Variaciones sobre la metáfora del “Continente Enfermo”. El caso de César Zumeta: “El hierro fortifica. Armémonos”

Abstract

This work involves two levels of study. In the first of them is typed analytically what the writer Venezuelan Caesar Zumeta represented in terms of a "politicized writer" and a "polyvalent intellectual". These two categories involve the following question: What was a Latin American intellectual during the change from the nineteenth to the twentieth century?  From typifying Zumeta within certain figures of the intellectual, some critical points are made in parallel to the problem of generations in order to position Zumeta within the Latin American generation of the 900s.  The second part of the paper deals with Zumeta's booklet entitled El Continente Enfermo (The Sick Continent), in order to contextualize this writing within a series of essays written by Latin American intellectuals who, at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, reflected, wrote, and shared a horizon of expectations that were not at all positive for the countries of the region. Hence, they had coined the metaphor of the "sick continent". However, this was not a univocal notion, quite the contrary, as shown by Zumeta's reflection on the "diseases" of the continent.