Böcker av Jorge Canizares-Esguerra

The Invention of Humboldt is a game-changing volume of essays by leading scholars of the Hispanic world that explodes many myths about Alexander von Humboldt and his world.Rather than 'follow in Humboldt's footsteps,' this book outlines the new critical horizon of post-Humboldtian Humboldt studies: the archaeology of all that lies buried under the Baron's epistemological footprint. Contrary to the popular image of Humboldt as a solitary 'adventurer' and 'hero of science' surrounded by New World nature, The Invention of Humboldt demonstrates that the Baron's opus and practice was largely derivative of the knowledge communities and archives of the Hispanic world. Although Humboldtian writing has invented a powerful cult that has served to erase the sources of his knowledge and practice, in truth Humboldt did not 'invent nature,' nor did he pioneer global science: he was the beneficiary of Iberian natural science and globalization. Nor was Humboldt a pioneering, 'postcolonial' cultural relativist. Instead, his anthropological views of the Americas were Orientalist and historicist and, in most ways, were less enlightened than those of his Creole contemporaries. This book will reshape the landscape of Humboldt scholarship. It is essential reading for all those interested in Alexander von Humboldt, the Hispanic American enlightenment, and the global history of science and knowledge.

In the mid-18th century, the French naturalist Buffon contended that the New World was in fact geologically new and that it had recently emerged from the water. This text looks at the debate surrounding the geological history of the New World, and the effect on historiographical concepts.

The book demonstrates that a wider Pan-American perspective can upset the most cherished national narratives of the United States, for it maintains that the Puritan colonization of New England was as much a chivalric, crusading act of Reconquista (against the Devil) as was the Spanish conquest.

This collection of essay explores two traditions of interpreting and manipulating nature in the early- modern and nineteenth-century Iberian world: one instrumental and imperial, the other patriotic and national.