Introduction

Summary

Understanding ‘modernity’ as a cultural category independent from processes of economic and social modernization has interested an increasing number of scholars, especially though not exclusively from a postcolonial perspective. Exploring how the modern condition has been represented in peripheral or postcolonial areas, including Latin America, allows us to consider as many modernities as there are experiences of what it means to be modern. Critical approaches to the literature on ‘modernities’ have highlighted the fact that the latter has achieved the effect of reinstating modernity as a category, making it impossible to escape a derivative Eurocentric view. Starting from the mid-1990s, Latin American ‘de-colonial thinking’ has further attempted to turn existing perspectives on modernity around, calling for a collective multidisciplinary endeavour to ‘decolonize’ long rooted systems of knowledge from the margins, with important results especially in cultural studies and the social sciences.

However, as Néstor García Canclini has argued, the category of ‘the modern’ was central to ‘[t]he task of understanding Latin America […] throughout the nineteenth century as a search to understand the contradictions between […] an exuberant cultural modernism and […] a deficient modernization’. Indeed, references to lo moderno as a feeling of belonging to a wider community identified with Europe – and from the 1920s with the ‘west’ – were everywhere to be found in the literature on the nation from the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It is therefore essential to assess in what ways ‘modernism was a crucial context for the development of an alternative social imaginary of modernity in Latin America’. Writers, poets and intellectuals were key actors in establishing new perceptions and accounts of the ways in which Latin America was becoming part of what was commonly referred to as ‘modern civilization’. But what kind of modernity did Latin Americans internalize? What did they choose to translate into their own cultural imaginaries and why? By historicizing the concept of modernity from a marginal locus of thought production, this book will show both the complexities of active processes of adoption and the multiple co-existing layers within the concept itself.

Spanish America's tangled relationship with Europe as an ambiguous interlocutor provides the crucial context in which the adoption of sets of values and beliefs was negotiated in order to create a new cultural and political equilibrium between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’.