Soffia, Pablo; (2024) Provincializing Historicism: Experiments in Theory and Method from Nineteenth-Century Spanish America. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Pablo Soffia - PhD Dissertation.pdf - Other Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 April 2025. Download (2MB)

Abstract

This dissertation argues that from the 1830s to the 1860s, Spanish American intellectuals in the Southern Cone used historical discourse to break their epistemic dependency on Europe and promote autonomous canons of thought in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. I substantiate that, to do so, some of the most creative and bold thinkers of their time set forth a process of theoretical and methodological experimentation against epistemic colonialism. Developing this argument, I challenge deep-rooted narratives in the available scholarship on the history of historicism and nineteenth-century Spanish American intellectual history. Conventionally, scholars have tended to conceive historicism as an intrinsically Eurocentric discourse or tradition of thought. Historicism, thus understood, offered a discursive and theoretical framework to a Westernising notion of lineal progress that, supposedly, became globally hegemonic during the nineteenth century. Latin-Americanists, for their part, have usually depicted the main generations of post-colonial Spanish American literary figures as promoters of a preponderantly Europhile and diffusionist vision of modernity. To nuance and revise these well-entrenched views, I draw on inspiration from recent literature in the fields of global intellectual history, the history of knowledge, and postcolonial studies while also expanding the source base traditionally examined by scholars. More specifically, I focus on the writings and debates of a closely integrated network of intellectuals based in Argentina, Uruguay, and, especially, Chile, a country that, from the 1840s onwards, became a regional centre for transnational intellectual collaboration. My thesis, in sum, contributes to the global history of historicism through the lens of a diverse group of Spanish American thinkers whose richly insightful and often subversive intellectual experiments allow me to shed new light on the scope and limits of Western historical thought by tracing connections they made between the writing of history and questions about politics, geography, aesthetics, linguistics, metaphysics, and economics.

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