Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900-1940 (review)

The fact that the term modernism (or "modernismo") was actually coined in the 1880s by the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío has not proved enough to earn turn of the century Latin American poetry a significant place in scholarship on international modernism. In part this is due to divergent understandings of the term in different geographical and institutional locations. Modernismo, spanning the period from the 1880s to the 1910s, has tended to be read as a continuation of French symbolism (despite its debt to Whitman and Poe), and more recently, as a declaration of cultural independence on the part of decolonizing and modernizing poets, turning to France in an effort to stave off both a Spanish colonial heritage and a more recent threat from the north. Its more vernacular late stage of postmodernismo is displaced by an avant-garde which loudly declares its radical break with the past, leaving comparative or hemispheric scholars with a picture of two modernisms that don't quite meet up, and an avant-garde that apparently rejects all traditions, comparisons, and connections.

Tace Hedrick's dense and impressive Mestizo Modernism makes the surprising yet compelling move of obliquely addressing this terminological disparity, recasting Latin American avant-garde production as, in fact, modernist. This gesture, as she convincingly argues, does not amount to imposing yet another Anglophone interpretative framework on to material produced elsewhere, but will rather allow scholars to reconnect the artwork of the period to the modernizing discourses with which it is entangled. In broad and bold terms, Hedrick is concerned not with contrasting modernisms but with examining changing ways of reading them, following a recent critical tradition north and south of the border which embeds modernist production in its sociopolitical context. In the scrupulousness, range, and depth of its endeavor, Mestizo Modernism takes its place alongside scholarship on "new modernist studies" in the United States—particularly the work of Susan Hegeman, Marc Manganaro, Houston Baker, and Amy Kaplan—which aims to unsettle the notions of both modernity and culture and unearth their racial, class, and gender underpinnings, not to mention their debts to hard and social sciences and their attendant ideologies. Hedrick's study also naturally connects with recent rereadings of Latin American poetry, prose, and artwork in the first part of the twentieth century; it goes beyond the foundational scholarship of such critics as Cathy Jrade, Beatriz Sarlo, Vicky Unruh, and Néstor García Canclini, in its deft interweaving of artistic production and self-presentation, high and mass culture, debates on modernization, and public policy.

Mestizo Modernism is particularly attentive to the role played by debates on race and national integration in the modernist period. Hedrick's discussion of mestizaje zooms in on concrete programs and procedures at the often overlapping state and artistic levels; what is more, it brilliantly traces the convergence at both levels of discourses on race and modernity, but also of gender—and, implicitly, class. The foundational figure of the new continental imaginary of the modernist period, Hedrick argues, is that of the Indian or mestiza mother, as a fertile trope for bodying forth a regional future; this figure is partly, although not entirely, displaced in the socialism-oriented 1930s by the image of a brotherhood of laborers. For as Hedrick demonstrates, what distinguishes Latin American modernism in particular is its insistent return to the figure of the family, to a nation rendered as the achievement of domestic plenitude (often minus the implicitly Spanish father), because the fascination with the premodern underpinning modernism is, in Latin America, "literally a domestic issue" (45). She boldly and convincingly reads these figures not simply as background characters in the drama of the lyric persona but as tropes through which artists grapple with questions of modernity, which include questions of those bodies (and, occasionally, machines) that labor to produce it. Finally, her insistent focus on the bodily presentation of her chosen artists as...