Conclusion

Summary

Rome and Athens. Mars and Venus. The authors of recent popular tracts promoting the idea of an inevitable clash of interests and values between Europe and America did not invent these antitheses. […] They provide the palette, the recurrent melody, in much of American literature throughout the nineteenth century, from James Fenimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain. American innocence and European sophistication; American pragmatism and European intellectualizing; American energy and European world-weariness; American naïvete and European cynicism; American goodheartedness and European malice; American moralism and the European arts of compromise − you know the tunes.

This penetrating remark describing mutually defining representations of Europe and the United States identifies the field with which this study has engaged. The dichotomies listed are only some of the ways in which the semantic field of (European) civilization versus (American) primitivism has been construed. However, looking at this statement through the analysis of Latin American narratives of ‘modernity’, one realizes that the terms associated with Europe, such as over-refinement, lack of energy, moral exhaustion, were commonly used in turn-of-the-century debates to connote the idea of Latin America. So, as US writers were delineating the (North) American nation by rejecting decadent European civilization, in Latin America notions of moral and cultural degeneration were instrumental to civilizational constructs. In other words, while Anglo-Saxon America came to be identified with future-oriented images of progress, Latin Americans incorporated ideas of decadence to stake a claim to being modern. The rapidly evolving sociopolitical context gradually engendered regenerationist discourses arising from the ashes of europeísta decline, while the contradictions within the Latinity paradigm were never completely lost.

It has been noted that ‘[the] margin of comparison with “the North” has provided a rich vein of cultural creativity so that even in conditions of economic inferiority and political disadvantage Latin Americans have retained a distinctive identity’. As I have shown in this book, Latinity was functional to incorporating ideas of modernity through the paradigm of an essentially urban, refined and sophisticated civilization. Because of this, however, the process of consolidation of the term ‘Latin America’ was more complex and multifaceted than is generally assumed.