• DOI:10.1093/AHR/118.5.1345
• Corpus ID: 163918139

The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race

@article{Gobat2013TheIO,
  title={The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race},
  author={Michel Gobat},
  journal={The American Historical Review},
  year={2013},
  volume={118},
  pages={1345-1375}
}

• M. Gobat
• Published 1 December 2013
• History, Political Science
• The American Historical Review

WITH THE PUBLICATION OF Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities in 1983, it has become commonplace among scholars to view nations no longer as things natural but as historical inventions.1 Far less ink has been spilled concerning the formation of larger geopolitical entities such as continents. Many still take their origins for granted. Yet as some scholars have shown, the terms “Africa,” “America,” “Asia,” and “Europe” resulted from complex historical processes.2 The concept of the continent emerged in ancient Greece and guided Europeans in their efforts to dominate other areas of the world, especially from the fourteenth century onward. Non-European societies certainly conceptualized their own geopolitical spaces, but the massive spread of European imperialism in the nineteenth century ensured that the European schema of dividing the world into continents would predominate by the twentieth century.3 The invention of “Latin America” nevertheless reveals that contemporary continental constructs were not always imperial products. True, many scholars assume that French imperialists invented “Latin America” in order to justify their country’s occupation of Mexico (1862–1867).4 And the idea did stem from the French concept of a “Latin race,” which Latin American émigrés in Europe helped spread to the other side of the Atlantic. But as Arturo Ardao, Miguel Rojas Mix, and Aims