Everyday, millions of Australians use the Australian ten-dollar note in a myriad of commercial transactions without paying much attention to the woman featured on its front. This is surprising, as Dame Mary Gilmore (née Cameron; 1865–1962) had a profound impact on Australian literature, education and society during the twentieth century.1 In fact, “by 1945, the year the war ended, Mary had become the most famous woman in Australia, a Grand Old Lady revered as virtual matriarch of the nation” (Whitehead 2003, p. 269). Even fewer Australians would know about Gilmore’s significant connections to Latin America. Perhaps, it was her popularity in Australia that led her to believe her impact on politics had reached the other side of the Southern Hemisphere. Many years after the 1881–1902 territorial disputes between Chile and Argentina over Patagonia, Gilmore made a “grandiloquent claim” stating that, “In a small way I helped stop the last threatened war between Chile and Argentina (when we were in Patagonia) by sending a letter through the Mulhalls (on the Buenos Aires Standard) to president Roca” (as quoted in Whitehead 2003, p. 247).
Gilmore was able to make this claim, grandiloquent or not, because of her membership in the New Australia movement of the late nineteenth century. A teacher, journalist and poet, she embraced the radical politics of the time, and subsequently set up the communist-inspired Cosme settlement in Paraguay in 1893. After leaving Paraguay, and before returning to Australia, Gilmore lived in Argentine Patagonia between 1900 and 1902. Once there, Gilmore learnt Spanish and worked as a governess in an estancia or country estate, taught English in Rio Gallegos, and wrote for the Argentine-English newspaper, the Standard (Wilde 1983). Apart from keeping the habit of drinking yerba mate until well into her nineties, Gilmore’s six-year experience in South America made significant impact in other ways as well (Whitehead 2003, p. 271). For example, “the former racist of Paraguay became one of the early European campaigners for Aboriginal rights” (Whitehead 2003, p. 268). As Anne Whitehead points out her life, “was remarkable in its complexity and paradox” (p. 267). And yet, the story of an Australian woman so celebrated and extraordinary in her life to be honoured on her country’s currency, whose personal experience in Latin America was influential in her writing and politics, seems doomed to oblivion.
Her life and its forgetting illustrates how counter-narratives that resist dominance—in this case patriarchy—might be derivative of intense experiences and transnational exchanges that function beyond well-explored north-south/metropole-colony flows more familiar to Australian academic pursuits. Jane Hanley’s work on Australian poet and critic Nettie Palmer’s appraisal of Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral, enables further reflection. According to Hanley, “Palmer’s use of Latin America as a comparison case is an interesting example of the role of the transnational in creating the national, both for its ongoing relevance today and as a way into understanding the diverse connections between creative cultures and colonial history” (2016, p. 1).
Such transnational exchanges are present in Gilmore’s story in a different way, but through both of them, it is possible to reexamine how politics of location shape knowledge production. As we all know, history and memory are much more than recorded events and documents. Revisiting these stories and their protagonists enables us to explore how mainstream narratives and dominant discourses engage with alternative histories and collective memory practices. Furthermore, it is now widely accepted that knowledge production is not only traversed by temporality, but spatiality. Not only the ethical principles and approaches of researchers rest on the complex negotiation between personal agendas and institutional interests that differ across geographical settings, but also they are profoundly influenced by the political and historical forces that affect that specific context of knowledge production. “Epistemology […] cannot be reduced to the linear history from Greek to contemporary North Atlantic knowledge production. It has to be geographical in its historicity” (Mignolo 2002, p. 67).
After much critical academic debate regarding memory and methodology, there is a general consensus that, “history is often concerned with placing memory-based work within more general narratives of the past, a process that inevitably implies a large measure of selection and forgetting that represents interests in the present” (Weedon and Jordan 2012, p. 145). Through our work, we as scholars function as “gatekeepers facilitating processes of remembering and forgetting” (Weedon and Jordan 2012, p. 150). In light of this, this volume attempts to rethink Australian and Latin American connections taking into consideration the diversity of histories, subjects and cultures that are part of larger processes of forgetting and remembering.
The artist whose work is featured on the cover of this book sheds even more light on this matter. Internationally renowned artist María Fernanda Cardoso was born in Colombia and now lives in Sydney. She generously gave us permission to reproduce one of her stunning pieces from her Butterfly Drawings series (2002). In the series, Cardoso created different patterns and shapes by using real butterfly wings. In an interview, reflecting on this particular set of works, Cardoso said:
The wings of the butterflies are like a mirror. By rearranging them, I create different patterns. I play with ways of placing them, proposing geometrically-ordered forms emanating from the designs of the butterflies themselves and the internal drawings of their wings. Repetition creates the sensation of movement, and produces the principle of animation. There comes a point when the eye tells you it has found what it was looking for. (Herrera 2002)
The sense of harmony, proportion and balance of the flying butterflies is reimagined by Cardoso as a new form, which captures the striking beauty of the blue monarch butterfly wings, but in an unexpected way; thus, creating new meaning. In many ways, as scholars concerned broadly with history and culture, we, too, seek to subvert conventional meanings. This volume, like the work of Cardoso, aims at creating different patterns of connection and coherence by unsettling some preconceived ideas.
In the case of Australia, the preconceived ideas we seek to question related to the generalised disinterest in Latin America we (as Latin Americanists) noticed pervading the Australian academy. Ever adventurous, we embarked on a quest to problematise such epistemic indifference even further. And so, the idea of putting together a volume came about. The Mapping Connections Workshop was held in July 2015 at the University of Sydney and organised through two University of Sydney based research networks, Sydney University Research Community for Latin America (SURCLA) and Race and Ethnicity in the Global South (REGS). The papers presented at that workshop and the essays that comprise this volume explore, as widely as possible, contemporary aspects of Australian–Latin American connections and reflect the stimulating intellectual climate created in this interdisciplinary forum. In doing so, this book appraises the cultural significance of Latin America to Australia from numerous perspectives, within and beyond the confines of Latin American Studies.
This book investigates affinities, connections and tensions between Australia and Latin America within a global context, where connectivity increasingly defines the modern condition while these parts of the world are (wrongly) perceived to be disconnected from one another. More than a survey of the state of Latin American Studies in contemporary Australia, we created a rigorous space of discussion and reflection on how Latin America is imagined, and approached, within an Australian-based academic framework that critically engages with South–South perspectives, cultural processes and flows. At its core, this book is about trajectories of scholarly work that are positioned within the tensions and ambiguities of ideas, images, sensibilities, knowledge paradigms and histories of contact that travel across this particular South–South axis. The basic premise behind the book is to critically engage with the historical, cultural and geopolitical context of complementing and competing connections between Australia and Latin America. Our aim in writing this book is to enhance understandings of the complexities of an increasingly decentralised setting of knowledge production where connection across the Southern Hemisphere is both a workable metaphor as well as a poignant reminder that further problematises not only the dominance of North–South paradigms but also the concept of the “South” restricted to a geographical location or monolithic category. In other words, this volume encourages cross-fertilisation of area studies, bringing Australia-based Latin Americanists and non-Latin Americanists into dialogue with transnational processes within the context of a fluid South–South framework.
Nelly Richards’ invites us to rethink our field in the following way:
To exercise critical thought in the—always mobile—breach that separates peripheral practices from metropolitan control is one of the most arduous challenges that awaits Latin American cultural studies in these times of academic globalisation, that is, of multiple de-centrings and re-centrings of the articulations between the local and the translocal. That exercise depends on the Latin American not being a differentiated difference (represented or “spoken for”), but rather a differentiating difference that has in itself the capacity to change the system of codification of the identity–alterity relationships that seek to continue administering metropolitan academic power. (2001, p. 191)
Conceptually located with the dynamics and ambiguities highlighted by Richards, the aim of this volume is twofold: on the one hand, to create spaces of discussion by exploring under-researched topics that offer fruitful and innovative points of contact between Australia and Latin America; on the other, to advance discussion on the relevance of area studies in general, and Latin American Studies in particular.
Latin American Studies grew in prominence in the 1950s and 1960s among Anglo-American scholars as a part of a broader creation of area studies in response to the burgeoning Cold War (Szanton 2004). In the case of Latin America, Anglo-American interest grew not only due to a desire to stanch the spread of communism, but also because of the widespread belief that biological race and racial purity had virtually no meaning there in contrast to white-majority nations such as the United States (Tannenbaum 1946, 1962; Elkins 1959). Scholars interested in race relations echoed similar claims Latin American racial theorists had made for decades regarding the lack of racial conflict in the region (Palacios 1904; Freyre 1933; Vasconcelos 1925). This fostered an incredible interest in Latin America as a data mine (Anderson 2014). However, starting in the 1970s and maturing in the early 2000s, scholars of Latin America increasingly began to argue that, although Latin American race relations did not look like those in Anglo-American contexts, racism toward individuals with darker skin still existed. This was especially noted in the literature about Brazil, which sought to document how prejudice and racialised identities persisted in the face of state-mandated anti-racist programmes that refused to recognise race at all (Dávila 2003; Hanchard 1994; Joyce 2012; Skidmore 1974; Twine 1998). Interests that began in Latin American racial thought and class relations expanded outward to cover a broad swath of scholarly fields by the early 2000s.
As Spanish cultural studies scholar Alfredo Martínez Expósito claims, the history of Iberian and Latin American studies in Australia is a different one. He argues that the origin of these fields can be traced to the introduction of Spanish-language programmes in the 1960s by British academic emigrés who, in some ways, attempted to reproduce the British model in Australia (2014, p. 77). A shift in focus in the 1990s, however, began to privilege the Latin American region over that of the Iberian Peninsula while simultaneously fostering an expansion of interdisciplinary endeavours that shaped what we currently—and rather loosely—have come to know as Latin American Studies in Australia (Martínez Expósito 2014, p. 77). Despite similar timing to the growth of Latin American studies in other English-speaking knowledge production sites, scholarly approaches to Latin America in Australia are still in a process of formulation that those fields in the United States or United Kingdom no longer enjoy. Indeed, that is one of the most exciting and remarkable aspects of taking stock of the field as it stands today. In addition, interest and expertise on the region has so far followed a remarkably different trajectory than the ones found in dominant academic centres allowing for the development of unique characteristics that are specific to the Australian context.
Martínez Expósito’s work also points to a combination of factors and motivations, which are finally calling attention to the significant connections that Australia and Latin America share both within and beyond the realms of academic enquiry. Some of these are related to efforts from scholars to illuminate the complexity of such connections primarily through the exploration of Latin American migration to Australia as well as studies on increasing Australian economic and political interests in the region (Kath 2016). Other scholars have examined political and economic agendas which include the existence and intensity of diplomatic relations and free trade agreements (with Chile in 2008, and Peru 2018) (Strodthoff 2014). This renewed interest has both influenced and facilitated research interest in the area to some extent. While Australian-based research on Latin America has followed at times a similar path to that of the United States and the United Kingdom, in that research tends to limit itself to theories and methods mainly originally produced in English and therefore replicating centre-emanated findings, the well-established hierarchy that reproduces relations of domination between the epistemic “colonised” and the “coloniser” in scholarly work, makes little to no sense in the Australian academic context. In other words...