Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film

Introduction: Neobaroque Alternative Modernities

14 qr Introduction Neobaroque Alternative Modernities This book opens with a portrait of neobaroque T. S. Eliot and closes with contemporary baroques in Chicano lowrider art and the hip-hop baroque in Cuban American art. In between, it ranges over vastly diverse territory: the major works of Djuna Barnes, contemporary antidictatorship literature and film from Chile and Argentina by Diamela Eltit, José Donoso, Raúl Ruiz, and María Luisa Bemberg, and Latin American and Caribbean postcolonial theory outlining the emergence of a decolonizing New World baroque in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It encompasses Spanish-language and English-language works, focusing mainly on the United States and the Southern Cone (the region of Latin America comprising Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil), and juxtaposes long-neglected Anglo-American neobaroque expression with the more familiar (or at least more predictable) Latin American and Latino varieties. Neobaroque in the Americas is an interartistic study that spans literature, film, architecture, and the visual arts and also incorporates the twentieth-century philosophy and cultural theory of Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Irlemar Chiampi, Bolívar Echeverría, and Christine Buci-Glucksmann. Few literary and cultural phenomena allow the researcher to roam this far in pursuit of her topic, looking both high and low in the arts, ranging from modernist experimentalism (Eliot and Barnes) to postmodern and contemporary developments such as post-Boom antidictatorship literature and film from the Southern Cone; traveling north and south across the American hemisphere; tracing parallel but distinct European and American mestizo genealogies of the same artistic expression (the European baroque and the transculturated mestizo New World baroque); and consequently being forced to make difficult choices along the way in balancing equally compelling word-based and image-based varieties. The baroque is an exceptional and fascinating phenomenon, in no small part because of the prolific afterlife it has had in generating “new” baroques, both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and again in the twentieth 2 Introduction and twenty-first centuries. Baroque (of the European sort), New World baroque, and neobaroque are the terms that designate the milestones of this idiosyncratic, nonlinear trajectory. The baroque first arose in the capitals of the new centralizing nation-states and regional provinces of the seventeenth century—in Rome, Versailles, Vienna, Madrid—as the grand, monumental style of European absolutism (the state form succeeding feudalism in early modern Europe, founded on the centralization of power and the absolute sovereignty of the monarch unchecked by any other agency) and the Counter-Reformation. From the very beginning, the baroque has been an interartistic expression, emerging in a variety of media but predominantly in the visual arts because of the Counter-Reformation’s emphasis on image-based religious pedagogy to indoctrinate the illiterate masses in Europe and the European colonies.1 But even though the baroque began as a conservative style, in the official arts sponsored by the Catholic Church and the absolutist state, many of the new baroques that arose subsequently deviated diametrically from these social origins. The wayward, rich afterlife of the historical baroque has vastly expanded baroque expression along two paradigmatic coordinates, time and space—or history, as found in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century neobaroque, and geographic and cultural location, as found in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New World baroque, which has continuities with contemporary postcolonial and ethnic neobaroques. Like the baroque before it, the neobaroque spread in nonlinear fashion across multiple boundaries among languages, nations (and continents), ethnic groups, and disciplines. Reflecting this rich transhistorical and transcultural genealogy of expression, the baroque today is one of the poster children of interdisciplinary arts and culture. The comparative nature of this study is perfectly suited to its subject: no narrow, disciplinary—nation-based, genrebased , ethnocentric or otherwise noncomparative—inquiry can ever hope to capture the uniqueness and complexity of the baroque. Neobaroque in the Americas examines the neobaroque—the twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury recovery of the baroque in modern and postmodern literature, film, the visual arts, and theory—within a hemispheric American framework. As such, it is broadly aligned with Roland Greene’s suggestion that “the neobaroque in spirit is a decisively American phenomenon, probably because this hemisphere provides a distance and delay from the original baroque that allows it to be critically refashioned. Baroque and neobaroque should be among the first nouns in a common language between the early modern past and the inter-American present.”2 This study is devoted to retheorizing the continuities of the baroque...