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IHR Latin American Seminar: "Hyisteory"

05 March 2019, 5:30 pm–7:30 pm

IHR

"Hyisteory": Historical categories, hysterical claims Populist blaming and the uses of comparative studies

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Daisy Voake

Location

Room 105
Institute of the Americas
51 Gordon Square
London
WC1H 0PN
United Kingdom

Analyses of twenty first century politics have heavily relied on the uses of Latin American populism as a template for understanding contemporary politics across the globe. Whether it was the pink tide in the region during the first decade of the new century, or the far-right movements in the U.S. and Europe during the second one, populism has become a pervasive category of analysis. In this paper, I reflect about the normative uses of history in the construction of analytical categories for the understanding of mass politics. I trace elites’ concerns about popular participation and the emphasis on comparative studies as a pivotal component of modernization theories in the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s. Particularly, I explore how Argentine Peronism became a template for the analysis of modern mass politics, from the 1940s to these days. And I call for a discussion about intellectual numbness and normative uses of history in order to develop new and more insightful analytical categories.

About the Speaker

Ernesto Semán

at University of Bergen

Ernesto Semán is an Associate Professor of Latin American History at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen, Norway and the author of Ambassadors of the Working Class: Argentina's International Labor Activists and Cold War Democracy in the Americas (2017).