An Alternative Modernity Analysis

The main topics for this week’s readings are generally themed around the birth of the public sphere during the eighteenth century with the advent of modernity and the discourse that surrounds it. Each author presents essentially the same themes and ideas on varying subject matter but does so from a different view point and through different stories.
Our first reading, which as the title suggests is about how English America transformed into the America we know today via the press. In “English America now the United States” of The History of Printing in America Isaiah Thomas discusses how the history of America is “blended with fable” (3). He goes on to state how the press had become free some years “previous to the commencement of the revolution” and that it continued for a long time appropriately to discriminate between liberty and moral restraints. Thomas continues with his main argument that the ones respecting the printing and printers of this country, it is presumed, will please professional men and a general history of this nature will certainly preserve many important facts.
In the article “An Alternative Modernity,” the author François-Xavier Guerra sets out to define and explain the evolution of modernity, in the context of the eighteenth century and Latin America, as an umbrella term for a group of “multiple transformations in the field of ideas, the imaginary, and values and behavior.” In the simplest of terms, modernity can be defined as, according to Guerra, “the invention’ of the individual” (1). Guerra continues on to state that for modernity to evolve it was necessary then for “the creation of new forms of sociability and of its societal practices” (8). To put Guerra’s words in layman’s terms: modern thought and...

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... public sphere, colonial authorities aimed to prevent any open discussion of or participation in politics and policymaking. What can be seen today as public state affairs and policy making—where not public prior to the second half of the eighteenth century—were exclusively private for the crown and altar. In the Spanish colonies, much like in Europe, the social segments behind this emerging public sphere of civil society were initially comprised of a limited circle of cultural elites: noblemen and aristocrats, high bureaucrats, clergymen, professionals, professors, and students. The Age of Revolution brought to Latin America “a major development with long-lasting consequences: the formation of new mechanisms of sociability, intellectual exchange, and debate” (457). This new development intended to replace the authority of tradition, religion, and social hierarchies.