Global South Modernities. Gorica Majstorovic
Global South Modernities
Latin American Decolonial and
Postcolonial Literature
Series Editor: Thomas Ward, Loyola University Maryland
Latin American Decolonial and Postcolonial Literature features works that analyze and engage with Latin American decolonial and postcolonial literatures. Recent work by Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Aníbal Quijano, and others has shown how colonial elements were instituted during the colonial period and offer mechanisms and methodologies to overcome the persistence of those colonial forms in literature, philosophy, theology, and society during the post-Independence era. This series focuses on the medium of literature. Decolonial can take the form of resistance to the colonial during that period or it can occur after independence trying to overcome the cultural and political heritage of the colonial interval. Some works in the series may depart from the Anglo-American perspective and use its terminology and thus would prefer the term “postcolonial.” Others may depart from the Mediterranean or Latin perspective a la Frantz Fanon and thus use the term “decolonial.” All decolonial or postcolonial perspectives on literatures of Latin American are welcome.
Advisory Board
Arturo Arias, University of California, Merced; Tara Daily, Marquette University; Juan G. Ramos, College of the Holy Cross; Javier Sanjinés, University of Michigan; Javier Valiente Núñez, The Johns Hopkins University; And Gustavo Verdesio, University of Michigan
Titles in the series:
Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America, by Gorica Majstorovic
Octavio Paz: Ontology and Surrealism, by Roberto Sanchez Benitez
Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the Narrative of Liberation: To the Revolution and Beyond, by José María Mantero
Decolonizing Indigeneity: New Approaches to Latin American Literature, by Thomas Ward
Global South Modernities
Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America
Gorica Majstorovic
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books
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Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN 9781498576178 (cloth) | ISBN 9781498576185 (epub)
Acknowledgments
Although I have been engaged by the issues raised in this book for a long time, the idea for the book got consolidated at a conference held at the University of Zagreb, Croatia in 2018. I presented there a paper titled “Towards a Decolonial Aesthetics of the Global South” and thought of the parallels between the two peripheries, the one where I was born and raised, and the one I chose to study. I would like to thank Ignacio López-Calvo for organizing the 10th Conference on East-West Cross-cultural Relations: East-West and Transpacific Studies in Zagreb and Ignacio Sánchez Prado for a keynote. This event has been an endless source of intellectual stimulation and inspiration.
I presented selections of this book at conferences hosted by the Modern Language Association (2017 and 2018), the Latin American Studies Association (2018), the American Comparative Literature Association (2017), the CUNU Graduate Center (2016), and the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts (2017). I would like to thank the organizers, my co-panelists, and colleagues in the audience who engaged my work with constructive feedback. I sharpened my ideas on Latin America and the Global South in conversations that took place at the 3rd International Summer School of Latin American Studies at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia in 2019. I am particularly indebted to Bojana Kovačević-Petrović, Dejan Mihailović, Andreas Merck, Alexis Toribio Dantas, and Carlos Juárez Centeno for their incisive comments following my presentation on the literary effects and the global circulation of Mexican Muralism.
I would also like to acknowledge the colleagues who invited me to address some of the topics discussed in the book: Roberto Cantú at California State University–Los Angeles, Svetlana Tyutina at California State University–Northridge, César Domínguez at Universidad Complutense in Spain, and Lori Cole at Global Modernisms: A research collaborative of the NYU Center for the Humanities. I am particularly grateful to Robert Higney, Thomas Kitson, and Matt Eatough for the incisive comments on the paper I presented at Global Modernisms. I am deeply indebted to these colleagues and friends for their support: Carolina Rocha, Ian Almond, Axel Gasquet, Jelena Filipović, Odile Cisneros, Anne Pomeroy, Janice Joseph, Jacqueline Loss, Robert McKee Irwin, Adela Pineda-Franco, Juan de Castro, Jorge Coronado, Juan Ramos, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, María Montt-Strabucchi, Héctor Jaimes, Antonio Isea, Dubravka Sužnjević, Mirjana Djorojević, Benita Sampedro, Natalia Brizuela, Araceli Tinajero, Paola Park, Shigeko Mato, Kerstin Behnke, Francisco Hernández-Adrián, Hakim Abderezzak, Anne Burke, Jelena Predović, and Maria Eugenia Mudrovcic.
While on sabbatical, I spent the Spring 2018 semester at New York University where I worked as FRN-NYU Scholar-in-Residence. I am grateful to Jens Andermann for his support from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and to the librarians at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library for their help while I conducted research for this book.
My thanks go to Thomas Ward, the editor of the Latin American Decolonial and Postcolonial Literature series at Lexington Books, for his insight and guidance; to Holly Buchanan for stewarding this book through its late stages with great patience and professionalism; to the anonymous reviewers who have offered invaluable and generous advice on shaping the book’s main premise.
Earlier versions of pieces of two chapters appeared in journals. I thank Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, Viaggiatori Journal, and Iberoamericana. América Latina-España-Portugal for permission to reprint these. I also thank Stockton University for awarding me a research grant which enabled me to complete this book. Conversations with M.A. in American Studies students during the course on Literature of the Americas I taught in Fall 2019 shaped my thoughts on various points in the book.
As always, Moez and Justin do much to remind me what really matters, and for that I am ever grateful. Jovo and Mane are a constant source of love and support from Los Angeles, CA. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents Marija and Božidar-Božo Majstorović in Belgrade, Serbia. This is for them.
Introduction
Mexican muralist painter José Clemente Orozco completed five mural panels in 1931 at the New School for Social Research in New York. Emblematic of the South-South modernist exchange and resonating with the title of this book, these murals consist of three large parts, called “Struggle in the Orient, Gandhi and Imperialism, 1931,” “Struggle in the Occident, Felipe Carrillo Puerto of Yucatán and Soviet