Conclusion

Abstract

Marred by postcolonial inferiority complexes, political hypocrisies, and opportunistic commercial purposes, and permeated by an obsession with Western Europe and the United States as an idealized construct, the idea of Latin America that emerges via several examples in this book remains interesting because of its potential as a form of subtle antagonism. Latin Americanism becomes a latent shadow-identity that avoids the absolute predominance of the nation-state by disturbing the exceptionalism at the foundation of all national (and also ethnic and regional) identities and evades the dualism obsessed with the separation from and the comparison and contrast with an idealized West. It also becomes a countertradition that quietly refuses the idea of Latin America as a future task by focusing on performing empathy rather than promoting future solidarity. Fugitive and vague when approached as a homogeneous, stable identity, this idea of Latin America hovers tenuously against the background of stronger ethnic, national, and linguistic allegiances and dubious conventions of geopolitics, disrupting the cultural and linguistic divides that set Brazil apart from Spanish-speaking Latin America and both apart from the United States. It unsettles both the cosmopolitanism that sees nothing but continuities between Europe and the Americas and the national particularity based on essentialisms.