Abstract
The nations of Latin America were founded upon visions of modernity. Independence leaders imagined republics based on popular sovereignty and liberal freedoms blazing a trail through obscurantism and oppression toward a utopian future in which the full potential of humankind would be realized. Latin America would become distinctively, gloriously, hospitably modern, “disclosing to the Old World the majesty of the New,” proclaimed Bolívar.2 In practice, the notorious gap between ideals and realities in the region has meant that Latin America’s modernity has indeed long been regarded as distinctive, but usually only in a negative sense. Peripheral, uneven, fractured, labyrinthine—these characteristic metaphors of deficiency all imply that the region’s historical experience has been particularly prone to inauthenticity and inconsistency, even more so than might be anticipated by any general theory that the modern condition is generically at odds with itself: incomplete (Habermas), ambivalent (Bauman), or paradoxical (Berman).3 It is not unusual to find Latin America’s history represented as a struggle between modernization and resistance to it.
“After all, modernity is a rebellion against fate and ascription,”: Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity, Cambridge, 1991, p. 68.
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Notes
Simón Bolívar, “Discurso de Angostura” [1819], in J. L. Salcedo-Bastardo, Bolívar, Academica Venezolana, Editorial Arte, Caracas, 1984, pp. 178–203. The original Spanish is particularly telling: “mostrar al mundo antiguo la majestad del mundo moderno,” p. 203.
Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” [1980], in Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1997, pp. 38–55; Bauman, Modernity and Ambivialence; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Verso, London, 1983.
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures [1985], trans. Frederick Lawrence, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987; The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Polity, Cambridge, 1984.
Aníbal Quijano, Modernidad, identidad y utopía en América Latina, Editorial El Conejo, Quito, 1990, p. 62.
Julio Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina. Literatura y política en el siglo XIX, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1989; trans. by John D. Blanco as Divergent Modernities, Duke University Press, Durham, 2001.
For the classic statement of modernization theory, see W. W. Rostow, Politics and the Stages of Growth, Cambridge University Press, London, 1971; for Latin American responses, see José Medina Echavarría, Consideraciones sociológicas sobre el desarrollo económico en América Latina, Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Montevideo,
1984; and Joseph A. Kahl, Modernization, Exploitation and Dependency in Latin America: Germani, González Casanova and Cardoso, Transaction Books, New Brunswick NJ, 1976.
Aníbal Quijano et al., Imágenes desconocidas: La modernidad en la encrucijada posmoderna, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, Buenos Aires, 1988, p. 17 and pp. 175–8.
Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, eds., After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003, p. 25.
Luis Roniger and Carlos H. Waisman, eds., Globality and Multiple Modernities: Comparative North American and Latin American Perspectives, Sussex University Press, Brighton, 2002; Laurence Whitehead, Latin America: A New Interpretation, Palgrave, New York, 2006. See also Manuel A. Garretón, Incomplete Democracy: Political Democratization in Chile and Latin America, trans. R. Kelly Washbourne with Gregory Horvath, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC, 2003, pp. 14–15.
Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” [1978] in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984, pp. 32–50.
Peter Wagner has suggested one general caveat about modernity that rings particularly true in relation to Latin America, namely that if it is thought of as “a ‘condition’ or an ‘experience,’ then the qualifications required to show its existence were largely absent in the allegedly modern societies during the nineteenth century, and for a still fairly large number of people during the first half of the twentieth century.” Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 3–4.
Victor M. Uribe-Uran, ed., State and Society in Spanish America during the Age of Revolution, Scholarly Resources, Wilmington DE, 2001; see also Anthony McFarlane and Eduardo Posada-Carbó, eds., Independence and Revolution in Spanish America: Perspectives and Problems, Institute of Latin American Studies, London, 1999.
Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930, Ediciones Nueva Visión, Buenos Aires, 1988; Néstor Garcia Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entra y salir de la modernidad, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1992; José Joaquín Brunner, America Latina: cultura y modernidad, Editorial Grijalbo, Mexico, 1992.
The term was particularly evident in Mexico, even before the revolution: there was the famous modernista forum Revista Moderna (1898–1911); a new generation of intellectuals (including Alfonso Reyes) founded Savia Moderna in 1906; later came Mexico Moderno (1920–1923) and a publishing house called Moderno (founded in 1919 by Manuel Toussaint).
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2004, p. 23.
The literature on the modernization of Latin American cities has been growing rapidly. See, in particular, Maurico Tenorio Trillo, “1910 Mexico City: Space and Nation in the City of the Centenario,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, February 1996, pp. 75–104; Gilbert M. Joseph and Mark Szuchman, eds., I Saw a City Invincible: Urban Portraits of Latin America, Scholarly Resources Inc., Washington, 1996; Ronn Pineo and James A. Baer, Cities of Hope: People, Protests, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870–1930, Westview Press, Boulder and Oxford, 1998; and Arturo Almandez, ed., Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850–1950, Routledge, London, 2002.
Angel Rama, Las máscaras democráticas del modernismo, Fundación Angel Rama, Montevideo, 1985, pp. 28–33.
For a good illustrative account, which brings out the effects of modernization in telling detail, see Karen Remmer, Party Competition in Argentina and Chile, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE, 1984.
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonía de las razas en América [1883], La Cultura Argentina, Buenos Aires, 1915, p. 456; José Martí, “Nuestra América” [1891], in Obras escogidas, Editora Política, La Habana, vol. II, 1979, pp. 519–27, p. 526.
Rubén Darío, “Cake-Walk: el baile de moda,” in Revista Moderna de Mexico, I:1, September 1903, pp. 59–61.
Roger Chartier, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,” in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1982, pp. 13–46, p. 22. Chartier is here discussing the work of Lucien Febvre, whose use of biography as a way of investigating the articulation between thought and the social world I have drawn upon for this book. However, Febvre’s concept of mental equipment (outillage) places more emphasis on the outlook of the individual than I wish to do (likewise Lucien Goldmann’s idea, adopted from Lukács, of world vision). Bourdieu’s term habitus—defined as the “set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways” (Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, Polity, Cambridge, 1991, p. 12)—comes closer to capturing the social context of ideas that I wish to emphasize. However, my reservation about habitus is that it implies a more established and consensual situation than existed in early-twentieth-century Latin America, where cultural producers were obliged to negotiate precarious, atomized, and rapidly shifting conditions. I have, therefore, settled upon Pomian’s less precise, but correspondingly more flexible concept of porteurs of ideas, which leaves open the (undecidable) question of the extent to which the individual outlook is conditioned by society or vice versa.
Brunner, Cultura y modernidad, p. 169 ff. For a sample of evidence for popular interest in the modern, see, from the discipline of history: Carlos A. Forment, Democracy in Latin America 1760–1900. Vol. I: Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2003; François-Xavier Guerra, Annick Lempérière et al., eds., Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1998; Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994; Thomas O’Brien, The Century of US Capitalism in Latin America, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1999; and Guy Thomson, with David LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-century Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra, Scholarly Resources, Wilmington DE, 1998. From social science, see: Arnold Bauer, Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; and David Nugent, Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes 1885–1935, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1997. For relevant work in Latin American cultural studies, see note 33; and also William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America, Verso, London, 1991.
Jesús Martín-Barbero, De los medios a las mediaciones: Comunicación, cultura y hegemonía, Ediciones G. Gili, Barcelona, 1991; García Canclini, Culturas híbridas; Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica.
The classic account is E. Bradford Burns and Thomas E. Skidmore, Elites, Masses, and Modernization in Latin America, 1850–1930, University of Texas Press, Austin and London, 1979, esp. pp. 27–8. Carlos Alonso (in his The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Latin America, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998) basically agrees, although he sees the elites’ ideology of modernization not as a result of choice but as determined by relations of dependency.
Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall, Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1984; Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au 16e siècle: La religion de Rabelais, Albin Michel, Paris, 1942; Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” in New Literary History, vol. 2, no. 1, Autumn 1970, pp. 7–37. See also Christophe Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels,” Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1990.
Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “La obra de José Enrique Rodó” [1910], in Ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión, Editorial Raigal, Buenos Aires, 1952, pp. 118–31, p. 119.
Ramos, Divergent Modernities, p. 60, original emphasis.
Alfonso Reyes, “No hay tal lugar,” in Obras completas, vol. XI, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1960, p. 373.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Progress Publishers, Moscow, n.d. [1848; trans. 1888], p. 48.
Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “Palabras en la despedida de un buen americano” [1940], in Plenitud de América, Del Giudice Editores, Buenos Aires, 1952, pp. 115–8, p. 117.
Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo. Del romanticismo a la vanguardia, Editorial Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1974, p. 125.
Darío, in El Tiempo (Buenos Aires), May 20, 1898, in Estudios inéditos, Instituto de Las Españas, New York, 1938, p. 160.
See Darío, “El rey burgués,” in Azul, Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 14th edn., 1966.
Cathy L. Jrade, “Socio-Political Concerns in the Poetry of Rubén Darío,” in David William Foster and Daniel Altamira, eds., From Romanticism to Modernismo in Latin America, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 1997, pp. 302–15, esp. p. 303. On imports of consumer items, see Bauer, Goods.
Octavio Paz’s ideas on Rubén Darío paved the way for Anglo-American scholarship: see Paz, The Siren and the Seashell by Lysander Kemp and Margaret Sayers Peden, University of Texas Press, Austin and London, 1976. For the revisionist case see Zavala, Colonialism and Culture; Richard A. Cardwell and Bernard McGuirk, eds., ¿Qué es el modernismo? Nueva encuesta, nuevas lecturas, Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, Boulder CO, 1993; Gerard Aching, The Politics of Spanish American modernismo, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997; Cathy L. Jrade, Modernismo, Modernity and the Development of Spanish American Literature, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998; Anthony L. Geist and José B. Monleón, eds., Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 1999. For the traditional interpretation see Keith Ellis, Critical Approaches to Rubén Darío, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1974. For work emphasizing modernismo’s contradictory tendencies, see Noé Jitrik, Las contradicciones del modernismo, El Colegio de México, Mexico City, 1978; David William Foster and Daniel Altamira, eds., From Romanticism to Modernismo in Latin America, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 1997. Revisionist work has also been done on the vanguardista movements: see Saúl Yurkievich, A través de la trama, Muchnik Editores, Barcelona, 1984. On novels, see Carlos J. Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; and his The Burden of Modernity.
Gordon Brotherston, ed., Spanish American Modernista Poets: A Critical Anthology, Bristol Classical Press, London, 2nd edn., 1995, esp. “Introduction,” pp. vii–xviii.
Aníbal González, La crónica modernista hispanoamericana, 1983 and La novela modernista hispanoamericana, 1987; Cristóbal Pera, Modernistas en París: El mito de París en la prosa modernista hispanoamericana, Peter Lang, Bern, 1997.
Jorge Larraín, Identity and Modernity in Latin America, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000.
Carlos Alonso, “The Burden of Modernity,” in Doris Sommer, ed., The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, pp. 94–103, p. 94.
Thanks to Charles Jones for this metaphor.
Vicente F. Lopez, “Clasicismo y romanticismo” [1842], in Norberto Pinilla, La polémica del romanticismo, Editorial Americalee, Buenos Aires, 1943, pp. 11–32, esp. p. 23.
Juan Bautista Alberdi, “Ideas. Para presidir á la confección del curso de filosofía contemporánea. En el Colegio de Humanidades Montevideo, 1842,” in Escritos póstumos, vol. XV, Imprenta Juan Bautista Alberdi, Buenos Aires, 1900, pp. 603–19, esp. 613 and 607.
Jorge E. Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective, Blackwell, Malden MA and Oxford, 2000, p. 141.
Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten, Polity, Cambridge, 1995, translator’s introduction, p. xvii. The relevant essay by Habermas is “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity,” in ibid., pp. 149–204.
See the review of debates in Castro-Gómez, Crítica de la razón latinoamericana, esp. Ch. 2.
See Rama, Las máscaras, p. 37 for an argument about the major role played in modernization by letrados, especially the Generation of 1880 in Argentina, the Reforma Generation in Mexico, Tobias Barreto in Brazil, and Eugenio María de Hostos in Puerto Rico.
Moreover, stereotypes of Latin America as ineptly and brutally modern are still ubiquitous in popular literature. To take one random but influential example, see Hergé’s Tintin and the Picaros [1976], Egmont UK, London, 2006, in which the Picaros, a guerrilla group dressed in harlequin costumes (carnival), try to overthrow the “cruel and vain” tyrant, General Tapioca (p. 1). The leader of the Picaros is equally bloodthirsty, however, rejecting Tintin’s offer to help in exchange for a promise to enact a revolution without violence with the rejoinder: “A revolution without executions? Without reprisals? […] It’s unthinkable! […] And anyway, what about tradition? […] Tapioca and his ministers are bloody tyrants and villains. They must be shot!” (p. 44). When the Picaros finally triumph, aided by Tintin and the Professor (respectively the incorruptible and the inventive—both civilizing Europeans), they force General Tapioca at gunpoint to declare, in a speech that “we shall, of course, be recording […] on tape,” that he is handing over power to their own leader who “will lead our beloved country forward along the road of […] progress” (p. 56). There are many other representations throughout the text of Latin American modernity as technocratic and authoritarian.
70 Alain Touraine, Critique of Modernity, trans. David Macey, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995, p. 201.
Manifesto of the Argentine periodical Martín Fierro, May 15, 1924, in Oliverio Girondo, Obras completas, ed. Raúl Antelo, Galaxia Gutenberg, Madrid, 1999, pp. lxv–lxvi.
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© 2008 Nicola Miller
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Miller, N. (2008). Introduction: Against Fate and Ascription. In: Reinventing Modernity in Latin America. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610101_1
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