Historian's
book garners recognition
Cañzares-Esguerra's
tome lauded by three periodicals, American Historical Association
By
PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
An award-winning
book by UB historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra examining the emerging
identities that shaped the Western hemisphere has been cited as one
of the best books of the year by three important international publications
and has received two prestigious national awards from the American Historical
Association (AHA).
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UB
historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has been piling up the
awards for his book, "How to Write the History of the New World,"
including two prestigious honors from the American Historical Society. |
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Photo:
Sandra Fernandez |
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The book,
"How to Write the History of the New World" (Stanford University Press,
2001), refreshes our understanding of the colonial past and of the origins
of the independence movements in the Western hemisphere.
Last month
alone, it was named one of the year's best books by the TLS (Times
Literary Supplement), the Independent and The Economist,
which called it "a masterpiece of scholarly ingenuity."
The book
also was named the best book on Atlantic history and the best book on
Spanish and Latin American history for 2001 by the AHA.
The central
themes of the book are implied by its subtitle, "Histories, Epistemologies
and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World." In it, Cañizares-Esguerra
traces the cultural processes that led early-modern intellectuals on
both sides of the Atlantic to question primary sources that long had
been considered authoritative: Mesoamerican codices, early colonial
Spanish chronicles and travel accounts.
"My study
argues that the skepticism that dominated the "age of reason" took on
different meanings in different places," he says.
"In Northern
Europe, it generated new forms of reading, assessing and validating
documents, and new forms of writing history that drew on non-literary
sources. In Spain, it prompted scholars to create new, more reliable
narratives based on primary documentation that, in turn, led to the
formation of one of the largest specialized repositories of primary
sources in the worldthe Archive of the Indies.
"Finally,
in Spanish America, skepticism was turned against its most ardent European
promoters. Spanish-American scholars questioned the ability of foreign
European observers to ever comprehend the past and nature of the New
World," he explains.
He notes
that the great intellectual, cultural movements of the modern worldlike
the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Romanticismoften are presented
as European inventions that were passively and derivatively consumed
in other regions of the world. The book demonstrates, he says, "the
pitfalls of such an approach" to historical studies of Latin America.
"In the
age of Enlightenment, when it comes to devising new ideas on how to
write the history of the New World," he says, "there was as much intellectual
creativity in the so-called peripheries (Spain, Mexico) as in the Northern-European
core." This fact often astonishes American students, who have very little
knowledge of the intellectual and cultural history of Latin America,
and whose understanding of Central and South America has developed from
a European perspective.
As a teacher,
Cañizares-Esguerra says he tends to avoid the tragic narratives
that dominate the field of Latin American history and instead emphasizes
the rich, racial, social, cultural and intellectual history of the region.
"I value
interdisciplinary approaches," he says, "and shy away from flattened
and parochial narratives that present Latin America as a continent onto
itself."
His second
book, "Nation and Nature: Nature Narratives and Identities in Latin
American History, 1500-1900," forthcoming from Stanford Press, studies
pictorial, literary and scientific narratives of nature and how they
relate to distinct regional and national identities of Latin America.
An article
by Cañizares-Esguerra in the February 1999 issue of American
Historical Review, "New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and
the Construction of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America,
1600-1650," further demonstrates his interdisciplinary approach.
In November,
the piece received the Best Article Prize for 1999-2001 from the History
of Science Society's Forum for the History of the Human Sciences at
the HSS annual convention.
Cañizares-Esguerra,
currently on leave at Harvard University, attended medical school in
Quito, Ecuador, and received a master's degree and doctorate in the
history of science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Before
joining the UB history faculty, he was assistant professor of history
at Illinois State University.