The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity

by Enrique Dussel, Michael D. Barber (Translator)

English (translation)
Original Spanish

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Sociology, History

224 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1995

About the author

ENRIQUE DUSSEL nace el 24 de diciembre de 1934, en el pueblo de La Paz, Mendoza, Argentina. Exiliado político desde 1975 en México, hoy ciudadano mexicano, es profesor en el Departamento de Filosofía en la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM, Iztapalapa, ciudad de México), y en el Colegio de Filosofía de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la UNAM (Ciudad Universitaria). Licenciado en filosofía (Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina), doctor en filosofía por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, doctor en historia en La Sorbonne de Paris y una licencia en teología en Paris y Münster. Ha obtenido doctorados honoris causa en Freiburg (Suiza) y en la Universidad de San Andrés (La Paz, Bolivia). Fundador con otros del movimiento Filosofía de la Liberación. Trabaja especialmente el campo de la Ética y la Filosofía Política.

Reviews

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read the book for a course with Raimundo Barreto, in conjunction with Neal and Stephen. A great analysis of 1492 and its meaning for the construction of Europe as a "center" and the America's and the Muslim world as "peripheries." Dussel brilliantly shows how the construction of an Indigenous Other is crucial for the formation of a European conquering, violent, and dominating Ego. One of the best history books I've read to date.

[Sam Orndorff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in two sittings, thanks to very effective prose and the smooth way Dussel is able to theorize world history, development, and political economy. It tends toward philosophical ideas, but is no less readable. From a Marxist perspective, the author keenly unpacks social resistance movements on the part of the subaltern, enslaved, Indigenous, and other groups who feel the brunt of modernity's inherent violence. Modernity basically starts, for Dussel, with Columbus' non-discovery of America in 1492 and Vespucci's confirmation that the landmass is another realm, a few years later. The author traces the spread of capitalist settler colonialism, but contextualizes this in several thousand years of imperial geopolitics. Few, if any, books can pull this off in 119 pages (but don't skip the appendices -- they're fascinating as well). This text holds up as a key piece of anti-colonial literature.

[sube · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a good account of the rise of modernity, and its myth associated with it -- and ties this in, in my opinion quite well, with the discovery of America: 1492 is now the central date, associated with modernity, away from an association with modernity in an eurocentric way. Modernity, here, notes rational emancipation, which became associated with Europe, as it's the most rational, developed societies and as such the other must be subsumed to the self; it also posits Europe at the center, the core (when, before, it was always the periphery).

[M Govea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lo brillante —y lo incómodo— es cómo todo el análisis apunta a una pregunta profundamente política: ¿qué significa pensar desde fuera de ese marco, desde la alteridad negada? No es historia, es crítica radical. Un texto que obliga a mirar desde el reverso del mapa.

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 5 out of 5]

I clearly forgot to add Dussel’s works to my ‘read’ list lol. I think I’ve read all of his major works at this point and have written at least 3 articles on him?

[Regina Gómez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gran gran libro sobre el encubrimiento de América. Spoiler: América no fue descubierta, fue invadida y saqueada.

[Natú · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Invention of the Americas, Dussel offers several important contributions to the field of decolonial theory and our persistent, euro-centered, and trivializing understanding of the Conquest/Encounter. Sadly though, he not only falls short of his promise to examine the conquest from within an indigenous cosmology, he completely fails to extricate himself from the European philosophers he simultaneously condemns and, it would appear, wishes to make his peers. That said, Dussel presents his argument and wide scope of research succinctly and comprehensively (though with little depth and often scarcely more than a cursory understanding of the beliefs of the various indigenous communities from whose eyes he wishes to "see"), and while he does fall short, this book provides many valid starting points for a more complete understanding and validation of non-European cosmologies and historicities, as well as a few examples to avoid.