Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil

In this work, Esther Gabara provides an innovative interpretation of modernist literary and artistic movements of the 1920s and 1930s in Brazil and Mexico, successfully arguing that their radical aesthetic experimentation and ethical commitment retain their relevance in the vastly changed circumstances of today. The work establishes an elaborate interdisciplinary dialogue between word, image, and context that will be of interest to those working in literary studies, art history, and visual culture for many years to come.

Gabara argues that the specific historical trajectories of Brazil and Mexico require us to redefine concepts such as modernism, postmodernism, and nationalism in order to account for the contributions of writers and artists like Mario de Andrade, Salvador Novo, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. This makes the work useful for those interested in Latin American studies, while contributing to ongoing theoretical debates about the general applicability of these terms across cultures and contexts. Gabara also breaks new ground by demonstrating how sexuality and gender influenced the experience and representation of modernity in these places. The end result provides a fresh analysis of the creative expressions of canonical figures in Mexico and Brazil, as well as the links between elite and popular culture. According to Gabara, the "resulting modernism has no inside nor outside and does not stay where it ought: it exceeds the purity of the art object, the limitations of elite culture, and the European center that for so long tried to hold an exclusive claim to it" (pp. 259-260).

This is a complex and ambitious work, comparing diverse regions and artistic practices and engaging theoretical vocabularies most familiar to those working in literary studies and art history. Photography is the medium and practice that ties the study together, providing a unique entry to Latin American modernity. According to Gabara, "photographs and the idea of the photographic led artists and writers to produce works that fuse meditations on ethics with experimental aesthetics in what I call the ethos of modernism" (p. 2). This distinctive ethos reveals traces of Latin America's colonial centuries, including the reinscription of baroque forms of representation and the lingering influence of racial constructs, and emphasizes "ethical self-questioning" (pp. 5-6). These historical legacies and new interpretive strategies inform the experimental practices of avant-garde intellectuals whose creative work redefined "the same genres that have been crucial to modernism internationally: landscape, portraiture, the (photo-) essay, and prose fiction" (p. 9). These interventions result in artifacts that reveal a distinctive history and thus experience of modernity, one that blurs easy divisions between modern and postmodern. The definition of modernity is stretched and redefined to accommodate the heterogeneity of lived experience in Brazil and Mexico, opening up new interpretive possibilities more cognizant of varied regional histories and identities.

Gabara argues that a key component of Latin American modernism is the joining of abstract experimentation with recognition of the world outside the frame. Thus, "Manuel Álvarez Bravo's photographs, like the prose fiction of his contemporaries, simultaneously compose an internal drama within the photograph out of light and form, and gesture to the tensions of modernity outside the photograph" (p. 11). Mario de Andrade's landscapes err—an example of the "errant modernisms" of the book's title—by departing from realism to construct abstract expressions that reveal Brazil's colonial history and multiple subjectivities. Andrade's foray into photographic portraiture coincides with the publication of his landmark novel, Macunaíma (1928). These artistic expressions reveal a tension between subject and object in Brazilian modernism. The results are "unstable and mobile portraits, not fixed ones," an indeterminacy that "makes possible a critical nationalism with space for a variety of citizens who occupy circumstances of race (and racial diversity) and sexuality generally not considered part of homogenizing nationalistic discourse" (pp. 110-111). The homosexuality of many leading intellectuals such as Mario de Andrade and Salvador Novo further complicated the construction of national identity in Brazil and Mexico, alongside the emergence of mass culture and the partial erosion of patriarchal norms in the shifting economic circumstances of the 1920s and 1930s.

A short review provides an inadequate forum to assess the contributions of this theoretically complex interdisciplinary work. Gabara successfully demonstrates the inadequacy of prevailing definitions of modernism, postmodernism, and nationalism in light of the actual experiences and artistic interventions found in Brazil and Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. How, then, are these concepts to be reconstructed?