Session Abstract

This panel brings together projects that address the different ways political communities formed and made manifest their desires in nineteenth-century Latin America. It aims to portrait the creation and configuration of community identities that emerged after Independence by offering new ways of analyzing what the "national” and the “political” meant in Chile and Colombia, countries scholars have regarded as exceptions to the trajectory of a seemingly common Latin American nineteenth-century historical and political experience. The panel aims to present alternative approaches to the study of political cultures and national identities by exploring the ways different social sectors in Chile and Colombia made their political interests manifest through the printing press, art, cartography, urban spaces, and consumer and material culture. Furthermore, it aims to examine the social and cultural anxieties underlying the processes of constructing patria, república and nación. The participants of the panel anticipate a debate interrogating existing historiography on the creation, manifestation, and formation of political community identities in Latin America after the collapse of the Spanish Empire, and hope to explore ways of broadening the source base and analytical approaches scholars might use such that we may better understand this heady period of Latin American history.