The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity

Language Notes\nText: English (translation)
Original Language: Spanish\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nThough it restates many of the boilerplate critiques of Eurocentrism, this book-delivered as lectures in Frankfurt in 1992-also offers some different angles on the European discovery of America. Dussel, a Mexican philosophy professor, articulates the grievance of Latin America, arguing that the conquest of America is essential to modernity as its "other face," the skeleton in the Enlightenment's closet. This survey of intellectual history can be heavy going and rhetorically stiff, but Dussel's corrective is clear: while the dominant Latin American classes like to speak of an "encounter" between two worlds, that approach conceals "the genocidal shock that devastated indigenous culture." Looking through the eyes of the conquered, Dussel intriguingly offers an alternative reconstruction of the achievements of indigenous Americans and an analysis of the psychic impact of the "foreign invasion." He doesn't advocate a return to the past, just a recognition of the often unhappy effects of modernity on his home region and culture.
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