The discovery of the mediterranean

Alfonso Reyes and the Spanish American claim to Spanish culture

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

pp. 179-205

in: Tania Gentic, Francisco LaRubia-Prado (eds), Imperialism and the wider atlantic, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This article proposes a multilayered reading of Alfonso Reyes's engagement with Spain from the perspective of what he called, in his essay "El Quijote en mano," the desire to "discover the Mediterranean by ourselves." This notion, a clear inversion of the foundational event of America's purported discovery by Spain, encapsulates a way of thinking about the Ibero-American Atlantic against the grain of colonial and imperial practices. This operation responds to the idea of reclaiming the Spanish heritage for the construction of a Mexican and Latin American universalism, in the context of an intellectual discussion that sought to reclaim the region's cultural citizenship in the world.