A Critique of Medieval Contemporaneity: Temporality and the Medievalization of Nineteenth-Century South America

The Eurocentric world-order is premised on normative ideas about historical time, of which a prominent example is the category of the “medieval”. As part of my forthcoming book Politics of Temporalization (UPenn 2020) on the medievalization of former Spanish and Portuguese American colonies, I will discuss how Chile, Argentina, and Brazil were named medieval and Oriental in nineteenth-century metropolitan as well as Euro-American thought. By discussing the presence of the “medieval” in the Ibero-American postcolonies, I will examine how this lesser-known medieval naming affects our own understandings of temporalization and the medieval-modern divide, leading to a critique of the notion of multiple temporalities and of current ideas about the contemporaneity of the medieval in the modern world.

A Medievalism and Imperial Modernity research strand event.  Co-organized with the York Centre for the Americas