays extend and revise the insights of postcolonial studies in diverse Latin American contexts, ranging from the narratives of eighteenth-century travelers and clerics in the region to the status of indigenous intellectuals in present-day Colombia. The editors argue that the construction of an array of singular histories at the intersection of particular colonialisms and nationalisms must become the critical project of postcolonial history-writing. Challenging the universalizing tendencies of postcolonial theory as it has developed in the Anglophone academy, the contributors are attentive to the crucial ways in which the histories of Latin American countries-with their creole elites, hybrid middle classes, subordinated ethnic groups, and complicated historical relationships with Spain and the United States-differ from those of other former colonies in the southern hemisphere. Yet, while acknowledging such differences, the volume suggests a host of provocative, critical connections to colonial and postcolonial histories around the world. Contributors Thomas Abercrombie Shahid Amin Jorge Canizares-Esguerra Peter Guardino Andres Guerrero Marixa Lasso Javier Morillo-Alicea Joanne Rappaport Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo Mark Thurner

More than the story of a South American country, "History's Peru" examines how the entity called "Peru" gradually came into being, and how the narratives that defined it evolved over time. Mark Thurner here offers a brilliant account of Peruvian historiography, one that makes a pioneering contribution not only to Latin American studies but also to the history of historical thought at large. He traces the contributions of key historians of Peru, from the colonial period through the present, and teases out the theoretical underpinnings of their approaches. He demonstrates how Peruvian historical thought critiques both European history and Anglophone postcolonial theory. And his deeply informed readings of Peru's most influential historians--from Inca Garcilaso de la Vega to Jorge Basadre--are among the most subtle and powerful available in English. In this tour de force, Thurner examines the development of Peruvian historical thought from its misty colonial origins in the sixteenth century up to the present day. He demonstrates that the concept of "Peru" is both a strange and enlightening invention of the modern colonial imagination--an invention that lives on today as a postcolonial wager on a democratic political future that can only be imagined in its own historicist terms, not those of European or Western history. A fascinating counter example to those who mistakenly believe history to be an exact and objective science, "History's Peru" is an intellectual adventure of wide scope and great originality. Mark Thurner is associate professor of history and anthropology at the University of Florida.

From Two Republics to One Divided examines Peru's troubled transition from colonial viceroyalty to postcolonial republic from the local perspective of Andean peasant politics. Thurner's reading of the Andean peasantry's engagement and disengagement with the postcolonial state challenges long-standing interpretations of Peruvian and modern Latin American history and casts a critical eye toward Creole and Eurocentric ideas about citizenship and nationalism. Working within an innovative and panoramic historical and linguistic framework, Thurner examines the paradoxes of a resurgent Andean peasant republicanism during the mid-1800s and provides a critical revision of the meaning of republican Peru's bloodiest peasant insurgency, the Atusparia Uprising of 1885. Displacing ahistorical and nationalist readings of Inka or Andean continuity, and undermining the long-held notion that the colonial legacy is the dominant historical force shaping contemporary Andean reality, Thurner suggests that in Peru, the postcolonial legacy of Latin America's nation-founding nineteenth century transfigured, and ultimately reinvented, the colonial legacy in its own image.

As the master narratives of the so-called Museum Age decline and the new museology grows old, museums appear to be returning to the fragile and ruined heterogeneity that they once so vigorously denied; museums everywhere now exhibit pieces of their own pasts, often in the form of refashioned cabinets of curiosity. Thurner explores the broader meaning of this ongoing return to curiosity in the museum within this book and argues that it indicates a need for reflection about what museums are actually museums of. The Museum of Babel provides a unique and thoughtful reflection upon this fundamental question, which is of broad significance for the global culture of our age. Examining the history of museums from a transatlantic perspective, Thurner discusses and analyses an array of contemporary exhibits of the museum’s past. Providing engaging and lively meditations on the histories that have made museums, from the Prado to the British Museum, and from the Louvre to Mexico’s Museum of Anthropology, Thurner provides a novel reflection on exhibits of the museum’s own past, whilst also demonstrating what museums are and making suggestions as to what they might become. The Museum of Babel is an enlightening reflection on the purpose and meaning of museums. As such, it will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of museum studies, cultural studies, area studies, history, anthropology and art history.