Nuestra América

the construction of iberoamerican identity in the works of Carlos Octavio Bunge

Abstract

This article analyzes the project of supranational identity formulated by Argentine essayist Carlos Octavio Bunge, from a historical discourse analysis perspective, emphasizing the problematic of the racial issue pointed by the author and its resonances in social and political relations. Therefore, the book Nuestra Améria: Ensayo de Psicologia Social (1903) will be explored and, in a complementary way, the article “Ethics of Christianity”, published by the magazine Nosotros in 1907. In the first section of the text, the life and work of Bunge was revisited, an author who was forgotten by the current intelligentsia for perpetuating racial ideas, which no longer hold. It is not the intention of this work to deny the prejudiced perspective of his production, but to ask how much it can persist in social relations and how much his analyzes, concerning caudillism, offer very rich reflections about the problematic of the insertion of the private in the public sphere. Issues and problems that are still present in Ibero-America, affecting the democratic regime. This way, in the following sections, we highlight Bunge’s analyzes regarding ethnic peculiarities and their repercussions on Ibero-American identity and on “la politica criolla”.