Resumen de Between imagination and experience: between imagination and experience: Creole travellers in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe
During the so-called century of travelling, many Creole travellers went on a journey from Latin America to Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This article outlines the travellers’ impact on the construction of (supra)national identities, by highlighting the often alleged duality between “European civility” and “Latin American barbarism” within their travelogues. After a brief description of processes of nation-building in Latin America, the article focuses on the distinction between “civility” and “barbarism”, as reflected in the travellers’ observations of educational concepts. The travellers emphasised the need to distinguish between the notions of “education” and “instruction”. The analysis of the travelogues revealed that many travellers were influenced by pre-conceived “ideas of Europe”. This article highlights instances in which the circumstances in Europe conformed to the travellers’ expectations, as well as instances in which the travellers suffered disappointment and irritation due to unexpected and non-conforming experiences. Particularly the non-conforming experiences possess an immense potential for further investigations. To outline this productive potential, this article will critically examine Rainer Kokemohr’s theory of “Bildung”. Kokemohr defines the processes of handling and converting experiences of crisis as “Bildung” if they lead to profound modifications of the experiencing subject’s self- and world-conceptions
