Space and history in historiography’s programmatic politics of Revisionism ‘prior to’ the Revisionism in Argentina

Abstract

This article proposes an exam of the political and historiographic ideas which J. Francisco V. Silva (Cordoba, Argentina, 1890-1978) poured into his intellectual intervention conducive to an explanation of the grounds of the “territorial dismemberment” of Argentina and the former Rio de la Plata Viceroyalty since 1810. It is an attempt to comprehend the mentioned textuality in the light of the context of the First World War and in articulation with the revitalization of the Hispanic past in the American continent, which many intellectuals from such situational context proposed in opposition to the narratives by the liberal history bequeathed from the 20th century. In that respect, this work focusses on a reading of the way in which Silva represents an axis which is sensitive to the revisionist imagination, such as the dismemberment of the former Viceroyalty, and his methodological fashion of dealing with it, explaining the relevance of geography and history from a residual positivism, when conceiving the former as an equivalent to the physical environment which models the racial type and the latter as a process by means of which the social determinations are made.