Latin America: Modernity, Globality, Critique: Introduction

Latin America has been the object of attention in the social sciences only intermittently during the 20th century. From the 1950s to the 1970s, attention focused on processes of modernization and dependency, and following this, on transitions from military dictatorships to democracy. Rarely, however, have social scientists and intellectuals from Latin America been active in speaking about the world beyond their own frontiers. It is as if Latin Americans were allowed to speak about their own experience and specific space-time coordinates, but not to extrapolate their findings more generally, and much less attempt to assess other realities across the world on this basis. The realities of global power as well as the attitude of Latin Americans towards their situation have been key factors in preventing a more general perspective being searched for by its intellectuals.