Outside In? Plebeian Exclusion and Participation in Dominant States from the Enlightenment to the Era of Positivism

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

While recent research has aptly characterized plebeian understandings of such central ideologies as racial hierarchies, codes of honour, and gender dynamics, our understanding of popular conceptions of major intellectual and political movements in colonial and nineteenth-century Latin America remains superficial. This panel treats plebeian exclusion (and participation) in such movements as the Enlightenment and political positivism in an effort to gauge what sort of knowledge members of the popular classes had about major intellectual and political movements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin America, and how they acquired it. In her discussion of the conclusion to her current book manuscript, Bianca Premo will present on popular legal participation in the Enlightenment, tackling the question of why we know so little about ordinary experiences with Enlightenment thought. In her paper, Nora Jaffary will discuss her findings about plebeian knowledge of – and participation in -- Mexico's first federal civil and criminal codes of 1870 and 1871. Frida Osorio, will present her research about subalterns' participation in the late-nineteenth-century system of constitutional rights adjudication known as amparo.

Sub Track

• History and Historiography

Session Organizer

• Nora E Jaffary, Concordia University

Chair

• Frida Osorio, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• Owning Ideas, or How Slave Owners, Husbands and Caciques Denied the Spanish Colonial Enlightenment in Court - Bianca Premo, Florida International University

• Law and Order in the Community: Mexico’s Penal Code of 1871 - Nora E Jaffary, Concordia University

• Gender and Justice in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Exploring Women’s Recourse to the Amparo Suit (1870-1910) - Frida Osorio, Columbia University

Discussant

• Stuart B Schwartz, Yale University