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Latin America Modernity

A Summary of the Podcast: “Roundtable Discussion on Latin American Modernity” This podcast focuses on modernism and modernization in Latin America. The participants in the discussion are Rex Koontz an Assistant Art History Professor, Marc Zimmerman the Professor and Chair of Modern and Classical languages, Anadeli Bencomo an Associate Professor of Modern and Classical languages, and Thomas O’Brien a History Professor. All four of the participants discuss the many questions about Latin America’s history of modernity and how their modernity is perceived and compared to by the Europeans and Northern North American modernity. First Thomas O’Brien gives a working definition of modernity as it pertains to economics and politics. The working definition of modernity according to Thomas O’Brien dates back to Western Europe from the 15th Century through the 18th and 19thCenturies. The Western Europeans looked at modernity in terms of rationalism and the development of capitalist models of development, and the ideas of Republican forms of government. Latin America has tried to develop these Western European ideas of modernization in many ways. A few of the examples discussed of Latin America’s efforts to follow the classical ideas of modernization are when in the 19th Century Liberals tried to develop plans for developing a free trade economy, the Latin American efforts to write constitutions and to set up Republican forms of government, and the late 20thCentury Neoliberal economics and its effort to reduce the size of state expenditures. Thomas O’Brien discusses to what extent these ideas of modernity were adapted, absorbed and rejected in Latin America. Latin America’s modernity dating back to the colonial time was directly impacted and a result of the Europeans who came into Latin America with their own preconceived notions and ideas of what should be occurring culturally, politically, and socially in Latin America. These Europeans brought with them their ideas of...