Cosmopolitanism in the Americas

CONCLUSIONS (and Querying the “Other” Cosmopolitanism)

131 CONCLUSIONS (and Querying the “Other” Cosmopolitanism) I began this work on cosmopolitanism at the turn of the century with the suspicion that the term had a bad reputation or that it was applied to people in a negative or derisory manner. The explicitly political cosmopolitan organizations and theories of cohesion across the Americas are the normative version of the cosmopolitical, the acceptable version of men organizing and joining together. The proper cosmopolitanism involved the formation of political unions and the consolidation of national and international bodies through association. The “other” cosmopolitanism evoked promiscuous travels, tempting encounters, and new experiences that might shock the more provincially minded. Cosmopolitanism was disturbing and disruptive because it introduced new ideas about social formation, it deregulated the norm of association and introduced the single and singular figure—odd, queer, outcast, alien—as its exemplary type. The cosmopolitan was a figure of modernista detachment, s/he was more at home out in the world and often exiled from national belonging. The “other” cosmopolitanism was a kind of cultural transvestism, a taking on of the markers and characteristics of elsewhere in a way that would alter a gender /sexual self-representation and revolutionize virile conceptions of national culture . This self-representation was also a textual or narrative style, an approach to writing and reading that was innovative and radically inclusive, but moreover that was ornate and refined, overwrought and delicate. The modernista style, the most cosmopolitan movement in the Americas, was, as Oscar Montero notes, the “founding moment of Latin American literary queerness” (“Julián del Casal” 95). In light of the cultural transvestism of the literary cosmopolitan, the terms cosmopolitan and modernismo and queer are virtually inextricable. In this last and final thought before the close of this text, I explore cosmopolitanism more specifically as an outcast condition, as a form of association or better yet, dissociation. Transvestism describes the performance of foreign styles while it alludes to the sexual and gender connotations of these cultural masquerades. In modernismo, foreign writers and texts are performed for the pleasure of textual voyeurism, of playing with different modes of representation. In his work on transvestism and 132 Conclusions masculinity and Latin American literature, Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui describes transvestism as the performance of “self” through the “other” as an act of “selfrealization ” (4). This description is similar to the fin-de-siècle discourse of the “pose” analyzed by Molloy in which there is a vacillating intimacy of the pose and the subject—you are what you pose, but then again, you might be just posing. There is a small loophole of responsibility that can also be a trap, where posing involves the risk of getting caught. The transvestite is not held to the same cultural prejudices as turn-of-the-century subjects, s/he seeks a full self-becoming beyond the interpretive vagaries of posing. Posing involves the hint of effeminacy or gender insurrection taken as a sign of homosexuality, whereas transvestism is a wholesale performance of the other gender. Both modes have the power to give audiences and readerships pause, to question the naturalness of that which we take to be biologically determined. These moments of gender and sexual transformation are akin to cosmopolitan ways of playing with foreign literature. The modernistas try on the literatures of elsewhere—the styles, modes, lexicon, and major tropes—as models for selfbecoming . They defy what Benedict Anderson describes as the irreducibility of national affiliation and gender assignment, by cross-dressing with international literary signifiers that flaunt insurrectionary gender styles. The dandified and decadent cosmopolitans were almost always gender and sexually defiant, all dressed up in the costumes, goods, and languages that made them seem strange, odd, not of local circumstances. The cosmopolitan escape from national restrictions of various kinds was a markedly literary modality; it existed freely in the private and safe space of the literary act and text. Sifuentes-Járegui reads transvestism through literature for exactly this reason, because, until recently, literature was the only safe space for the representation of different sexualities in Latin America. Unlike what will later become , after the turn of the century, the shared public images of the cinema, literature provided a safe space for the assumption of new ideas, roles, attitudes, and desires. Some writers actively sought to disseminate and encourage a flirtation with becoming other than oneself, identifying temporarily or even crossing over. The cosmopolitan was the ideal reader of literary propagandists like Gómez Carrillo, Blanco Fambona, and...