Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America

Abstract

GEIST, ANTHONY L., AND JOSE B. MONLEON, eds. Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America. Hispanic Issues 19. New York: Garland, 1999. 320 pages.Underlying this timely and unusually coherent anthology of essays on Modernism in Spain and Latin America is the idea that, precisely, there is something to be gained by considering the phenomenon in both cultural milieux simultaneously, since both areas have been on the periphery of an economic and cultural modernity that they have felt to be a distant, metropolitan reality. But in a cogent introduction, the editors argue furthermore for upending the center/periphery model altogether by proposing that the periphery was always central to the cultural project of modernity. One only has to think about the cast of characters that is traditionally associated with Continental Modernism-Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Picasso, among others-to notice their eccentricity with respect to Europe. But we must also keep in mind the fetishization and aesthetic commodification of an exotic periphery that was such an integral part of the Modernist program, even if it was carried out at times by individuals belonging, in fact, to those secondary economic and cultural zones.The critical paradigm invoked here is derived from Jameson's conception of Modernism as the style that arises to address the reality of a capitalism that has expanded to incorporate the rest of the world into its economic orbit as a colonial periphery. In this view, the realization that the health and prosperity of the metropolitan system now rest paradoxically in a realm literally outside itself creates an anxiety that is resolved through the invention of a cultural modality that affirms the centrality of the modern experience-an experience privative to the metropolitan circles that posited it. Modernism would then be a kind of compensatory mechanism that would seek to erase or write off the dependence that increasingly would characterize the colonial and neo-colonial metropolitan experience. Similar ideas have been proposed by Ernesto Laclau in his recent consideration of Enlightenment rationality as a strategy that required the simultaneous positing of an unenlightened periphery in order to come into being, a periphery that can-and will-therefore come back to haunt the hegemonic enlightened program from within.As a whole, the essays assembled in this collection constitute attempts to engage in this revisionist critical project, clearly outlined in the introduction by Geist and Monleon. By and large, the articles reveal the astounding uniformity of the cultural manifestations of the modernist phenomenon produced throughout the world. This uniformity is, of course, itself a symptom that the underlying foundation of the phenomenon indeed had the cosmopolitan dimensions adduced by Jameson, Geist, and Monleon. In other words, the movement's uniformity and concern with universale bespeaks its compensatory function of assuaging anxieties arisen from a world-historical metropolitan perspective. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 153 citations exist upstream.