Global South Modernities. Gorica Majstorovic
crossroads, spaces of intersections that are defined and redefined through (de)coloniality, multiple cross routes, and contact zones.
My reading of Arlt’s assessment of the geopolitics of his time posits his travel writing in the line of critical inquiry of the “postcolonial exotic,” Graham Huggan’s assumption that a certain construction of exoticism (to which Arlt was occasionally not immune) is not a subject position, but rather a geopolitical category inseparable from global flows of capitalism and imperial history. Indeed, in his 1935–1936 trans-Atlantic travels, Arlt witnessed the imperial rivalry that is at the core of his short story titled “La cadena del ancla.” Following Ottmar Ette’s Literature on the Move and Karen Kaplan’s Questions of Travel, the critical examination of this story draws on the attention Arlt paid to relations of power in the realm of Mediterranean politics, but also in the realm of cultural production and consumption, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Chapter 5 engages critically with the recent and ongoing consolidation of the cosmopolitan turn. It continues the reflection from the previous chapters, arguing that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and materially driven by institutions, translators, publishers, editors, academics, awards, critics, readers, and authors as active agents in this complex material dynamic. In this regard, the chapter substantiates, refines, and continues to interrogate interwar approaches to globality and cosmopolitanism in Latin America, and extends some of its reflection to modern times. In doing so, the chapter inevitably also embraces the “global” and “southern” turns in humanities and literary study to combine the focus on ideologies of cosmopolitanism and decolonial thought from the viewpoint of transnational intellectual networks and their particular aspirations in Latin America.
The first section focuses on Armando Discépolo’s 1925 play about immigration, titled Babilonia; the second part of the chapter focuses on early twentieth-century critical dialogues between cosmopolitanism and coloniality in the work of Arturo Capdevila and his counterpart, Pedro Henríquez Ureña. When discussing Capdevila’s Babel y el castellano, I argue that cosmopolitanism was constructed as a unifying, universalizing system, as in the “cosmos” component of the term. By contrast and departing from the notion of confusion inscribed in it, I read Babel as a dispersing, disruptive, chaos-provoking discursive force. “Universal or traditional” cosmopolitanism is a system of values, hierarchically divided, and closely linked to the colonial expansion of European empires, to their subsequent economic growth, and to other privileged conditions for intellectual production. Enlightened cosmopolitanism is an enclosed, unified, and unifying system of values deposited in the cultural and political archive of major Western European nations. In this light, I show that cosmopolitanism is a metaphor of contact, albeit of the select few, and Babel that of separation, confusion, and conflict. I show how for Roberto Arlt, rising totalitarianism and horrifying preparations for World War II inspired a dystopian vision of cosmopolitanism. Taking a cue from Cheah and Robbins’s thoughts on the cosmopolitical, the final part of the chapter includes reflections on a defiant, discrepant, and “improbable cosmopolitanism.”
Overall, Global South Modernities denotes both a literary corpus and an argument. The corpus comprises the literary texts published in the first half of the twentieth century across the continent, in Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru, among other countries. The argument: that these texts provide us a new genealogy of Latin American literature by examining the asymmetrical relations within multiple modernities as well as a new understanding of Latin American modernist literature through the lens of the Global South. Overall, in contrast to accounts that privilege depoliticized views of literary production, this book shows how the shared decolonial project of the Global South was already at work in the Latin American literature and art in the early to mid-twentieth century. This, indeed, was the dawn of Latinoamericanismo, a discourse of hemispheric solidarity against imperialism.
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