‘Latin American Modernity,and Yet …’1

The article examines two ‘postmodern’ critiques of modernity: a general history that argues that it was never solely Western, and a work of Latin American cultural criticism that petitions for the region to leave behind a modernity seen as Eurocentric. It argues that to understand the modern elements of Latin America entails keeping present the European, and in part pre‐nineteenth‐century, genealogy of modernity. This is in order to grasp that both the pitfalls of claiming modernity is a common project (colonialism vanishes) and the difficulty of going beyond it (European modernity bequeathed the language of breaks and dialectical incorporations). The piece identifies the rhetorical choreography involved when the limits of the critique of Western modernity become apparent.     

The ‘Princeland’ secession movement in Victoria and South Australia, 1861–1867

‘Australians have always recognised that distance or isolation was one of the moulds which shaped their history.’ G. Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, p. vii.     

‘A Sick,Weak, and Ignorant People’: Public Health Education and Prevention in Rural Colombia, 1930–1940

This article analyses Salud y Sanidad (Health and Sanitation), a government journal edited in 1930s Colombia. It examines the state's model of public health, which proposed education and prevention as strategies to guarantee the success of its programmes. It argues that despite the journal's more progressive approaches, editors and contributors reproduced stereotypes about Colombia's rural inhabitants that contradicted state rhetoric and showed the limits of public health models that do not address the underlying social inequities that drive the propagation of poverty and disease in rural areas, and that ultimately continued to blame victims for their illness and misfortune