{"exhibit":{"id":18,"title":"The Outsider's Gaze","description":"

This section presents literary works from and about Latin America with the intention to present a specific image of a country to foreigners through various different channels to show how Latin America can serve their interests, involving the economic, the religious, and the political.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The Outsider\u2019s Gaze into Latin America is a deceptively innocuous title that skillfully conceals the imperialist pen and reduces its potency to a mere gaze. A gaze in itself denotes a passivity and apathy that simply did not exist in the prolific travel literature of the \u201coutsider\u201d, with the \u201coutsider\u201d primarily being Americans and European foreigners. American and European travelers journeyed into Latin America with their pens and papers and more importantly, an assumption of a linear history of modernity built upon a dichotomizing \u201cothering\u201d that placed Europe and America not only ahead of South America, but also above it. The construction of Latin America\u2019s image in the \u201cgaze\u201d of the foreigner through his or her own pen and paper was supported by academic institutions or simply by their mere status as white Westerners. The narratives of Latin America that these Western travelers constructed were widely disseminated and became the narratives that constructed the perception of Latin America to the literate populus of the Western world. It is through these narratives that the West constructed their own identities in opposition to that of Latin America\u2019s. However, to what extent is the vision of the outsider\u2019s gaze accurate? And subsequently, to what extent is Latin America\u2019s image on the world-stage true? This tension in truth is explored in this thematic category as we analyze rhetorics of inequality and racial, religious, economic, and political othering in travel texts written by white Western travelers in Latin America.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Books from and about Latin America between 1880s-1920s can present contrived economic representations of the countries and expose neocolonial tendencies of the printing industry at the time.  This new wave of capitalism must not only sell the books themselves but also the image of Latin America itself to Europeans and North Americans. By virtue of this selective representation, we can view the economic history of Latin America through books not as an accurate portrayal but as an artifact of priorities.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Missionaries\u2019 main objective was to convert many of the indigenous people that their nations were colonizing over to Christianity, most often Catholicism. This often occurred when elitist in the government requested that these missionaries be sent off and that they were serving their religion in the best possible form. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

Some labels in this group reflect items with goals of portraying political images of Latin America. Print is a powerful persuasion and communication mechanism, so it is not unusual for the exhibition to have text relevant to local, national and global politics. Some displayed items have a political subject, such as in A Diplomat\u2019s Wife in Mexico,<\/i> or put a country in conversation with the global political realm, such as in Debry\u2019s History of Mexico. <\/i>Other subjects of this label ate written during and in response to political events like the independence of Haiti or the Mexican Revolution. One book begins with a preface of the political ties that allowed for the journey of interest to happen at all. Regardless, they all tie together because the political commentary is written by a foreigner. The outsider is looking in on a country and taking on the overwhelming task of evaluating politically complex issues or politically changing nation. Visitors have also assumed \u201coutsiders\u201d to the stories in the exhibition, so they will apply their own outsider perspective to political events that have passed. Labels analyze the political past as written, and then connect it to the current state of affairs in the relevant country. Exhibition creators want visitors to browse The Outsider\u2019s Gaze <\/i>and walk away with their own political understandings of Latin American. But, this thematic label asks even more of the visitor because they must ask themselves: are texts from the outsider\u2019s perspective effective in relaying accurate political history? When are interpretations too far gone to be useful for a political analysis? <\/span><\/p>","credits":"","featured":0,"public":1,"theme":"minimalist","theme_options":null,"slug":"outsider-s-perspective","added":"2019-04-15 14:50:21","modified":"2019-04-22 08:07:16","owner_id":18,"use_summary_page":1,"cover_image_file_id":29},"item":{"id":44,"item_type_id":15,"collection_id":5,"featured":0,"public":1,"added":"2019-04-10 08:16:47","modified":"2019-04-21 14:52:05","owner_id":24}}