Modern-Colonial geographies in Latin America : the mirage of the civilizing city and the archaic countryside
This special issue highlights and discusses the colonial grounds (Machado Aráoz, 2014) that characterize the modern experience of Latin America and the ways modern-colonial geographies have articulated urban and rural geographies. We explore the emergence and transformation of rural and urban Latin American geographies as a dialectical relationship which is part of colonial and postcolonial systems of power. By doing so, we inquire into the instauration and propagation of structures of power, hierarchies, and resistance that have marked the production of Latin America and its subaltern intersections with global geographies. This introduction to the special issue focuses particularly on the material side of the modern-colonial discourse in order to recover and discuss the historical foundations of modernity and its contested forms. Finally, we propose understanding the formation of modern-colonial geographies not simply as a top-down approach but as a discontinuous and contradictory process that has produced and reproduces a variety of "subaltern modernities" (Coronil, 1997, p. 7).