Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America

Introduction

Introduction In Latin America (as in other global peripheries), critical and aesthetic cosmopolitan discourses shared a common epistemological structure that I call deseo de mundo, desire for the world. Cosmopolitan intellectuals invoked the world alternately as a signifier of abstract universality or a concrete and finite set of global trajectories traveled by writers and books. In either case, opening to the world permitted an escape from nationalist cultural formations and established a symbolic horizon for the realization of the translocal aesthetic potential of literature and cosmopolitan forms of subjectivation. I want to begin by reading the constitutive nature of these desejos do mundo and deseos de mundo in two particular and meaningful cosmopolitan imaginings of Latin American culture. In 1900, the Brazilian politician, diplomat, and writer Joaquim Nabuco published a memoir, Minha formação (My Formative Years), describing his sentimental education as one of the most influential public intellectuals of the late Empire and early Republic. The historical importance of Nabuco’s autobiography lies in his firsthand accounts of the abolition of slavery, the revolts and political maneuverings that led to the Empire’s collapse, and his travels and encounters with notable literary and political figures. What interests me, however, is a remarkable section of the book titled “Atração do mundo” (“The Attraction of the World”), where Nabuco grounds his intellectual self-representation in a cosmopolitan discourse: “Minha curiosidade, o meu interesse, vae 4 ❘ Introduction sempre para o ponto onde a acção do drama contemporâneo universal é mais complicada ou mais intensa. Sou antes um espectador do meu seculo do que do meu país; a peça é para mim a civilização, e se está representando em todos os theatros da humanidade, ligados hoje pelo telegrapho” (33–34) (“My curiosity or my interest always focuses on the most complicated or intense part of the action in the contemporary universal drama. I am more a spectator of my century than of my country . For me, the play is civilization, and it is staged in all great theaters of humanity, now connected by the telegraph”; 24). Silviano Santiago reads Nabuco’s cosmopolitan declaration as a crucial milestone in a tradition that Antonio Candido has described as a “síntese de tendencias particularistas e universalistas” (12) (“synthesis of particularistic and universalist trends”).1 But instead of a dialectical synthesis of opposites, Santiago characterizes Nabuco’s self-representation as that of a marginal witness to world affairs (thus his reliance on modern technologies of communication, like the telegraph), the sort of global mediation that shapes the peripheral position of Brazil and Latin America at the beginning of the twentieth century: “Morando em um país provinciano, [Nabuco] está distante do palco onde a grande peça se desenrola, mas dela pode ser espectador no conforto do lar em virtude dos meios de comunicação de massa modernos, no caso o telégrafo. A oposição entre país de origem e século, e a preferencia pela crise da representação [do Imperio] e não pela busca de identidade nacional da joven nação” (12–13) (“Living in a provincial country, [Nabuco] is far from the stage where the great play is being performed, but he can be a spectator from his comfortable location thanks to modern media like the telegraph. The opposition between country of origin and his times signifies his preference for the [Empire’s] crisis of representation, to the detriment of his young country’s search for national identity”). Nabuco admits that, despite their national significance, local politics bore him (33). He conceives of himself as a spectator, a world-historical witness, only to “a acção do drama contemporaneo universal” (“the action of contemporary universal drama”) that takes place beyond the national stage, out there in the undetermined, universal realm of civilization —the discursive field where Nabuco grounds a cosmopolitan self-representation that relies on the radical opposition between the nation (“meu país”) and humanity at large (“meu século,” “drama contempor âneo universal,” “os theatros da humanidade”). Half a century later in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a programmatic and polemical essay, “El escritor argentino y la tradición” Introduction ❘ 5 (“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”). In that piece, written as a lecture in 1951 and revised and published in 1953, he examines the contingency and boundaries of the aesthetic tradition that should structure the Argentine literary imagination. He asks, “¿Cu...