Global South Modernities. Gorica Majstorovic

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ