Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest ed. by Lois Parkinson-Zamora, Monika Kaup (review)

The collection of essays Baroque New Worlds, edited by Lois Parkinson-Zamora and Monika Kaup, is an ambitious project that presents a compilation of twenty-nine essays with the intention of tracing “[. . .] the reemergence of Baroque traditions and forms of expression over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first” (2). The intended goal is calling attention to the multiple formations of the Baroque “[...] and to theorize a new set of possibilities in Europe and the Americas [...]” (2). The anthology is organized into three sections respectively entitled “Representations,” “Transculturation,” and “Counterconquest.” Part one is organized chronologically, opening with texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich Wölfflin, Walter Benjamin, Eugenio d’Ors, René Wellek, and Mario Praz, then moving on to Latin American readings of the Baroque by Alfonso Reyes, Ángel Guido, Pedro Henriquez Ureña, José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier and Severo Sarduy. In Parts two and three, contemporary scholars and authors reassess the deployment and appropriation of the Baroque in Latin America. Six essays in Part two focus on colonial practices and transculturation, and in Part three seven essays concentrate in the postcolonial elaboration of the Baroque. The editors of this collection have reached broadly, including articles by authors such as Carlos Fuentes and Éduard Glissant, without neglecting the Luzo-Brazilian sphere as represented by Haroldo de Campos and Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, and the Francophone north of the continent by Dorothy Z. Baker.

Baroque New Worlds is in part a work of introduction since many of the Latin American cultural theory essays are here translated from the Spanish for the first time. The effort is commendable and it will partially help to remediate the occasionally acute cultural myopia that has allowed some scholars to ignore key scholarship on the excuse that the original is in Spanish. This collection presents in clear fashion the international dialogues that shaped twentieth century understandings on the Baroque. René Wellek’s piece is an illuminating example as well as the Latin American essays, their authors in close dialogue with contemporary Spanish peers such as Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset. Baroque New Worlds offers key texts for the scholar or student interested on the Baroque and Neobaroque in America. Students may find particularly useful the extensive notes and the bibliographical lists provided. The black and white illustrations are a welcomed quick reference for the reader unfamiliar with the examples. However, the collection, in my view, has some shortcomings.

One of the most noticeable absences is a working definition of the Baroque. This is, of course, a notoriously difficult task. Acknowledging that this cultural movement has had many different applications around the world, the editors conceptualize the Baroque, New World Baroque, and Neobaroque “as a single, rather large, eccentric pearl, with excrescences and involutions corresponding to their overlapping histories and forms in Europe and the Americas” (3). If this is the case, a straight explanation of the essential characteristics of this pearl should have been provided. I am thus not persuaded by the editors’ globalizing idea of the Baroque as one transhistorical style and their use of “Neobaroque for all reconstitutions of the Baroque and New World Baroque as twentieth-century aesthetics and ideologies” (13). This needs more thorough reasoning, as it considers but does not deeply account for political, cultural or social contexts, not to speak of addressing how it interacts with current nomenclature like modernism or postmodernism. Is the Neobaroque a form of either or is it proposed as a substitution? I am therefore skeptical that Benjamin, Lezama or Buci-Glucksmann can be termed Neobaroque practitioners without much more careful consideration. The editors choose instead to define the Baroque through the at times contradictory views of the contributors and descriptions of baroque mechanisms since “Its visual and verbal forms are ample, dynamic, porous and permeable” (3). In José Lezama Lima’s characterization, for instance, the Baroque is Dionysian, dialectic, parodic, excessive, full of exaltation and exuberance...