Global South Modernities. Gorica Majstorovic

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СКАЧАТЬ to remind me what really matters, and for that I am ever grateful. Jovo and Mane are a constant source of love and support from Los Angeles, CA. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents Marija and Božidar-Božo Majstorović in Belgrade, Serbia. This is for them.

      Introduction

      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 СКАЧАТЬ