Border crossing with Rousseau: Emile and Francisco de Miranda's Tour of the United States, 1783–1784
Abstract Drawing on Charles W.J. Withers's analysis of the transnational geographies of Enlightenment culture, this essay reconsiders the early Atlantic border crossings of Francisco de Miranda, forerunner of Latin American independence, in relation to Emile, Jean Jacques Rousseau's revolutionary work on education. During his time as an officer in Cádiz, Spain, Miranda participated in the circulation and reading of Rousseau, extending a network of readers who challenged the Inquisition's criminalization of forbidden books in what might be called a shadow public sphere. Miranda's travel diary of his journey through the United States, Diario del Viaje por los Estados Unidos de América del Norte (The Diary of Francisco de Miranda: Tour of the United States, 1783–1784) shows how he transculturated Rousseau's theories on empiricism, travel and education, and political maturation to develop a secular creole epistemology that ushered and affirmed his vision of independence, and his entry into the larger Enlightenment republic of letters as a self-identified American. Miranda thus enacted a model of traveling knowledge-making that paralleled and diverged from the work of Jesuits such as Francisco Clavijero and others who, as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra shows, developed patriotic epistemologies within religious frameworks.
The Celebrity of Exilic Romance: Francisco de Miranda and Lord Byron
ABSTRACT This comparative analysis argues that Lord Byron's celebrity, and the ways in which he sought to deploy it, was anticipated by Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), the Venezuelan exile, adventurer, and revolutionary. Miranda inspired a type of transnational celebrity classified here as “exilic romance.” Defined by the appropriation and performance of several often contradictory identities, exilic romance operated as a living text, one that was being constantly edited, revised, and reinterpreted. Its many poses, which included the reinterpretation of courtly love, episodic adventure, and erotic symbolism, drew on literary genres (romance, picaresque, epic, and drama) and on classic Hispanic cultural symbols (such as El Cid, Don Juan, Don Quixote, and el pícaro). These literary “reenactments” were shaped in numerous ways by exile: the exotic distance of physical, cultural, and anachronistic separation that existed between the celebrity object and his public reception. This exilic distance enabled a fluid celebrity form of myriad personae that became the foundation for the subversive agency that critics have commonly associated with Byron's elusive classification. In proposing that Miranda's celebrity prefigured Byron's, this argument shows how exilic romance captured the political and cultural imagination on both sides of the Atlantic for four decades through the public fascination with Miranda's and Byron's lives and how Byron made the fascination and elusiveness of exilic romance one of the subjects of Don Juan.
Achievements and contradictions of the Peruvian agrarian reform
Different paths of transition to capitalist agriculture, as well as different types of agrarian reform, can be distinguished. The Peruvian agrarian reform is analysed within this context and evaluated in terms of its contribution to rural development. The Peruvian case underlines the importance of understanding the rationality of the pre‐existent agrarian system for a successful restructuring of the agrarian economy and society. The contradictions which arose between the State's model and the peasants’ model of agrarian reform, as well as those between different types of peasants, are discussed. Peru's experience is also a reminder that a land reform is not a sufficient condition for rural development unless accompanied by proper price, marketing, credit and investment policies.