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Chapter 1 has four sections: the first analyzes blackness and translation in the Mexican avant-garde magazine Contemporáneos; the second and fourth engage the avant-garde and petroculture in two texts by the Mexican estridentista writer Xavier Icaza; the third focuses on oil extraction in an article published in the avant-garde magazine Irradiador in 1923. The first of Icaza’s texts under examination is Magnavoz 1926: Discurso mexicano, which includes references to José Vasconselos, Alfonso Reyes, and Diego Rivera not only as key historical figures of the time but also as characters that Icaza introduces in this avant-garde text. I subsequently analyze Icaza’s Panchito Chapopote (1926) and argue that this unique avant-garde text is not only the first example of the Mexican ‘petrofiction’ but also among the first to engage oil production in the Latin American context. I place Irradiador and Contemporáneos within the broader aesthetic of modernist mobilities that I examine through the lens of translation, circulation, black internationalism, and South-South exchange. I highlight the fact that Contemporáneos played the most important role in the introduction of African American emancipatory themes and literature not only in Latin America, but to a large extent, in the whole western hemisphere.

Chapter 2 focuses on the circuits of decolonial knowledge across the Global South through the lens of the three major avant-garde magazines from the 1920s: Amauta, Boletín Titikaka, and Zenit. I study these avant-garde magazines in order to define what I call “the emerging literary cultures of the Global South” and in doing so, I place Latin American fiction, poetry, and related essays within the broader aesthetic of modernist mobilities. My reading of José Carlos Mariátegui follows Javier Sanjinés’s contention that indigenous movements have introduced doubt into the linear course of modernity and teleological schemes. Indeed, as Javier Valiente Núñez points out, and I concur, Mariátegui needs to be read as a “precursor” to decolonial thinking. I therefore begin the discussion of decolonial Global Modernisms by pointing out the enormous significance of Mariátegui for the indigenous literary cultures of the Global South, and continue with the discussion of Eustakio R. Aweranka, Inocencio Mamani and Manuel Kamacho Allqa in the Boletín Titikaka.

In the second part of the chapter, I show how Zenit envisions and constructs the avant-garde as reimagined from the periphery: a politically-conscious and often contentious space for discussion and debate of new ideas, and both global and distinctly local. More specifically, I address poetic interventions from the modernist peripheries that were published in this magazine, which itself was published on a global and European periphery: first, I examine Vicente Huidobro and Guillermo de Torre, Zenit contributors from the Hispanic world; then, I focus on Gandhi and the provocative political readings (in the magazine’s last issue, in 1926) of the Indian modernist poet Rabindranath Tagore.

The reading of Huidobro’s manifesto Non serviam in 1914 is considered as the founding moment of the Latin American Avant-Garde (Schwarz 1991b). Tagore was the first non-European writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1913. In sum, I am interested in the ways in which the interventions and interpretations of all of these key modernist authors from the Global South were inserted into the shared vision of globality. I point out that this was possible not only through the lens of the new avant-garde aesthetic, but also through a new social and political vision of decoloniality. I conclude by showing, especially in the final part of the essay that discusses Tagore and Gandhi as seen by Rivera and Orozco, that Zenit and Mexican muralism were the primary sites for channeling not only modernist cultural examination and avant-garde artistic experimentation, but also the emerging decolonial art and political thought.

Chapter 3 focuses in its first part on acts of embodied dissent through engagements with decoloniality as reflected in Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco’s 1938 novel Baldomera. In the second part of this chapter, continuing the discussion of the Latin American proletarian novel in the 1930’s, I address cinematic montage while focusing on other urban crime fiction from the same time period, the novel Los siete locos by Roberto Arlt (1929). I argue that both the Ecuadoran and the Argentine urban narratives are Global South novels written through a decolonial lens at a time when filmgoing emerged as mass culture and popular entertainment. Baldomera was written at a time when foreign investments into the region’s economy led to massive urban migration as well as a constant influx of black workers from the Caribbean. Jamaicans, for example, were brought in for the construction of the Quito-Guayaquil railroad and this migration dynamic is reflected in the novel through the character of Mr. John. Nelson Maldonado Torres writes that the concept of decoloniality, in fact, “was inspired by indigenous activism in Latin America and the efforts of Afro Caribbean and Afro-Andean communities not only to survive, but also create an-other world” (2016, 76).

The second part of the chapter deals with Arlt’s engagement with film as a global form. An acute observer of the post-1929 crisis affecting Buenos Aires working classes, Arlt writes in “El cine y los cesantes” that masses of unemployed workers find it easier to spend a day in the movies, for as little as 20 cents, rather than go home empty-handed and with no job prospects. While recognizing the importance of early Hollywood to Arlt’s work, I am more interested in the entangled effects of Hollywood film and early Soviet cinema, where film directors often adopted American film techniques to promote Soviet ideological causes. The deep involvement of American popular culture and early Soviet cinema reflects an interesting, and often ambiguous and largely overlooked, engagement with globality that, as I suggest, affected Arlt’s views.

Dziga Vertov’s aesthetic of “kino-glaz,” or kino/film-eye, is the avant-garde aesthetic apparatus that I read through a documentary lens in Arlt and Pareja Diezcanseco. According to the “film-eye” theory, the camera is an instrument, much like the human eye, that is best used to explore the actual happenings of real life. I show how Baldomera and Los Siete Locos/Los lanzallamas—as Global South novels—use similar film techniques and decolonial perspectives. In short, I am interested in the ways in which the technologies of the visual raise questions about the nature of the residual and the unconsumed, and also about fulfilling and foiling expectations, especially with regard to the ideological functioning of film and novel as mass culture in a peripheral society of the Global South.

Chapter 4 offers a decolonial reading of four travel narratives by the foremost early-twentieth-century Latin American authors: the Nicaraguan poet, journalist, and diplomat Rubén Darío (1867–1916), the Dominican literary critic and historian Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884–1946), and the Argentine writers Ricardo Güiraldes (1886–1927), and Roberto Arlt (1900–1942). The chapter places Latin American fiction, travelogues, and related texts within the broader framework of modernist mobilities, and it examines the role travel played in the disintegration of utopias and the incipient mass culture. While engaging decolonial thinking and by focusing on spaces of colonial convergence such as the Panama Canal or Tangier, I examine the Global South in the mid-1930s from a transnational perspective that includes its connectivity with the global, geopolitical flows. I read multiple engagements with globality in this period through the lens of South-South exchange, and analyze them as 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.