Germán Campos Muñoz. The Classics in South America: Five Case Studies

One thing that cannot be denied is that Germán Campos’s study has a broad perspective: it covers the culture and politics of a subcontinent (South America) over six centuries (from the sixteenth to the twenty-first). Moreover, it does so by following an infrequent fil rouge: the Classics. Even more: Campos maintains that the Classical tradition in South America should not be considered mere influence or a decorative nuance, but rather as an effective tool in the perennial exercise of defining the New World. The rhetorical productivity of such encounters with the Classics is expressed in key moments of Latin American cultural and political histories.