The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America (review)

Critical approaches to the avant-garde tend to adopt temporal frames to explain the emergence of artistic movements and their objectives. In Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) for example, Peter Bürger proposes an understanding of the historic European avant-gardes in terms of three stages: the rise of a market for secular artwork produced for the urban bourgeoisie, the development of an "autonomous" field oriented toward art pour l'art, and finally, a radical institutional critique of autonomy that sought to reconnect art and life. Latin American avant-gardes also conceptualized their practices using temporal metaphors, often to convey a sense of "catching up" to metropolitan counterparts, as in Oswald de Andrade's well-known line from the Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil (1924), which laid out a program for the Brazilian avant-garde: "The work of the futurist generation was cyclopic. Resetting the imperial clock of national literature. Once this stage was achieved, there is another problem. To be regional and pure in your own time." As Andrade suggests, the Latin American avant-gardes also addressed specifically spatial concerns that accounted for their location on the periphery of capitalism, or what Fernando Rosenberg calls their "positionality" in his innovative and incisive study. In fact, according to Rosenberg, "the Latin American avant-gardes . . . understood 'the new' spatially, not temporally—along a horizontal axis, not a vertical one" (p.7).

Rosenberg proposes a "geopolitical reading" of the Latin American avant-gardes that sidesteps the question of originality and imitation in favor of a critical paradigm that emphasizes synchronicity among peoples and nations, or what Johannes Fabian has called "coevalness." Against "diffusionist accounts" that attempt to demonstrate the European "influences" over the Latin American movements, Rosenberg trains his eye on a "global, simultaneous dynamic" (p.16). By situating Latin American avant-gardes in global context (by which he means Western Europe, Latin America, and to some extent the United States), he is able to reframe the polemical question of whether they were detached cosmopolitans or engaged artists that addressed questions of national concern (p.14). Invoking the notion of "critical cosmopolitanism," he shows that Latin American avant-gardes embraced an ideal of "non-Eurocentric, always-situated universalism" (p. 40).

Although Rosenberg is clearly familiar with vanguardist practices throughout Latin America, his study deals primarily with two authors, Roberto Arlt (Argentina, 1900-1942) and Mário de Andrade (Brazil, 1893-1945). He offers an innovative geopolitical reading of Arlt's Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas (1929-31), a literary diptych about a revolutionary group situated on the periphery of Buenos Aires that seeks to upset the international balance of power. The insurgent, utopian impulse behind the novels, as Rosenberg shows, is oriented toward a remapping of the world order, not the defense and promotion of national culture. Rosenberg interprets Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma (1928) through the lens of Benjaminian allegory, showing how the narrative slyly subverts the quest for national originality, autonomy, and unity even as it draws heavily from indigenous myths. He reads Macunaíma against the metaphor of antropofagia (cultural cannibalism) proposed by fellow modernist Oswald de Andrade in his 1928 Manifesto Antropófago and related writings. Mário certainly had deep reservations about Oswald's project, but Rosenberg overstates the contrast by arguing that antropofagia was an optimistic "symbolic" discourse of transculturation and self-realization, while Macunaíma proposed an "allegorical" discourse of fragmentation and ruins (pp. 84-5). This opposition overlooks the allegorical, anti-colonial dimensions of antropofagia, which fit uncomfortably in the straightjacket of neo-romantic symbolic nationalism. Although subsequent articulations of antropofagia often reified it as a metaphor for national character, the same could be said of Mário's tricksterish Macunaíma—"a hero with no character."

The final chapter, "Cosmopolitanism and Repentance," follows the intellectual and artistic trajectories of Latin American vanguards such as Oliverio Girondo, Vicente Huidobro, and Oswald de Andrade after the early phase of experimental...