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Centenary Subjects examines the ideological debates and didactic exercises in subject formation during the centenary era of independence (the decade of the 1910s)—the peak of arielismo—and proposes a new reading of the arielista archive that brings into focus the racial anxieties, epistemological and spiritual fissures, and iconoclastic agendas that structure, and at times smother, the ethos of that era.

Arielismo takes its name from José Enrique Rodó’s foundational essay Ariel (1900), a wide‑ranging gospel dedicated to Latin American youth that incited a cultural awakening under the banner of the spirit throughout the Americas at an ominous juncture—when the US co-opted the Cuban War of Independence in 1898, effectively rebranding it as the Spanish‑American War. Rodó’s optimistic message of transcendence as an antidote to the encroaching empire quickly became one of the most pervasive and malleable paradigms of regional empowerment, reverberating throughout a range of Latin Americanist projects in the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries.

Centenary Subjects recovers a series of important but understudied essays penned by arielista writers, radicals, pedagogues, prophets, and politicians of diverse stripes in the early twentieth century, and analyzes how, under the auspices of the arielista platform, young people emerged as historical subjects invested with unprecedented cultural capital, increasing political power, and an urgent mandate to break with the past and transform the sociopolitical and cultural landscape of their countries. But their respective designs harbor racial, epistemological, aesthetic, and anarchistic strains that bring into sharper relief the conflicting signals that the centenary subject had to parse with respect to race, reason, and rupture.

In a radical reconsideration of political theory and politics, Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan explore the notion of rupture or radical tearing apart in both history and theory through the sweep of Western philosophy from Plato to Kierkegaard and beyond. The authors use contemporary literature and film to elucidate political theory, examining works by such writers are Dave Eggers, John Irving, and Toni Morrison, as well as films by directors from Sergei Eisenstein to David Fincher. Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan find that a rupture or radical break is repeatedly invoked at the beginning of every philosophical system. In this rupture, many of our most cherished political values—equality, solidarity, and the idea of freedom—emerge. But the lack of a sustained commitment to this radical tearing apart has repeatedly foreshortened, distorted, or perverted those same values. Most political philosophy may have marginalized these radical breaks with the past. But Eisenstein and McGowan demonstrate that Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Žižek have consistently brought rupture to the fore as an organizing principle for political thought. This insight holds great pertinence to our current world situation. Seeing the possibilities for an extended dialogue and sustained political change, Eisenstein and McGowan argue for a more systematic engagement with these theorists.