From ‘World History’ to ‘Global History’: Latin American Perspectives

ACHA, OMAR

Buenos Aires

Congreso; Englobe Conference; 2011

Universidad Di Tella

The concept of globalization involves a critical concern toward traditional and revisionist practices of the historiographies developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a matter of fact, both the nation-state centered history and the microhistorical and deconstructive historiography can be put under a new light of a global turn in the historical understanding. In this paper I will propose a preliminary analysis of the current avatars of the issue in Latin America. The main hypothesis I would like to justify in this paper are the following ones: 1) There was an important conceptual change in the recent understandings of global history, a change that allows to a deep critique of the assumptions of the old world history; while the Eurocentric and teleological inclinations of world history misrecognised peripheral (non Eurocentric) conceptions of history, a critical awareness of global history facilitates the dialogue with alternative viewpoints; 2) There is a specific chronology of Latin American globalizations, that can be arranged in five stages until the nowadays ideal-typical notion of “globality”; the particular chronology activates the inquiry about a Latin American research program of global history; 3) The colonial, postcolonial and dependent cultural relations with European and (North) American cultural metropolis involve a “gerschenkronian” privilege of the “backward” historiographical zones like the Latin American one; the “backwardness” permits to skip the universalistic, monologic and Eurocentric troubles of the world history and of the less critical conceptions of global history; 4) Latin American discussions on globalization and some critical notions embedded in its intellectual history generate interesting contexts to conceive historiographical and theoretical frameworks for a practice of situated global history; I refer, on one hand, to the hybridity and interpretive readings of European texts or representations (for instance, the “cannibalistic” methodology proposed by Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade or the creative reading of Marxism by the Peruvian essayist José Carlos Mariátegui), and on the other hand, I have in mind the local knowledges that highlight the density of interactions between the global and the local; 5) but it must be assumed that in the field of Latin American historical practices the global inquiry is only its beginnings; besides a dialogue with international investigation, the development of research programs does need to accomplish three goals: a) the production of historical writings about the region in its global connections, b) a critical history of Latin American historiography would help to overcome the former shortcomings of nationally constrained research, and c) the making of a theory of global history nuanced by the conceptual and empirical peculiarities of the manifold experiences of Latin American global interactions.  In the concluding remarks I will try to show why the practice of a global historiography from Latin American perspectives offer arguments to a critical analysis of the globalization in our times. And I will also explain its implications for the imagination of alternative globalizations.