Global South Modernities. Gorica Majstorovic
in Latin America and a re-thinking of some of its main conceptual premises. The “modern” and “the avant-garde,” for example, has not always been read in conjunction with “colonial” and “decolonial,” and my study is the first book to offer such insight in the context of Latin American modernist literature and the avant-garde. It is not lost on me, however, that Modernism refers to a number of competing worldviews. My particular interest is not to provide a new definition of modernism, one that would now include Latin America, albeit framed through the Global South, but rather to open up a long overdue debate and engage in a series of critical inquiries into its uses and decolonial sites of production. By focusing on its producers and sites of material production, I show how literature and its institutions fulfilled a major role in forging those models through an anti-imperial outlook and what after Mignolo has been called the “decolonial thought.” I am specifically interested in showing—through historically contextualized ways—how it forged new models of worldview that was rooted in hegemonic contestation and anti-imperialism.
There are several ways of defining the key terms from my title: paraphrasing Perry Anderson, for instance, modernity is neither an economic process nor cultural vision but the historical experience mediating the one to the other (Anderson 1984). I placed “modernity” in the title of the book in the plural to refer to the multiple imbricated realities in the Global South that encompass emancipatory politics of the Afro-Latin American and indigenous peoples against effects of colonial dispossession. Alfred J. López reminds us in this sense that the concept of the “South” manifests the shared condition of the subaltern (2007), and Pramod K. Nayar contends, “the modernities from the Global South are dissensual modernities” that exemplify contestation, fragmentation, and dissensus (Nayar 2018, 242). I show that the texts under examination reflect alternative spatial configurations and emancipatory politics, as well as multiple interlocking temporalities that divert from the linear models of Western epistemology.
In Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde he argues that one must separate the avant-garde from modernism on the basis of its social critique. I argue that this distinction, where modernism is seen as the less radical “cousin” of the avant-garde, is impossible to sustain in Latin America. Susan Stanford Friedman also notes the association of modernism with elitism, high culture, and establishment. While these are precisely some of the reasons that Modernism never took hold in Latin American Studies, my aim in this book is to show that while this is certainly the case in some authors, there were many who opposed these associations and propagated the radical politics and non-conformist ideology. In Global South Modernities I argue that Latin America had its own forms of modernist engagement that denounced and continuously challenged elitism, high culture, and uncritical faith in technology and progress.
While the whole range of debates about the meanings of the terms modernity, modernism, and the avant-garde goes beyond the scope of this book, as a way of recognizing the complexity of the issue I envision “Global South modernities” as a notion that engages critically with narratives by which modernity is told in Latin America. In this light, Global South Modernites reads Latin American literature of the first half of the twentieth century and the avant-garde as sites for hegemonic contestation that open up possibilities for an aesthetic critique of tradition through a decolonial lens and political reassessment of its aesthetic forms. Drawing on the materialist notion of “peripheral modernisms” put forth by the Warwick Research Collective, and especially by the work of its founder Benita Parry, who first formulated a theory of the aesthetics of peripheral modernity, in chapters 1 and 2, I show how avant-garde magazines from the Latin American and southeast European peripheries were positioned within the post–World War I era as polycentric spaces in which multiple vanguardist practices emerged, crossed paths, and disseminated provocative ideas.
Parry, drawing on the seminal work of Roberto Schwarz who understood Brazil as the space of “peripheral capitalism,” proposed a theory of “peripheral modernism” to address specific aesthetic mediations of disjuncture between core and periphery: those “formal qualities—whether realist, fabulist or avant-garde—[that] can be read as transfiguring and estranging incommensurable material, cultural, social and existential conditions attendant on colonial and neo-colonial capitalism” (2009, 33). Following Parry, I read the “peripheral” not as a statement of value but of systemic relation, whereas neither “core” nor “periphery” is perceived “as a homogeneous or static geographical region, but rather as clusters of internally differentiated nation-states, the periphery existing in an asymmetrical relationship to the older imperialist centers which had pursued capitalism’s unilateral intrusion into pre-capitalist worlds” (Ibid., 27).
While engaging differing modernist latitudes, located within varying degrees of capitalist development, and by also focusing on spaces of decolonial convergence such as Zenit, in my analysis of Vicente Huidobro, Guillermo de Torre, and (interpretations of) Gandhi and Tagore, I examine the avant-garde in the early to mid-1920s from a global perspective that in Zenit’s particular case included its connectivity with the global decolonial struggle. However, while echoing the discussion in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, by writing about Zenit my aim is not to simply provide a new (geopolitical) addition to modernism, one that would now include not only Latin America but also South East Europe. Put differently, the point is not only to expand a field, but rather, by focusing on decolonial translation in Zenit and Boletín Titikaka, for instance, the point is that the “expansion,” in a sense given to new modernist studies by Mao and Walkowitz, becomes conceptual and intersectional.
Instead of a geopolitical “adding on” (that would ironically mimic the imperial acquisition of new lands, a proposition scrutinized in Geomodernisms), I therefore read global modernism in Zenit as a space of intersections that is defined through its multiple aesthetic nodal points and imperial cross routes. Taking a cue from Sanja Bahun’s formulations of histoire croisée or “crossed history” and Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” from Tout-Monde: Transnational Perspectives, I engage with Glissant’s mantra “Périphériques vous parlent!” (The periphery is speaking to you!) to explore peripheral modernisms that encompass complex relations and intersecting parallels between Latin America, India, and South East Europe. Glissant’s theory in Tout-Monde calls for people to crush the walls around them, real or imaginary, in order to achieve equality as well as political solidarity within a vision of “totality” with no “absolute” at its core but a series of permutations of effects of colonial violence. Glissant’s poetics of relation guides my thinking about Zenit and its geopolitical positionality within the southeast European modernist periphery, a space that I read as a polycentric, multiethnic and multicultural arena that, very much like Amauta and Boletín Titikaka in Peru, was eager to both connect with global artistic trends and offer a pronounced counter-narrative.
In this regard, the period between the two world wars marked a unique moment of the artists’ intense commitment to international modernist aesthetic through global networks of collaboration and intellectual exchange. By looking at that global exchange from the South-South perspective, it is not uncommon to find in the modernist period a growing disillusionment with novelty and Western modernity, especially for Latin American authors. With modernista cosmopolitan dreams long shattered, the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, for example, pondered in 1923: “¿Por qué admiran ustedes, los americanos, estas urbes cancerosas de Europa? París? París es un ocaso lento y ya verdoso. Aquí todo ha terminado . . .” (Why do you, Americans, admire these cancerous European cities? Paris? Paris is a slow and verdant crepuscule. Here everything is over . . . ) (1987, 5). By looking at Amauta, Boletín Titikaka, Contemporáneos, Irradiador, and Zenit in light of Vallejo’s provocative question, I am interested in reflecting on the political valence of this statement through the lens of uneven Global South modernities, decolonial thinking, and what I call in chapter 5 “improbable cosmopolitanism.”
A basic proposition to be tested here is that political aesthetics maintain their urgency in artistic productions from the so-called periphery often much more intensely than in the saturated Western-centered, metropolitan cultural spheres. The decolonial avant-garde aesthetic of Amauta, Boletín Titikaka, Irradiador, and Zenit is