The Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes once opined that Mexican philosophers had not been invited to the banquet of Western civilization and that their ideas were ignored, though they had much to offer. Ofelia Schutte’s most recent book offers a timely corrective to this problem as it attempts “to understand the relationship between liberation, cultural identity, and Latin American social reality from the standpoint of a historically rooted critical philosophy” (p. 1). Schutte’s book is ambitious in scope. It provides a synthesizing overview of contemporary Latin American thought, a welcome addition to the field that updates earlier studies, such as Martin S. Stabb’s In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890—1960 (1967) and Michael A. Weinstein’s Polarity of Mexican Thought: Instrumentalism and Finalism (1976).
Schutte’s admirably interdisciplinary study revisits some of the classic Latin American thinkers and evaluates their work in the context of contemporary theoretical discourse. Rich in historical and biographical details, her survey begins with a reassessment of José Carlos Mariátegui’s autochthonous Marxist thought and its share in paradigms of social liberation. Subsequent chapters examine the contributions of Samuel Ramos, Leopoldo Zea, Augusto Salazar Bondy, Arturo Andrés Roig, and Francisco Miró Quesada to Latin American cultural identity by analyzing such themes as mexicanidad, mestizaje, authenticity, and technology. Schutte then provides a comprehensive and insightful discussion of works by Gustavo Gutiérrez, Paulo Freire, Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, and Enrique Dussell, among others. She distinguishes liberation theology from the lesser-known but equally compelling philosophy of liberation, and demonstrates how both can join together “to defend the cultural, political, and economic integrity of the people of the region” (pp. 173–74). The final chapter outlines Carlos Vaz Ferreira’s seminal contribution to feminist thought in Latin America during the early decades of this century, then surveys contemporary approaches to women’s issues in the region. The notes and bibliography are useful for generalists and specialists alike.
While each chapter of this intriguing book could stand alone and could be developed into a separate monograph, the author thematically unifies the volume by relating one thinker’s struggle to another’s. For instance, she shows how Zea’s attempt to inscribe ethnic “circumstance” into philosophical discourse is analogous to feminist analyses of gendered discourse (p. 93). Schutte’s advocacy of the right to express cultural heritage arises from analysis of Latin America’s historical struggles, but her argument also illuminates nicely the “culture wars” waging in the United States and Canada today.
