This is an exploration of how Latin America developed an alternative modernity during the early twentieth century, one that challenges the key assumptions of the Western dominant model.

Postmodernity in Latin America contests the prevailing understanding of the relationship between postmodernity and Latin America by focusing on recent developments in Latin American, and particularly Argentine, political and literary culture. While European and North American theorists of postmodernity generally view Latin American fiction without regard for its political and cultural context, Latin Americanists often either uncritically apply the concept of postmodernity to Latin American literature and society or reject it in an equally uncritical fashion. The result has been both a limited understanding of the literature and an impoverished notion of postmodernity. Santiago Colás challenges both of these approaches and corrects their consequent distortions by locating Argentine postmodernity in the cultural dynamics of resistance as it operates within and against local expressions of late capitalism. Focusing on literature, Colás uses Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch to characterize modernity for Latin America as a whole, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman to identify the transition to a more localized postmodernity, and Ricardo Piglia’s Artificial Respiration to exemplify the cultural coordinates of postmodernity in Argentina. Informed by the cycle of political transformation beginning with the Cuban Revolution, including its effects on Peronism, to the period of dictatorship, and finally to redemocratization, Colás’s examination of this literary progression leads to the reconstruction of three significant moments in the history of Argentina. His analysis provokes both a revised understanding of that history and the recognition that multiple meanings of postmodernity must be understood in ways that incorporate the complexity of regional differences. Offering a new voice in the debate over postmodernity, one that challenges that debate’s leading thinkers, Postmodernity in Latin America will be of particular interest to students of Latin American literature and to scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern.

Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America examines the seminal influence that Latin American writers had on the style, subject matter, and ideology of literature in the Global South from 1900 to the late 1930s. Gorica Majstorovic challenges the historical and racial logic of interwar Latin American literary studies by introducing the solidarity relations between the global decolonial movements and placing anti-imperialism, Blackness, and indigeneity at the center of decolonial analysis. Following Mignolo, de Sousa Santos, and Cheah, the texts under analysis subvert the processes of European colonial worlding and show modernity itself as pluralized. Drawing on these works, Majstorovic bridges the gap between aesthetics and politics while shifting the focus onto the Latin American transnational modernist networks and situating the analysis within the theoretical frameworks of the Global South. While examining the idea of globality through its different conceptualizations (cosmopolitanism, immigration, and travel), Majstorovic analyzes avant-garde magazines of the 1920s, Mexican petrofiction, urban proletarian, and decolonial travel narratives of the 1930s, calling into question modernism’s usual framing as an Anglo-American interwar phenomenon. Majstorovic constructs a new genealogy of Latin American literature by examining the asymmetrical relations within its multiple modernities and offers a new understanding of Latin American interwar literature through the lens of the Global South.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Presenting a paradigm-shifting view of early Latin American modernism, this book looks at how a transnational intellectual community of writers and critics forged an anticolonial aesthetic based in abstract artistic forms.

This volume represents a rereading of modernism and the modernist canon from a double distance: geographical and temporal. It is a revision not only from the periphery (Spain and Latin America), but from this new fin de si cle as well, a revisiting of modernity and its cultural artifacts from that same postmodernity. Modernism and Its Margins is an attempt at introducing different perspectives and examples in the theoretical debate, redefine dominant assumptions of what modernism-or margins-mean in our historical juncture.

Modernity in Latin America is defined above all by its multi-layered, kaleidoscopic quality. Reminiscent of Octavio Paz's labyrinth, it is a modernity which has accommodated a piling-on of new traditions to old, a blending of external cultures with local, and of high cultures with more popular ones—mixes which allowed a rich and celebratory avant-garde movement, for example, to emerge in the 1920s, and prompted the explosive growth of cities like Rio de Janeiro. Many such cultural (as well as technological) innovations have occurred without equivalent changes in social and political life, however, and so the region has also been at the mercy of what might be termed an uneven development in many of its civic institutions. In this prestigious volume of original essays, many of the best writers on the region are brought together to examine the nature and manifestations of a specifically Latin American modernity. Beatriz Sarlo and Nicolau Sevcenko write about Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo in an exploration of twentieth century urban experience and shifting patterns of migration and immigration; Renato Ortiz and Ana Lopez look at mass media and the ways in which radio, television and cinema have shaped modernity; Jose Jorge de Carvalho, Jose de Souza Martins and Nelson Manrique address questions of religion, politics, ideology and social movements; Gwen Kirkpatrick and Beatriz Rezende explore the intricacies of artistic and literary modernism; and Nestor Canclini and Ruben Oliven open the collection with essays which unravel the many forces – the legacy of slavery, the freedom from an unquestioning faith in development and 'progress', the impact of globalisation – that have given rise to a characteristically hybrid modernity.

Focusing on four key artists who represent Latin-American modernism: Cesar Vallejo; Gabriela Mistral; Diego Rivera; and Frida Kahlo, Tace Hendrick examines what being 'modern' and 'American' meant for them and illuminates the cultural contexts within which they worked.

This book is the first in-depth exploration of the relationship between Latin American and European modernisms during the long twentieth century. Drawing on comparative, historical, and postcolonial reading strategies (including archival research), it seeks to reenergize the study of modernism by putting the spotlight on the cultural networks and aesthetic dialogues that developed between European and non-European writers, including Pablo Neruda, James Joyce, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Victoria Ocampo, Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortázar, Samuel Beckett, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Malcolm Lowry. The book explores a wide range of texts that reflect these writers’ complex concerns with questions of exile, space, empire, colonization, reception, translation, human subjectivity, and modernist experimentation. By rethinking modernism comparatively and by placing this intricate web of cultural interconnections within an expansive transnational (and transcontinental) framework, this unique study opens up new perspectives that delineate the construction of a polycentric geography of modernism. It will be of interest to those studying global modernisms, as well as Latin American literature, transatlantic studies, comparative literature, world literature, translation studies, and the global south.