Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America

María del Pilar Blanco is associate professor of Spanish American literature and fellow and tutor in Spanish at Trinity College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination.Joanna Page is a Reader in Latin American literature and visual culture at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of several books, including Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Between Romanticism and Formalism.

This multidisciplinary, well-researched work is an excellent contribution to the fields of cultural studies and Latin American studies."—Choice"Wonderful and imaginative. . . . An exciting new addition to the literature."—New Books Network"The humanities, including language, literature, and history, have increasingly provided valuable insights on the relationships between science, society, and creative work. This book adds significantly to our appreciation of these connections in the Latin American context, including multiple countries and time periods."—Journal of Latin American Geography"Excels above all in its capacity to inspire further work on the raised issues. . . . The book does not shy away from the challenge of digging deeper and redeeming forgotten or unknown figures and episodes in the history of Latin American science and culture, which is the reason why it is highly recommended for a broad readership"—Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroductionI. Latin America's scientific landscapesIntroductionMaría del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page1. Bone Tales: Patagonian Monsters and the Paleontological Imagination Gabriela Nouzeilles2. Nation as Laboratory: Rethinking Science Writing in Mexico's República Restaurada (1868-1876) María del Pilar Blanco3. Natural Histories of the Anthropocene: Santiago del Estero, Argentina, in the 1930s Jens AndermannII. Latin America as the site of knowledge production Introduction4. Empathy, Patients' Needs and Therapeutic Innovation in the Medical Literature of Early Viceregal Mexico Yarí Pérez Marín5. Between Potosí and Nuevo Potosí: Mineral Riches and Observations of Nature in the Colonial Andes, ca. 1596-1797 Heidi V. Scott 6. Indigenous Medicine and Nation-Building: Hermilio Valdizán's Medical Project Edward ChaucaIII. Science and the modern nationIntroduction7.Postcolonial Social Sciences of Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: Land Surveys, Comparative Political Sociology, and the Malleability of Race Lina del Castillo8. "Una nueva y gloriosa nación": Patriotic Lyrics and Scientific Culture in the Forging of Political Emancipation in Río de la Plata Miguel de Asúa9. Inventions and Discoveries in Letters to Perón: Dialogue and Autonomy in the Popular Technical Imagination in Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s Hernán ComastriIV. Utopian convergences between science and the artsIntroduction10. Modernismo, Spiritualism, and Science in Argentina at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: An Analysis of National Magazines Soledad Quereilhac11. Doing Poetry with Science: Unthinking Knowledge in Sarduy, Perlongher, and Eielson Julio Prieto12. The Science of Reading Fiction: New (Post-Darwinian) Metaphors to Live ByJoanna PageV. Science, epistemology, and the critique of modernityIntroduction13. Laboratories of Universality: A Genealogy of Solitary Latin American Inventors Carlos Fonseca Suárez14. The Politics of Relativity: Radical Epistemologies and the Revolutionary Potential of the Scientific Imaginary in José Carlos Mariátegui Brais Outes-León15. Beyond Empiricism: Rolando García's Theory of Complex Systems and the Epistemological Consequences of a Non-linear Universe Mara Polgovsky EzcurraBibliographyIndex