Adam Sharman – författare

May ’68 has inspired cultural, social and political movements across the world but has also been used to criticise them. This book interrogates the consideration of the revolts in France as the pinnacle or even paradigm of a particular avatar in a revolutionary lineage that would include the liminal moments of 1789 and 1917. But it also engages in a mapping of the synchronous but not necessarily aligned rebellious events and purported legacies that orbited around that momentous year in the West and its internal periphery, on the other side of the Iron Curtain and in the strategic centre of the Global South constituted by Latin America in the 1960s. The collection combines fresher perspectives with more established scholarship in history, philosophy, critical theory, literary studies, psychoanalysis and visual culture through which the contributors deconstruct the rich and paradoxical conditions, development and vestiges, as creative as well as troubling, of an iconic moment of the twentieth century.

This book is about Enlightenment culture in Spanish America before Independence—in short, there where, according to Hegel, one would least expect to find it. It explores the Enlightenment in texts from five cultural fields: science, history, the periodical press, law, and literature.