The Chinese Mirror. Haya de la Torre, Kuo-Min-Tang and the global origins of Latin-American populism (with some notes about the methodological and political implications of a latin-american global history)

BERGEL, MARTÍN

Río de Janeiro

Congreso; Coloquio Internacional "Latinoamérica y la Historia Global?; 2016

Fundação Getulio Vargas

This present paper seeks to contribute to current debates about the place of Latin America in the emerging field of global history. As a number of scholars have noted, this field has been structured primarily around a US-Euro-Asiatic dialogue and only very recently there have been various attempts to connect Latin America as a region with the debates that emerged from global history as such. This paper aims to make a contribution to two dimensions in relation to the agenda questions posed by this new approach. On the one hand, this paper is inserted into a specific field, which has been established only recently: global intellectual history. I not only seek to stress the marginal role that Latin America occupies within this approach, but I also make a case in favor of a global approach within the broader tradition of studies of intellectual history. On the other hand, I would like to show the promises that could bring about the possibility of developing a field of Latin American global history. As I will argue in this paper, such possibility could imply de-substantializing the region, and think about social, cultural and political geographies that transcend the reified denominations through fluxes and exchanges of ideas, artifacts and migration movements. Both questions are linked to the subject of my paper, namely the adoption by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, founder and intellectual and political leader of Peruvian the APRA (one of the first political movements that would become part of the tradition of Latin American populisms), of the model offered by the Chinese Kuo-Min-Tang in the 1920s.