Resumo

ALMELA, Harry. History, modernity and postmodernity in Venezuela. Argos [online]. 2012, vol.29, n.57, pp.13-29. ISSN 0254-1637.

The critical assessment of the triumph of modernity has been one of the greatest issues in Latin America’s current thinking of political and social situation, through the criticism of the established order in the world and its impact on Latin America from the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the critique of neoliberalism and the radical political opposition to the idea of the “end of history” as Fukuyama (1992) puts it. In the academic discourses, these approaches develop themselves under various interpretations of postmodernity. The following text tries to evaluate the issues of modernity and postmodernity in Latin America, and to propose a periodization of the category “modernity” in Venezuela. The questioning of postmodern episteme regarding the methodologies derived from it regarding political, social and cultural phenomena in Latin America has been widely developed by Reynoso (2000), Nascimento (2005) and Bravo (2007), while the relationship between academia and colonial politics have been deeply criticized by Richard (2001) and Yúdice (2002), among others. On the genealogy of cultural studies in our continent, the reflections of Ríos (2002) have shown the relevance of theoretical issues related to the alleged novelty of this school of thought. We will join such discussions for a while, while we decide what to do with our sense and our concept of history.

Palavras-chave : modernity; postmodernity; the social sciences in Latin America; Venezuela.