33841GH

SoSe 20: Global Thinking in Modern Latin America

Nino Vallen

Information for students

***** This is an online Seminar that takes place entirely on Blackboard. Students engage and discuss with the assigned literature through response papers published on a blog. For more information about the format and requirements write Dr. Nino Vallen (nino.vallen@fu-berlin.de). ***** close

Comments

Globalization is not a force of nature. A wide variety of actors is involved in the constant struggles over how things in the world should work and how this ought to be reflected in the global order. In these struggles politicians, intellectuals, and experts not only think about the world but they strategically use their universal visions to gain support for their ideas. This course explores the political significance of global thinking from the perspective of Latin America. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will consider how people in the region thought about the world and engaged with worldmaking projects as they came into existence during the heydays of empire and the following period of decolonization. Topics that will be discussed include the world expositions, racial exclusion and diversity, anti-imperialism, dependency theory, and the pluriverse. Aim of the course is provide students with new insights into the conflicts, institutions, practices, and ideas that have given shape to today’s global order and the perceptions of Latin America’s position in it, both in Europe and the region itself. close

Suggested reading

Bell, Duncan (2013): “Making and Taking Worlds,” in Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, 254–279. New York, NY: Columbia University Press; Escobar, Arturo (2017): Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press; Reiter, Bernd, ed. (2018): Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge. Durham and London: Duke University Press; Schuster, Sven (2018): The world’s fairs as spaces of global knowledge: Latin American archaeology and anthropology in the age of exhibitions. In Journal of Global History 13 (1), pp. 69–93. close