The bicentennial commemorations of Latin America Independence in the last fifteen years have opened new spaces of reflection, with the emergence of new scholarly works that analyzed the complexity of this process within the larger framework of the Age of Revolutions. Although there is consensus that the events of 1808 were catalysts for a definitive imperial crisis, recent works have expanded the time framework to analyze earlier developments. These include a series of conspiracies and local mobilizations that challenged colonial rule and the development of a new political culture in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Martín Bowen's book is a timely and original contribution to this new body of literature, showing how diverse communities in the sparsely populated Spanish colony of Chile used a great variety of materials and communication modes to disrupt the unity and harmonious nature of colonial politics.
This book offers a fascinating history about the emergence and development of new forms of political participation in Chile during the Age of Revolutions. In this book, Bowen analyses a vast number of cases in which ordinary individuals, from diverse social-racial backgrounds, used innovative ways to exhibit their discontent, shape their disagreement, and expose contrary political views. As he explains in the introduction, what became revolutionary in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Chile was not the circulation of new radical ideas, but “the emergence of a profaned and pluralistic political landscape” (5), one in which people's dissenting actions disrupted traditional norms, “profaning the realm of politics and forcing it to embrace open expressions of division” (6). The display of division represents a key issue on Bowen's analysis of common practices of visibility and propagation; these two crucial modes of communication were used by Chileans to express their position, “contributing to the destabilization of all official claims to unanimity, turning visibility into a field for the contestation of legitimacy and making dissent an unavoidable dimension of political life” (81). Bowen shows that in Chile, the Age of Revolutions became, above all, the Age of Dissent.
Through seven elegantly written and beautifully illustrated chapters, Bowen offers a series of rich stories where symbols, material culture (flags, pins, rosettes, coins, cockades, portraits), gestures, and conversations turned into rich texts that individuals used and reused to express their contrasting ideas and positions as they built new political spaces for contestation and antagonism. Bowen offers a solid theoretical framework to connect communication acts to politics and, in this way, expands our understanding of communication to include a variety of modes that transcend the written word and orality: here, communication goes beyond an exchange of information to become a “site of contention” (8).
In the first four chapters, Bowen focus on “visibility” as a mode of communication that entailed the “publication” (manifestation, revelation) of people's antagonistic positions. The diverse ways in which people—especially plebeian subjects—made publicly visible their views prompted concerns among late eighteenth-century colonial officials who became obsessed with controlling dissent. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, however, the “political decomposition” and disunity of the Chileans was “public and evident” (21). The following three chapters of the book analyze “propagation” as a mode of communication that was embodied in different mimetic dynamics that spread dissent, and the ways state officials tried to rule and discipline peoples’ mimetic actions. Here, Bowen introduces the concept of the “mimetic public sphere” to demonstrate “that communication was understood as the propagation not of ideas or messages but of actions and behaviors” (144).
I would be hesitant to characterize the book as “the first detailed exploration of how ordinary actors in revolutionary Spanish America both produced and reacted to an antagonistic and profaned political landscape” (6); there is a rich Latin American scholarship that has analyzed what Elias Palti characterized as the fractious politics of nineteenth-century Latin America—expressed in a fragmented public opinion and contested political scenarios. However, I believe that Bowen makes a crucial contribution by offering an original and meticulous study of the profound connections that exist between communication and politics; he encourages us to look beyond the war of newspapers and pay close attention to how different groups exchanged gestures, behaviors, objects, and actions as they debated visions of their present and future realities.
