Global South Modernities. Gorica Majstorovic
Cuba.
Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America focuses on an earlier, and strategically important, period that spans the twenty years between the two world wars and early decades of the twentieth century. I approach the cultural production from this period from a decolonial lens in order to shed light on Latin America and the Global South as key transnational factors prior to the emergence of paradigms of the South-South solidarity of the 1960s and 1970s. Largely influenced by the Non-Aligned movement on the one hand, and the Tricontinental, on the other, the wider application of the term “Global South” can be traced to the Brandt Economic Report of 1980. In my analysis of literary modes of South-South exchange, I imply the term “Global South” and often use it interchangeably with “South-South” although, as I will discuss later, the term also has important implications and solidarity interconnections with the Global North. Furthermore, I refer to “globality” as a broader term that contains the transnational lens through which I approach not only cosmopolitanism, travel, displacement, diaspora and migration but also empire and decoloniality.
“Global South” is a term that in my reading of Latin American visual and literary discourse indicates both a location/space from where practices are seen, interpreted, and recognized and, more importantly, a discursive position from which theories of globalization are exposed or denounced. As a geographical space, the Global South encompasses Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Oceania, parts of the Middle East, but also corners of South East Europe. Moreover, as a space of enunciation, the Global South uncovers the problem and history of colonialism and includes areas pertaining to the American South as well as immigrant and migrant communities across the globe. I therefore understand the Global South conceptually as a relational term and a space of postcolonial intersections that is defined and redefined through its multiple cross routes and nodal points.
I use the term “Global South” in relationship to the “global” and globalizing processes but also to emphasize its difference, which lies in its critical potential. Anne Garland Mahler points out that while the term “global” and ensuing “globalization” often refer to the flattening out of difference, the Global South as a critical term departs precisely from the fissures in the globalizing folds, its main point being the critique of uneven modernity from the position of empire and (neo)coloniality, histories of capitalism, race, diaspora, and migration. In other words, Mahler emphasizes an important point by claiming that not all “global” modalities are preoccupied with colonial domination, while all “Global South” analyses are intrinsically inseparable from its histories of colonial domination, enslavement, and exploitation of indigenous peoples.
The term itself is a category that traverses spatial demarcations of the “South” for there is a “Global South” in the “Global North” and vice versa. Several questions arise from this assumption: Are important intellectual conversations always positioned vertically, from North to South, West to East, or are there alternative modalities that circumvent these dichotomies and offer new perspectives of international solidarity and new forms of intellectual community? Is academic discourse replicating these political asymmetries so that the discussion of Global South often lies in centers of knowledge located in the Global North?
A case in point (and one of possible answers to this question) is a contemporary art exhibit titled “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art” that opened at the Whitney Museum in New York in February 2020. Three of the exhibited panels are by the American painter Hale Woodruff (1900–1980). They were commissioned by Talladega College, a historically Black institution in Alabama. Titled “The Mutiny on the Amistad,” “The Trial of the Amistad Captives,” and the “Repatriation of the Freed Captives” (all mounted in a second version painted circa 1941), they portray the 1839 rebellion aboard La Amistad, a ship illegally transporting abducted Africans from Havana to Puerto Príncipe (now Camagüey), Cuba. The tree panels depict the African slaves’ mutiny, the resulting civil rights trial won by U.S. abolitionists, and the captives’ repatriation to Africa. Through its composition and figurative style, a strong influence may be observed on these panels of Diego Rivera, with whom Woodruff studied in Mexico. I chose this painting as an illustration for the presence of the Global South in the Global North not only because of its subject matter but also to visually illustrate that the influence does not always go in the direction North to South but is often (although seldomly acknowledged) reversed. That is to say, it is the Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera and others, and not those from France as traditional art scholarship has claimed, that have influenced and shaped the North American twentieth-century art. In other words, “Vida Americana” allowed the Whitney Museum an unprecedented opportunity to present art history in a new light by acknowledging not only the French and European influence but also the long overdue recognition of the transformative impact Mexican muralists had on American art.
“Postcolonialism” is one of the most widely debated terms in Latin American studies in the past several decades. Given that Latin American countries gained independence from Spain in the nineteenth century, at the time when Western European colonial expansion was encroaching into Africa, Asia, and Oceania, scholars have questioned the validity of the term for the texts and approaches that appeared in the Latin American context. In Decolonizing Indigeneity: New Approaches to Latin American Literature, the volume that inaugurates the present series on Latin American Decolonial and Postcolonial Literature, Thomas Ward contends that it is “erroneous to consider these approaches ‘post-colonial,’ since the structures that give space and form to literary analysis are still colonial, based on the colonial, or on the heritage of the colonial” (2017, xxiv). Due to the specific circumstances that have shaped Latin America, Ward asserts that these models are decolonial because they include ongoing processes of emancipation on all levels: literary, cultural and institutional. I follow Ward’s lucid analysis from Decolonizing Indigeneity and include in chapter 2 a reflection on the poems by Eustakio R. Aweranka, Inocencio Mamani and Manuel Kamacho Allqa from the Peruvian avant-garde magazine Boletín Titikaka.
In my understanding of the term I agree with Ignacio Sánchez Prado who underscores that Latin American thought is in fact Postcolonialism avant la lettre. He convincingly proves this point by examining the following contributions from the Mexican context: seminal texts by Alfonso Reyes from the 1920s to the 1940s, Los grandes momentos del indigenismo en México by Luis Villoro, and La invención de América by Edmundo O’Gorman, both from 1958. In his reflection on the enduring legacy of liberal humanism (dating back to nineteenth-century Latin America and continuing today), Ignacio Sánchez Prado aptly suggests that different aspects of post-independence Latin America “place the region and its distinct subregions and nations into temporal, ideological, and cultural logics and epistemes that differ significantly from those prevalent in the discussion of African and Asian nations” (2018, 56). While asserting the continent’s unique trajectory, Sánchez Prado also succinctly points out that “the historical kernel that underlies Latin American theories of decolonization and emancipation is the undermining of the persistent structures of colonialism internally, and imperialism externally” (Ibid., 59). Latin America is, according to his analysis, the first site where the violence of colonial modernity has been self-reflected upon, through theories of emancipation that occur prior to the emergence of decolonialization paradigms that inform the world today.
José Rabasa, in turn, dates the beginning of Postcolonial Studies with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978; he points out Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, C.L.R. James, and Franz Fanon as precursors of the field of Postcolonial Studies. He mentions the influence of these thinkers on the cultural developments following the Cuban revolution and highlights the importance of José Carlos Mariátegui’s work in the 1920s. He concludes his definition of the field by pointing out an intellectual exchange between Bolivia and India, which was produced without the mediation of Anglophone academic channels. Although Rabasa does not explicitly refer to the Global South nature of this exchange, a pairing of Bolivia and India is a clear indication of the Global South as the emerging paradigm of study.
My analysis of the literary modes of South-South exchange is tuned into the postcolonial-decolonial debates in the Latin American context of the last several decades. While learning from valuable insights but also pitfalls of this critique,