Nayeli L. Riano

Ph.D. Candidate in Political Theory, Georgetown University

I am a Ph.D. candidate in political theory in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, writing a dissertation under Drs. Shannon Stimson, Stefan Eich, Joshua Cherniss, and Joshua Simon (Johns Hopkins). My dissertation analyzes the conceptual impact and reconstruction of the Enlightenment political discourse on "civilization" and "barbarism" in Latin American political thought during the long nineteenth century. In this period, I integrate the region's historical stages of colonialism, wars of Independence, nation building, and industrialization with its social and political thought, covering the topics of empire, colonialism and post-colonialism, liberalism, Latin American political thought, Enlightenment, modernity, history, and republicanism.

My dissertation echoes the broader questions that currently drive my research, such as: How do we understand "crisis" in the history of political thought? How do ideas of "history," "progress" and "nature" shape our political thinking? and, what does it mean to be "modern?" Working primarily with Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English texts, I am interested in drawing out the historical links and the confluence of ideas in these varied linguistic and intellectual traditions. Educated in the liberal arts, I incorporate different areas of study in my research (literature, history, philosophy, art) to broaden our understanding of what it means to think "politically."

Prior to my work in political theory, I studied intellectual history at the University of St Andrews (MLitt) and English literature at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.)

Dissertation Project

A Mirror of Enlightenment: Reconceptualizing Civilization and Barbarism in Latin America

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

-Walter Benjamin

"The barbarian either totally mocks or totally worships. Civilization is a smile that discreetly combines irony and respect.”

-Nicolas Gomez Davila

Abstract: 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 a previously unexplored facet of their conceptual development across the Atlantic. The prolonged Latin American engagement with these concepts during the nineteenth century entailed a meaningful reevaluation of their respective 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 can help us to better understand, on the one hand, why these concepts continue to have currency in our political imaginary despite being fundamentally unstable and non-dichotomous and, on the other, instigate us to think beyond their illusory antagonism by reinventing the meaning of civilization as an ethical reckoning, an ongoing concern with ascertaining the morals and values that define our political societies and the failures therein, that effectively abandons its historical need for barbarism for legitimacy.

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:

nlr46 [at] georgetown [dot] edu

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