Moral Voices of Latin America
Contact: Lincoln Professor Ted Humphrey,
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and Lincoln Fellow Janet Burke,
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The Moral Voices of Latin America is a project to produce a volume that follows on Professor Burke’s and Professor Humphrey’s Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition, Hackett, 2007. The premise of the project is that, the Spanish Latin Americans having achieved independence from Spain and having established republics of various forms, they looked around to discover that their newly established still faced challenges of social justice that absolutely hindered those nations from thriving socially and economically and assuming what they believed were their rightful places among the nations of the world. The goal of this project is to make available to readers of English, a range of Spanish Latin American moral, social and political thinkers who both identified challenges to the emergence of healthy political climates in their nations and who strove, often very much in opposition to entrenched power structures and traditions, to bring the needs of the oppressed to the table for rectifying action.
These “moral voices” are little known among English readers and warrant their attention, as the issues they address and the ways in which they come at them are to be found in the United States as well.
As of Spring 2012, the following scholars were invited to participate in this project and all accepted: Professor Jorge Gracia (Buffalo), Jose Antonio Aguilar Rivera (CIDE) and Diego von Vacaro (Texas A&M). In the Fall of 2012, this program will be opened to the following additional scholars to participate: Professors Amy Oliver (American University), Ofelia Schutte (So. Florida) and Elizabeth Horan (ASU). among others and anticipate receiving positive responses. Much time was spent in the spring of 2012 collecting research materials, most of which are not available in the United States. This is particularly true of the less well-known thinkers being examined, for example, Carlos vaz Ferreira and Juan Montalvo.
In addition to the specific work for this project, the following connected literary works were recently published: Bernal Diaz’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain (Hackett, March 2012) and Liberty in Mexico, ed. Jose Antonio Aguilar Rivera, trans., Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey, (Liberty Fund, July 2012).
During the fall of 2012 and into the spring of 2013, Professors Humphrey and Burke, along with colleagues Jorge Gracia, Jose Antonio Aguilera Rivera and Diego von Vacaro, will be re-conceiving this project to include not only translations of Spanish language material not previously available in English, but also critical essays concerning the thought of the thinkers included in the volume. As this program advances, a conference centered around the theme of Moral Voices -- in which participants present their papers, receive comments from fellow contributors and then revise their papers – may be added as well. As editors, Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey will both contribute essays to the volume and translate the selections from the Spanish thinkers the volume covers.