Assistant Professor of Humanities, University of Texas at Austin
Embedded Files
I am a political theorist working at the crossroads of the history of political thought and comparative intellectual history, with a focus on the transatlantic movement and transformation of political languages from the early modern period to the twentieth century. Informed by conceptual and contextual historical inquiry, my interdisciplinary approach incorporates literature, art history, and historiography to trace how these languages take shape and shift meaning within the cultural imaginations that underlie political thought. Across these fields, I examine how ideas of temporality and conceptual change inform the way political thinkers interpret and narrate events such as revolution, civil war, and national development.
My current book project sits within political theory, intellectual history, and Latin American studies. It examines how European Enlightenment political discourses — particularly regarding the paired concepts of "civilization" and "barbarism" — were received, contested, and reconstructed in Latin American political thought across the long nineteenth century. The project traces this conceptual history through the region's transitions from colonialism through independence, nation-building, and commercial expansion. Rather than treating "civilization" and "barbarism" as static Enlightenment exports, the project shows how their conceptual instability became a generative resource for Latin American political thinkers negotiating sovereignty, citizenship, and modernity after empire. My work has been supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society, the American Political Science Association and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University.
My research is published or forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas, History of Political Thought, and History of European Ideas, among other venues.
I hold a Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University, an MLitt in Intellectual History from the University of St Andrews, and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.
Book Project
Book Project
Refracting Enlightenment: Civilization and Barbarism in Latin American Political Thought
How have the concepts of civilization and barbarism shaped the political thought of the modern world? Inherently antagonistic concepts, yet inherently dependent on each other, they encapsulate within their duality a feature of political thought that this project explores by way of historical inquiry into a time and place that stood as one of the original representatives of “barbarism” in modern history: the Americas. During the eighteenth century, civilization and barbarism became temporalized concepts, part of a European Enlightenment discourse about the New World replete with moral assumptions about the region and its inhabitants that were also intended to consolidate the European identity through its imagined historical relation to a foreign entity. These concepts and their implications were significantly shaped by Enlightenment theories of historical progress, societal development, and human nature that problematically depended on colonialism and empire. They merit closer scrutiny, however, because of an under-explored facet of their linguistic and conceptual development across the Atlantic. The prolonged Latin American engagement with these concepts during the nineteenth century entailed a meaningful reevaluation of their alleged values which elucidated their limitations and, at once, their opportunity for reconstruction within a different, post-colonial context itself rife with problems of national development, civil war, relations between Church and State, and intellectual and cultural identity. Exploring these afterlives of the Enlightenment discourse on civilization and barbarism in Latin America and recovering the Latin American contribution to this story helps us to better understand how political concepts--including the languages that carry them--change meaning over time and impact political knowledge. Accounting for such historical change offers political theorists insight into a paradox: how the instability of political concepts also contributes to their persistence through continual reinvention. Far from eroding their power, the very instabilities of concepts like civilization and barbarism have fueled their resilience and adaptability in political imaginaries.
The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero - Prospero, Miranda, Caliban and Ariel (Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2) Detail.
One of the most notably hostile relationships in Shakespeare's The Tempest is that between Prospero and Caliban—the banished Duke of Milan who has arrived on a new island and the native “savage” whom he has enslaved. Prospero takes pride in his books, but uses his knowledge to manipulate nature. Caliban, though crude, recognizes a more peaceful time on his island before Prospero arrived. In this sense, Prospero and Caliban can be seen as representing a type of dialectic between the two concepts that my dissertation covers, civilization and barbarism, above conveyed by the oppositional stance between these two characters. This play, moreover, was deeply Influential In Latin America, and was readapted by thinkers Jose Enrique Rodó and Roberto Fernández-Retamar.
Get in touch:
Get in touch:
nayeli.riano@austin.utexas.edu
nayeli.riano@austin.utexas.edu
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse