The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism (review)

There is no getting around the fact that modernismo is one of the most studied fields in Spanish American literary history. This is precisely why scholarship on the subject must propose new perspectives, explore overlooked features or connections, and provide readers with new ways to understand the impact of this movement. And this is exactly what Alejandro Mejías-López accomplishes in The Inverted Conquest. This book offers a bold and broad look at the underpinnings of modernity and modernismo in the context of transatlantic literary relations at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a thoroughly documented study with a wealth of references to a century of research on modernismo and to the contemporary texts on both sides of the Atlantic. Through carefully crafted arguments, Mejías-López explores the notion of the myth of modernity (or the idea of imperfect modernity in Latin America), situates Spanish American modernismo within the fields of transatlantic and transnational modernism, and builds a convincing case for understanding how Spanish American modernistas captured linguistic authority and symbolic capital from Spain. This "inverted conquest," whereby authors moved "the cultural center of the Hispanic Atlantic westward to America" (4), is one of the book's most powerful concepts, and it is a welcome new framework for interpreting Hispanic modernism.

The book's four chapters build on each other to articulate how modernistas carried out their cultural conquest. The first chapter points to the "myth of modernity" many critics subscribe to and which has resulted in the gradual erasure of modernismo's impact. Mejías-López provides a solid historical overview of modernization from the fifteenth century on, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century Spanish America, and highlights the fractured process of modernity not only in the Americas, but also in Western Europe. The goal of the chapter is to see the Atlantic as a space where relations between power and culture were redrawn. Chapter 2 borrows Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural fields of production to set modernismo in the transatlantic literary and transnational fields. Spanish American modernista authors often saw their work and themselves as part of a community that extended far beyond national borders. Yet they came face-to-face with the role of European symbolic capital in America of the 1800s, explored clearly in this chapter. What modernista writers did to combat European influence and to distinguish their literature was to build on the pillars of Spanish Americanism, cosmopolitanism, and modernity as the basis of their movement (74). These three concepts would allow them to begin to wrest cultural authority from Spain.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore this process in depth. Through readings of Darío, Rodó, Reyles, and Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, as well as the Spaniards Juan Valera, Unamuno, and Clarín, chapter 3 demonstrates how the staunch opposition in Spain to cultural authority coming from America was overcome. "For Spanish critics, Spanish American modernismo and the way it was transforming and opening literary language in Spanish were a threat to the perceived purity of 'Castilian' and to the linguistic, literary, and cultural authority of the nation" (99). For them to admit to leadership by inhabitants of the excolony, notes Mejías-López, was to recognize their own marginalized place at the beginning of the twentieth century. Racial fears were likewise part of the position many Spanish writers took. The fourth and last chapter makes this case by interpreting works by Martí, Rodó, and Díaz Rodríguez, among others. Modernistas capitalized on race, specifically the conflict between Hispanics and Anglo-Saxons, to engage imperialist and anti-imperialist discourses. Here again Mejías-López shows a strong comparative American perspective of the process of racially defining empire (and, in the case of Spain, its legacy). With the war of 1898, modernista writers began concentrating on "Hispanicness" and the Hispanic race whose roots they...