Conservative Economies of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Press : Economías conservadoras del conocimiento en la prensa del siglo XIX

• The press in nineteenth-century Latin America, as a public arena for the formation of the new nations, has often been associated with the consolidation of liberalism and of the specific cultural and economic systems that governed modern life under the devices of modernity, progress, and newness. However, as a matter of fact, the press was also the site of articulation for conservative agendas, partly as a response to the advances of liberalism, but also as a means to explore modes of expression that facilitated the recognition of positive aspects of liberal modernity while retaining ties with tradition. Therefore, in order to fully understand how modern nations are a result of an always contested liberal state design, it is also imperative to understand how the press, with its literary and other types of cultural texts, expressed conservative values. As the nineteenth century advanced, a myriad of newspapers and magazines published an array of genres, both textual and visual, that covered from news, political debates and satire to literary texts, as sketches of manners, poetry, short-stories and novels by instalments. To understand the material mechanisms and conservative sensibilities that operated behind discourses of tradition, hierarchy, family, property, and so on, this special issue will focus on the formulation of conservative economies of knowledge in nineteenth-century Latin-American press. What forms did the relationships between bodies, natural resources, and other aspects of the material world take in the conservative imagination? What knowledge of the material world and bodies emanated from the aesthetic and other discursive expressions of conservative sensibilities? How did aesthetic and other discursive expressions seek to create and inform social forms, forms of government, modes of persuasion, ways of knowing or failing to know the world? The articles included in this special issue will consider the relationship between aesthetics, the press, and conservatism in a variety of approaches related to particular cases from the heterogeneous corpus of periodical publications of the century in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Spain. From popular genres, such as the calendar (West) or the theatre (Herranz) to more learned genres, such as poetry (Castro) and didactic texts on geography (Soriano Salkjelsvik); from more sociological approaches (Gutiérrez Negrón and Herranz) to more political ones (Martínez Gramuglia, Cuvardic & Baltodano, Vicenteño Bravo); from a philosophical take on affects (Ruisánchez Serra) to mapping the pedagogical ideas of a public figure (Kaempfer), the articles give an idea of the vast array of possibilities that arise from the study of economies of knowledge from the vantage point of conservative sensibilities in the press. Methodologically, the articles also cover a range of approaches from literary and historical studies, extending from the distant reading offered by the digital humanities (Ruisánchez Serra), the sociology of literature (Gutiérrez Negrón), the sociology of language (Martínez Gramuglia), historiographical approaches (Cuvardic & Baltodano, Kaempfer and Vicenteño Bravo), cultural studies and close readings (Castro, Soriano Salkjelsvik, and West). By bringing forward until now forgotten or overlooked newspapers and magazines, this special issue is also a contribution to the studies of the nineteenth century and an invitation to further diving into the archives, where much work still needs to be done. The study of the press allows us to show how different versions of the national and the global interacted in the construction and moulding of the reading public; the focus on conservative economies of knowledge visualises the existing tensions in those processes and gives us a deeper understanding of the performativity of conservative agendas. We are especially interested to show how the press served as a space where competing notions of conservatism could take aesthetic form in transnational or transatlantic contexts and how conservative thinkers and writers displayed the multiple values and affects that accompanied these notions.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi -- Historia (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology -- History (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Literatures (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Övrig annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Other Humanities not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Idé- och lärdomshistoria (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- History of Ideas (hsv//eng)

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