Читать книгу Global South Modernities - Gorica Majstorovic - Страница 4

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 Russia,” and “Table of Universal Brotherhood, 1931.” Around this time, Gandhi emerged as the Global South figure that most represented anti-imperialism, specifically directed at British colonies in India and across Asia. The two facing walls at the New School depict the revolutionary struggles in Russia, India, and Mexico, as symbolized by Vladimir Lenin, Felipe Carillo Puerto, and Mahatma Gandhi.

The Orozco mural panel portrays Gandhi and anti-imperialism through the inclusion of several figures against an orange background. Left to right, we see men in chains, painted monochromatically, with Gandhi sitting to their right and facing them, painted on an ocher ground. This is followed by a line of figures representing imperialism: a British imperial soldier, native Indian Royal Guards wearing turbans, and six soldiers wearing helmets and gas masks. Slightly behind Gandhi sits the poet and Indian National Congress activist Sarojini Naidu, wearing a light-brown sari. In “Gandhi, an Archivist of the Future,” Boaventura de Sousa Santos proposes that Gandhi was one of the protagonists in the twentieth-century practice of intercultural translation, someone who was “in constant dialogue with other cultural traditions” (2018, 215). By looking at the Gandhi mural at the New School, I examine its South-South intercultural translation and exchange as a visual backdrop for a series of Latin American literary texts from the interwar period that focus on Global South modernities.

Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America attempts to rethink Latin American intellectual history between the two world wars by engaging with the recent and ongoing consolidation of Global South as a paradigm of study. Approaching it primarily through the lens of South-South exchange and on the basis of a literary sense of what it means to engage Latin America and the Global South, it focuses on the concepts of decoloniality, cosmopolitanism, and empire. Drawing on a range of related disciplines, the book aims to contribute to a new understanding of how singular literary texts and artistic currents become inserted into global systems of cultural exchange. Furthermore, by placing indigeneity and blackness at the center of analysis, it is interested in ways of understanding not only the past but also the effects of the Global South on the present.

Reflecting on what has lately been described as a Global South turn, the book addresses the plurality of modernities across the Global South. It focuses in particular on modernist engagements in Latin America and ways of engaging with modernity across the continent. Above all, it draws on methodological and theoretical inquiries of a broad corpus of texts engaging globality by spanning East and West Europe, the Americas, parts of Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. The book primarily addresses Latin American literature from the modernist period (1900–1940), understood as a crucial time for transnational exchange across the Global South. By placing decolonial and postcolonial theories in dialogue, the study shows ways in which South-South exchanges reflect East-West and North-South asymmetries, and how they are questioning, subverting, or circumventing them while forming different conversations and more egalitarian alliances.

It is an original intervention that challenges the historical and racial logic of interwar Latin American literary studies by introducing the complex solidarity relations between the global decolonial movement and anticolonialism in African and Caribbean countries. While examining the idea of globality through different conceptualizations and forms of reading, it addresses cosmopolitanism, immigration, travel, and decolonial thought as textually constructed discourses. More specifically, it analyzes the avant-garde magazines from the 1920s, Mexican petrofiction, urban proletarian and decolonial travel narratives of the 1930s’, and in doing so, calls into question Modernism’s usual framing as an European and Anglo-American interwar phenomenon, usually seen as devoid of concepts of social utility, to consider how it reinvented itself in relation to the rise of more socially-conscious, Global South perspectives.

Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America is the first single author book-length study to engage Latin American interwar thought and culture from the vantage point of the Global South. While exploring the impetus given to literature and arts by Global Modernism, it is one of the first studies to argue that Latin American authors have played a key role in its formation. It represents a significant and timely contribution to the fields of Latin American and Global South Studies: it is one of the first book-length literary studies focusing on the Global South and Latin America, and the first comprehensive study to focus on the multiple and multifaceted cultural alliances and global networks of solidarity and engagement in the interwar period. This book highlights the seminal influence the Latin American writers had on the style, subject matter, and ideology of literature in the Global South in the decades between the world wars.

The book departs from the examination of twentieth-century avant-garde magazines as sites of anti-imperial and anti-colonial modernist cultural production. I argue that during this time, the avant-garde magazine acted as the primary catalyst of collective critique through literature and artistic expression in the Global South. This was made possible by the magazine’s publication flexibility, able editorial guidance, power of dissemination of new ideas, and ability to form and circulate across fields of political, cultural, and social thought. Chapters 1 and 2 explore these global dynamics through an engagement with these specific magazines: Irradiador, Contemporáneos, Amauta, Boletín Titikaka, and Zenit. These chapters and the entire book focus on the interconnected decolonial themes that encompass indigeneity, race, and labor, as well as other interrelated, decolonial forms of counter-institutional and oppositional discourse. While examining the avant-garde magazines from the 1920s, the present book calls into question modernism’s usual framing as a European and Anglo-American interwar phenomenon to consider how it reinvented itself in relation to the rise of global, and especially Global South, perspectives from across Latin America and the world. In doing so, the book challenges Latin American literary history of the interwar period by making it racially more inclusive, more multilingual, and non-hierarchical.

In “Introduction: The Global South and World Dis/Order,” Walter Mignolo and Caroline Lavender look at “Global South” as an emergent conceptual apparatus while exploring the tensions and interlocking ideas in a wide range of intellectual, aesthetic, and political works. My study engages with their proposal and, in doing so, aims to contribute to the shaping of this critical apparatus by specifically examining postcolonial and decolonial intersections between Latin America and the Global South. The book focuses on how our perspectives change when we approach travel and migration comparatively and through the lens of intercoloniality, following the groundbreaking critical approach in “Comparative (Post)Colonialisms,” part five of Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Mabel Moraña et al., 2008).

Given that the decolonial modernist engagements with globality that I analyze in this book emerge in response to an area of study of enormous complexity and scope, the series of readings that I propose here is not intended as a comprehensive cultural history of Latin American literature and globality in the period between the two world wars. Rather, they reflect my own critical concerns and preoccupations about anti-imperialist projects and literary interactions that promote global engagements and transnational solidarity. As a Latin Americanist born in another postcolonial area of the Global South, namely South East Europe, I was trained in socialist Yugoslavia in the critical tradition of the Non-Aligned movement. This movement originated in Bandung in 1955 and quickly reached a wide global scope. The legacy of the second international congress of this global movement, which was held in my home city of Belgrade in 1961, largely informed the postcolonial perspectives of the history books on which I was raised. Those books always stressed ways in which Western hegemony and ensuing forms of colonial and neocolonial domination were circumvented and/or challenged from the periphery.

Latin American countries were not present at Bandung. The first instance of their participation, in what will later be called the Non-Aligned movement, appeared at the Belgrade congress in September 1961, through the membership status of Cuba and observant participation of Brazil, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Subsequently, the post-WWII wave of decolonizations and the Tricontinental congress, which originated in post-revolutionary Cuba, contributed to the emergence of what scholars refer to as “Global South transnational solidarities.” The first book-length study on this important topic in the context of Latin America, Anne Garland Mahler’s groundbreaking From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (2018) focuses on the mid-twentieth-century transnational alliance founded at a 1966 Tricontinental conference in Havana, 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, I ultimately draw from both of these critical traditions in 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 on social sciences (predominantly with economic and sociopolitical approaches): Globality and Multiple Modernities: Comparative North American and Latin American Perspectives (Sussex, 2002) and Reconfiguration of the Global South (Routledge, 2017) are two examples of this tendency. Studies about Latin America and the Global South rarely focus on literature and visual arts, with the notable exceptions of the articles published in the Global South journal (2007–, Indiana UP) and The Global South and Literature, a multiauthor volume edited by Russell West-Pavlov in 2018. However, the foundation of centers for research and dissemination of knowledge about the Global South is indicative of the growing importance of this paradigm: in the U.S., two of the first such interdisciplinary clusters are the Global South projects at Cornell University and the University of Virginia. In Argentina, the Programa Sur Global, is based at the Universidad de San Martín in Buenos Aires. In Germany, The Global South Studies Center was founded at the University of Cologne and Literary Cultures of the Global South at the University of Tübingen.

Ignacio López-Calvo breaks a new path and employs the global analysis in Latin American criticism throughout his groundbreaking work on literary and cultural interconnections between Latin America and Asia, as well as through his editorship at Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World that has published two special issues dedicated to “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn.” Transmodernity posits the periphery as the central notion of its orientation and focus. It follows Pratt’s insightful discussion of the ways in which European exploration and travel writing produced “the rest of the world” through the lens of colonialism and imperial imagination. Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America departs from these notions, substituting Pratt’s earlier use of “Third World” terminology with that of the “Global South.” In “Modernity and Periphery: Toward a Global and Relational Analysis,” Mary Louise Pratt points out that “in keeping with the decolonization of knowledge that began in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s, modernity is now analyzed from a much more global perspective than before” (2002, 21). In the Latin American tradition that encompasses studies of modernity, she highlights the importance of works such as Beatriz Sarlo’s Una modernidad periférica (1998), Roberto Schwarz’s seminal work on Brazil, the CLACSO-sponsored volume Imágenes desconocidas: La modernidad en la encrucijada postmoderna (1988), Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), and Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996).

The argument has been made that the process of decolonizing knowledge is the source of the “post” in postmodernity, not because it put an end to modernity, Pratt succinctly argues, “but because it put an end to the center’s self-interested and deluded understanding of modernity, provoking, among other things, a crisis in intellectual authority that academics are still struggling to confront and contain” (Ibid., 22). Pratt’s visionary assertion continues to ring true. The present book aims to be inserted into those debates and ongoing challenges in order to create what Pratt calls “a global and relational account of modernity” (Ibid.). Global South Modernities produces an analysis of Latin American interwar modernity through a decolonizing lens, only to point out that such historical and conceptual grounding of modernity (as global and relational) is necessary for inquiries about globalization in the present. Chapter 5 departs precisely from these inquiries as it broadens the scope of research to include the historical and literary discussion of immigration to Argentina.

Pratt writes about ways in which (1) modernity has conceived of itself as the metropolitan center; (2) “the center encodes the periphery in accounts of modernity; and (3) modernity is viewed and described from the lens of the periphery” (Ibid.). She claims that the center generates narratives of discussion and goes on to define the “diffusionist” nature of modernity as one of its most central characteristics. Pointing this out, Pratt writes about the ways in which the center (of western modernity) has both failed to recognize this and has produced the elision of periphery in order to construct the narrative of its own centrality. It is not lost on her, however, that calls to analyze the terms “center” and “periphery” may be seen anachronistic as they are now replaced by a supposedly unaligned globalization or an overcoming of binarism and dichotomies. She rightly argues, and I agree, that looking at literature through the decolonial lens that highlights the peripheries is not to re-authorize but rather continuously question the center’s functioning “unmarked as a center” (Ibid., 23). “Perhaps this concern,” she contends, “lies behind the recent emergence of the dyad ‘North’ and ‘South’—capitalized—in place of the vocabularies of center-periphery and first, second, and third worlds” (Ibid.). Indeed, what happens when coloniality and globality are inter/de-linked and when “North” and “South” are capitalized is at the core of the present volume.

Following Susan Stanford Friedman, we now understand modernity as a planetary phenomenon with uneven effects. While I agree with her focus on modernist studies with a transnational, planetary scope, I do believe that conceptual dichotomies such as center/periphery are impossible to dismiss if we are to fully take into account the colonial history and its (material) aftermath. While Friedman is certainly right when she argues the preponderance of Western cultural hegemony, observing that “conventional periodization reinstates the modernisms of the West as the powerful center to the rest’s weak periphery” (7), I wonder how is one to understand modernist literature in Latin America in a historical vacuum and without taking into consideration the historical dynamics shaped by metropolitan center/postcolonial periphery?

In the wake of the Mexican and Russian revolutions, the two decades between the world wars is the historical period when the first challenge to the imperial system appeared on a global level. It is in this context that Global South Modernities argues for the emergence of peripheral aesthetics committed to anti-imperialism and decolonial politics. In other words, the book studies key instances of anti-imperialist aesthetics in Latin American literature from the early twentieth century into the late 1930s. By focusing on Latin America, it goes beyond the confines of European cultural production and demonstrates the keen awareness that the Latin American writers and artists had of their ability to conceive alternative responses to the Eurocentric cultural models.

New Modernist Studies emerged in Anglo-American literary scholarship in the 1990’s. It is not until recently, however, that its space has expanded to include Latin America, as demonstrated with the appearance of books by Esther Gabara (2008), Gayle Rodgers (2016), Patricia Novillo-Corvalán (2018), Harper Montgomery (2017), Lori Cole (2018), as well as forthcoming studies by Camilla Sutherland and Nora Benedict. Modernism has long been characterized as more concerned with aesthetics than politics. Going against this assumption, Jessica Berman included in Modernist Commitments an analysis of modernism in Spain by looking at Max Aub and his writings about the Spanish Civil War. Drawing on these works, I am interested in bridging the gap between aesthetics and politics while I shift the focus onto the Latin American transnational modernist networks and situate my analysis of its literary production within the theoretical frameworks of the Global South. It is in this sense that Global South Modernities take its particular shape in the Latin American context.

Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures, edited by Juan G. Ramos and Tara Daly (Palgrave, 2016), opens a new path that my book joins in exploring. Two other recent books, published by Iberoamericana, A New Poetics and Politics of Thinking Latin America / India. Sur / South and a Different Orientalism (edited by Susanne Klengel and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, 2016) and New Orleans and the Global South: Caribbean, Creolization, Carnival (edited by Ottmar Ette and Gesine Müler, 2017), continue the trajectory of inquiry announced in the special issue of The Global South journal edited by Caroline Levander and Walter Mignolo in 2011. The field has been further consolidated with the edition of Literary Cultures of the Global South series at Routledge and books such as Re-mapping World Literature: Writing, Book Markets, and Epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South, edited by Gesine Müller, Jorge J. Locane, and Benjamin Loy (De Gruyter Mouton, 2018), and The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South by Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (Northwestern, 2019). Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (Columbia UP, 2012) is a key study of the Global South that proposes a reorientation of center and periphery around a multitude of experiences.

Informed by insights from postcolonial and decolonial studies, I have attempted to offer a revisionary account of modernist and avant-garde writing 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 a case in point. I show that the anticolonial intellectual climate of the interwar period brings these magazines and their main emancipatory ideas closer, in both aesthetics and politics, with those exposed in Aimé Césaire’s seminal Discourse on Colonialism (1955). Finally, I explore here some of the recent shifts in critical and theoretical frameworks of Comparative Literary Studies and, to a degree, World Literature. With a considerable critical distance from such approaches, my study emphasizes the geopolitical and uneven economic forces underlying comparison of global artistic movements and, in doing so, poses the following further questions: Can World Literature and/or Global Modernism be used as frameworks for deprovincializing the literatures of the Global South? Are World Literature and Global Modernism highlighting the East/West, North/South divides, while neglecting other postcolonial dynamics of production and circulation? Is the discussion of peripheral modernism possible without the attention to imperialism and the uneven development, not only in modernist territories but as reflected through its conceptual and structural developments? Would dismantling the historically constructed binaries (North/South, East/West) ultimately also dismantle the historic specificity while re-affirming the Western European discursive centrality in the discussion of the avant-gardes? Has the reference to “Eurocentrism” been somewhat critically limiting, especially with regard to the discussion of the anti-imperial discourses produced on the peripheries of Europe itself? Would a non-eurocentric framework of South-South exchange offer a constructive alternative to these concerns?