The utopia of America: Time and Authenticity in Angel Rama's critics

This article discusses Angel Rama's critique of Latin American culture, mainly in the prologue to La novela latinoamericana. Panoramas 1920-1980 (1982), the only collection of texts he published while still alive. In the prologue, Angel retraces his steps across essays written between the sixties and the seventies, analyzing and scrutinizing his own intellectual and theoretical concerns. By reading the prologue, one realizes how time and authenticity were articulated to inaugurate an idea of America. Angel then employs the principles of incompleteness and fugacity to interpret Latin American culture as an essay. Furthermore, he proposes a re-reading of Pedro Henriquez Urena's La utopia de America (1925). Finally, he deals with the issue of temporality at a moment in history when the present seemed infinite.