ON THE IMAGINATIVE COMPONENT OF (LATIN) AMERICAN IDENTITY DISCOURSE

Abstract

The discovery of America was one of the major events that determined the establishment of the world-historical process. However, for a long time this large-scale and all-important phenomenon, as well as the concept itself, was interpreted strictly in accordance with the Eurocentric attitudes and assessments of history. The European outlook tended to review the ambiguous, heterogeneous in its content, and accompanied by contradictions phenomenon in narrow geographical, political, economic, and epistemological perspectives. The usual interpretation lacked the cultural-historical, philosophical, and cultural meanings. The author of the article attempts to fill the lost meanings and to expand the very meaning of the concept of “the discovery of America” by changing perspectives - from the European to the (Latin) American one, in which the concept reaches a new interpretative level by having defined the continent-wide culture-forming strategy, and is able to absorb many meanings of self-identification of the subject involved in the global historical process.

Keywords

• “the discovery of America”
• “the invention of America”
• “America as an idea”
• the essence of America