June 2015
Professor Alan Knight speaks on Eduardo Galeano’s work.
By HCS-Manguinhos*
In this exclusive interview with our blog, Alan Knight, Emeritus Professor of the History of Latin America and fellow of St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, gives us his insights into Eduardo Galeano’s work and its influence on Latin American historians and scholars. Particularly on The Open Veins of Latin America, a classic of leftist political literature published in 1971, following the death of the Uruguayan author and journalist two months ago. The book gained popularity again after the late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, gave it as a gift to US President Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas in 2009 and became a bestseller around the world.
Galeano, who died at age 74, was considered one of Latin America’s leading anti-capitalist voices. Although the author at a 2014 book fair in Brasília (Brazil) remarked that when he wrote Open Veins he lacked “sufficient knowledge of economics and politics” and that it belongs to “a past era”, the book is considered by many one of the cornerstones of dependency theory, the notion that “underdevelopment in Latin America is a consequence of development elsewhere, that we Latin Americans are poor because the ground we tread is rich [in resources].”
Alan Knight, whose wide-ranging research encompasses the comparative study of Latin America – including themes of revolution, populism, peasant movements, and democracy – also speaks on dependency theory and public intellectualism.
Knight is the author of The Mexican Revolution (2 vols., Cambridge University Press, 1986); US–Mexican Relations, 1910–40 (Center for US-Mexican Studies, 1987) and two volumes of a three-volume general history of Mexico: Mexico: From the Beginning to the Conquest and Mexico: The Colonial Era (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He is completing the third volume of the series, “Mexico Since Independence”, and researching a sociopolitical study of Mexico in the 1930s.
What is the significance of Galeanos’ work?
I must make clear that, while I have ‘dipped into’ several books by Galeano, the only one I have read carefully, from cover to cover, is The Open Veins of Latin America, since I took part in a TV discussion about it a few years ago. Galeano was a prolific and versatile writer, so this book is but one – though probably the best known, in part thanks to Hugo Chavez, who gave a copy to Barack Obama – of his large output.
The Open Veins is a product of its time – he tells us he finished it at the end of 1970 – and later updates did not much change the perspective, which is above all a ‘dependista’ one, which sees Latin America (LA) as a society which for half millennia had been controlled, exploited and victimised – in the strict sense of being turned into a hapless victim – by the imperialist centre (first Iberia, then Britain, then the US). There are only a few tenuous exceptions – leaders who resist and are crushed; or – again, a product of the time – the Cuban Revolution, about which Galeano is very optimistic.
The book is lively, wide-ranging and passionate; but its ‘dependista’ perspective – particularly its denial of LA agency – is very simplistic and, in many instances, unconvincing. There are no shadows; everything is sharp black and white. This makes writing sweeping history easy – and even engaging – but it is dogmatic history, which has not stood the test of time very well. Even though, we could say, LA dependency on international capital is greater today than it was in 1970!
How much his work influenced Latin American historians (or scholars)?
Dependency theory had a strong influence, especially in LA, to some extent in Europe and the US; but that influence is now much reduced. A few historical dinosaurs rehearse the old simplicities; some more innovative historians retain aspects of the dependency perspective – e.g., they pay close attention to the role of the US, especially during the cold war period – but they do not see LA in such two-dimensional terms and they stress LA agency – the capacity of Latin Americans, including poor and subordinate Latin Americans, to achieve outcomes even in difficult circumstances. (Some arguably overdo ‘agency’, underestimating the obstacles to progressive change).
Like most social scientists, too, historians are now more leery of revolution as a solution (it is costly and can be counter-productive) and they are more disposed to see benefits in middle-of-the-road programmes (what Galeano et al. might have called ‘dependent development’ or ‘bourgeois democracy’). Again, some perhaps go too far: a dose of Galeano-esque radicalism would shake up some social scientists – less so historians – who have become easy apologists for the Washington consensus.
What is the meaning of ‘public intellectual’ in Latin America?
I come from Britain, which has a low opinion of ‘public intellectuals’, or even intellectuals in general. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Some public intellectuals – the talking heads who are prepared to hold forth about anything and everything – are a noxious breed, and very different from serious scholars, of whatever discipline, who stick to what they know best.
So, in my somewhat jaded opinion, the more public – i.e., prominent and ubiquitous – an intellectual is, the less likely he or she is talking sense and is worth listening to. (I could name names, from Europe, LA, or the US – where outspoken public intellectuals on the radical Right are credited with considerable and, I am sure, noxious influence!). LA has, of course, produced prominent and influential public intellectuals – such as Galeano – but my sense is that here, as elsewhere, the more they talk (or write), the less they are worth paying attention to. Public intellectualism thus becomes a variant of the current cult of ‘celebrity’, which the media love to cultivate.
A final (also jaded) thought: despite what Keynes one said (economic policy is the result of what some forgotten intellectual economist once wrote), intellectuals usually dance to the tune of power and money (including the media). They come cheap and it is not difficult to find intellectuals, so-called, who will endorse a particular ‘product’, be it political, economic, or even historical. At least Galeano was ‘his own man’ who, as far as I know, spoke truth to power, as he saw it.
*Collaborators from the HCS-Manguinhos team: Marcos Cueto, Marina Lemle and Carola Mittrany.
Related articles on HCS-Manguinhos:
Barros de Lima, Cleverton. Literature and suffering: a medical perspective on ‘life’. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos Jul./Sept. 2013 vol.20 no.3 ISSN 0104-5970
Cueto, Marcos. The “culture of survival” and international public health in Latin America: the Cold War and the eradication of diseases in the mid-twentieth century. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos Jan./Mar. 2015 vol.22 no.1 ISSN 0104-5970
De Almeida, Marta. Open circuit: the exchange of medical and scientific knowledge in Latin America in the early 20th century. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos Jul./Sept. 2006 vol.13 no.3 ISSN 1678-4758
Vieira H., Nelson. A paixão transformada: história da medicina na literatura. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos Nov. 1996 vol.3 no.3 ISSN 1678-4758
How to cite this post [ISO 690/2010]:
“Eduardo Galeano spoke truth to power”: An interview with Alan Knight. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos Blog. [viewed DD MM YYYY]. Available from: http://www.revistahcsm.coc.fiocruz.br/english/eduardo-galeano-spoke-truth-to-power-an-interview-with-alan-knight/
