Global South Modernities. Gorica Majstorovic

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?

      Outline of Chapters

      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 СКАЧАТЬ