Global South Modernities. Gorica Majstorovic
order to situate the discussion of the Global South as a productive critical paradigm for literary study. This study shows that it is precisely at the intersection of the two, the postcolonial and the decolonial, that the Global South may be productively defined. It pulls from the postcolonial theory and seminal theoretical work of Walter Mignolo (decoloniality and diversality), Enrique Dussel (transmodern pluriverse), Aníbal Quijano (coloniality of power), and Mabel Moraña (the monster as war machine).
Postcoloniality implies the processes of breaking free from colonialist frameworks, while decolonial thinking, as defined by Mignolo, examines modernity as a world-system that emerged during the sixteenth-century colonial expansion that required (and acquired) a colonial periphery. His influential texts Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000; new edition 2012), The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011), and the volume co-written with Catherine E. Walsh On Decoloniality (2018), attest to these assertions. Furthermore, echoing Dussel, in arguing for the uses of decolonial thinking, Mignolo has suggested that Latin American coloniality is a constitutive part of the capitalist modernity, and not an add-on, not an external addition. Nelson Maldonado Torres has argued that since the start of the world capitalist economy, and different from the postcolonial, “decoloniality makes reference, not only or primarily to the plight of formerly colonized territories that obtained their independence in the twentieth century, but, more precisely, to the insurgent positionality of subjects and to the possibilities of decolonization in the long durée of modern/colonial cultures and structures” (2017, 111).
Pheng Cheah has suggested that the aim of decolonial thinking, and through it, I would argue, the aim of the Global South as a critical paradigm, is to “contest a homogenous universalistic modernity by showing its structural connections to colonial violence” (2016, 200). Global South Modernities interrogates the intersection of colonialism, modernity, and capitalism by looking at Latin American transformations and transpositions of modernity in the Global South. It argues that current formulations of the “global contemporary” (Brouillette, 2017) were in fact developed during the interwar period and with key Latin American players. Most of the texts under analysis were written in the aftermath of WWI, during a period that I see as foreshadowing future South-South alliances, forged at Bandung and Havana, and consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s.
Post-WWI was a period of massive colonial restructuring, global destruction, and a growing loss of faith in Western paradigms of progress, modernity, and empire. Books such as Stefan Zweig’s Brazil, A Land of the Future (1941/2007) epitomize the utopian potential and transtemporal globality embedded in Latin America in the aftermath of the war. My study departs from these notions in order to examine the interwar intellectual transversals across continents, a complex dynamic where I contend that Latin American decolonial thought played a key role in the emerging paradigms of the Global South. While employing the critique of modernity from the position of coloniality, this study addresses literary modes of South-South exchange and in doing so, analyzes works by writers from across the continent: the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui, the Argentine Roberto Arlt, the Ecuadoran Adolfo Pareja Diezcanseco, the Dominican Pedro Henríquez Ureña, the Mexican Xavier Icaza, the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, and the Brazilian Oswald de Andrade, among others. While it fully acknowledges the national and regional literary histories in which each of the authors emerges, the approach, however, is decidedly transnational.
In the first two chapters, for instance, I highlight the pathbreaking cultural agency of two avant-garde magazines founded in Peru, Amauta and Boletín Titikaka, two in Mexico, Irradiador and Contemporáneos, and one in the other area of the Global South, Zenit. By using these case studies, the present book does not evolve around strict national genealogies nor does it apply national delineations and demarcations of literary study; instead, it focuses on intersections, deterritorializations, and multiple nodal points in Latin American critical thought that are seen as an integral part of the Global South. For example, it analyzes the work of an Argentine author writing about the ecological catastrophe at the recently inaugurated Panama Canal, a Dominican thinker writing about utopia from Argentina, an Ecuadoran author witnessing Caribbean migration to the Pacific coast but also interwar Latino immigration to the United States, a Peruvian writer in Spain and France, and a Mexican author whose petrofiction challenges British and American imperialism.
The book’s primary focus is on South-South exchange and critical displacement, categories that Mary Louis Pratt examines in her seminal study Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992; second, revised edition, 2007). In doing so, in addition to contemporary thinkers its main, decolonial premise is also indebted to the writings of Felipe Guamán Poma and Francisco Bilbao, who were crucial for the Latin American production of knowledge that denounced colonial oppression, Western hegemony, racism, and Eurocentrism. The study underscores both temporal and spatial modalities of the Global South. The texts by Latin American authors that I address use global modernist aesthetics to challenge the modernist narratives by European travelers and also the dominant “home” narratives associated with conservative notions of Hispanism, state power, and hegemony. Furthermore, its aim is to go beyond the prevalent Anglophone focus, often found in studies of the Global South and Global Modernism, by looking at the texts that circulated across different linguistic spaces or were written about Latin America and by Latin American authors. In temporal terms, these texts wish to subvert the processes of European colonial worlding and ultimately show that “modernity itself needs to be pluralized or multiplied” (Cheah 2016, 200).
With regard to space, according to the early representations of the world, the planet was made up of three large portions of earth grouped together around the Mediterranean Sea, with terra incognita to the south. Old maps, always showing Europe on top, established a dominance of the North, with a view of the South as a gaze from above looking down below. With his upside-down map of South America, the Uruguayan modernist artist Joaquín Torres-García acknowledged, as early as 1935, the structural inequality of this colonial bias and founded the Escuela del Sur, an important visual backdrop for my analysis. While drawing on postcolonial theory, this book relies on wide applications of the “postcolonial” and argues throughout that it is “decolonial” thinking what ultimately constitutes not only a unique Latin American approach, but also its crucial, and ultimately more globally-focused, perspective. In other words, the Global South can only be adequately defined through the lens of decolonial thinking and by reading Latin American authors.
According to Mignolo, decoloniality challenges postcolonial theory and problematizes European epistemologies and theories of power that underline the logic and interests of the Western European civilizations. He views decoloniality as both a political and epistemic project that includes a programmatic de-linking from globalization and contemporary legacies of coloniality (2011). Postcolonial theory and its Anglophone and Francophone applications are therefore insufficient not only for the definition of the term “Global South,” but as I show through my critical engagement with the afterlives of Mexican petrofiction, for its ramifications in the contemporary world as well. My study is indebted to Mignolo’s thought on decoloniality and also to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s notion that Global South is a subject rather than an object of study.
The book departs from the main idea of de Sousa Santos’s Epistemologies of the South (2014) that a subject can conceive of the world on its own terms and with agency in its own hands. Decoloniality, in short, considers the Global South not only as an area that receives negative impact of globalization but also as a zone that produces literature and art, theory and critical thought. José Carlos Mariátegui, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Roberto Arlt, César Vallejo, Rosa Arciniega, Mário de Andrade, Rubén Darío, Vicente Huidobro, Ricardo Güiraldes, Adolfo Pareja Diezcanseco, Alfonso Reyes, Guillermo de Torre, Xavier Icaza, Diego Rivera, and certain segments of Victoria Ocampo’s journal Sur, engage fiction, poetry, travel writing, theatre, film, visual art, and essay as active participants in the global trajectories of Latin American literature. My book is the first to study these interwar Latin American writers as agents and promoters who sought to forge the comparative epistemologies of the Global South.
The majority of studies that address Latin America and globality concentrate