"Una nueva y gloriosa Nación": Patriotic Lyrics and Scientific Culture in the Forging of Political Emancipation in Río de la Plata

Abstract

The connections between scientific culture and the literary output associated to the events surrounding the independence from Spain of the provinces of Rio de la Plata in the course of the second decade of the 19th century seem worth exploring. In a previous work (La ciencia de Mayo, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura 2010), I have tried to characterize the complexity of the scientific culture of the period. Coming back to this theme, I noticed that a promising line of research had been overlooked, which is the study of the mutual relevance of science to patriotic poetry and political journalism. I intend to outline the configurations of a common public discourse framed by the aspirations of independence and the early imaginings of a nation.It is no coincidence that Fr. Cayetano Rodríguez, Esteban de Luca, and Vicente López y Planes?the three authors of the lyrics competing to be chosen as national anthem?cultivated strong scientific or technical interests. The naval engineer Cerviño made a public defence of the still proscribed Copernican theory in the course of a public lecture. Two decades later, odes were written in praise of hydraulic works promoted by the government. Meanwhile, the official press insisted on the benefits to the progress of sciences and the arts derived from the emancipation from Spanish tutelage. I expect to investigate these and other transactions between the post-revolutionary literary corpus and the early attempts at generating a new culture of science. Preliminary work on this theme shows that fertile connections could arise from a project that cuts across issues such as the thinking of political independence, early literary circles in Buenos Aires, science and technique at the service of revolution, elite salon culture and the unstable boundary between ecclesiastical and lay learning.