Global South Modernities. Gorica Majstorovic

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ