Abstract

The analysis of modernity in Latin America has led to recurrent controversy and debate. In spite of its tension-ridden and even contradictory implications, it has been the relatively open-ended character of modernity and its élan of material and cultural progress and the promise of expanding autonomy and equality that has been a major asset for its endorsement in Latin America, a region that some have called the ‚farthest West,‘ a name that hints at the ambiguous and sometimes conflict-ridden relationship of these societies with the poles and agents of Western expansion and hegemony. This article claims that the confrontation with Western modernity is in Latin America a confrontation with roots, discourses and institutions that turned out to be their own. Accordingly, the dynamics of expansion of modernity has been linked from very early on to global and transnational arenas, turning modernity into multiple yet truncated, leading to recurring attempts to reconstitute and attain the unfulfilled promises of modernity in the region.