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  • Para una teoría del arte en Historia y estilo, de Jorge Mañach by Yaneidys Arencibia Coloma
  • Christina García
Arencibia Coloma, Yaneidys. Para una teoría del arte en Historia y estilo, de Jorge Mañach. A Contracorriente, 2018. 110 pp.

Yaneidys Arencibia Coloma's engagement with Jorge Mañach's early-to-mid-twentieth century essays will be of particular interest to Latin American Cultural Studies scholars and intellectual historians of Cuba's Republican era. While Jorge Mañach is already regarded as one of Cuba's most important thinkers, Arencibia Coloma effectively makes the case for considering his essays as models of multidisciplinary praxis and formulating theory from the contextual specificity of the region. For those committed to thinking Latin American culture and history from a situated vantage point, through its vernacular tropes and, thereby, bypassing hegemonic European paradigms, Mañach's essays, as shown by Arencibia Coloma, merit attention beyond a Cuban literary canon.

Specifically, Arencibia Coloma's intervention in the scholarship on Mañach is to consider a collection of four essays published in a volume titled Historia y estilo from 1944, as contributing to the discipline of Art Historical theory. Whereas Arnold Hauser is credited for being the first to argue for a sociological approach to art in 1951, Jorge Mañach had articulated an interdependence between art and society seven years prior. Again, for Latin American Cultural Studies scholars who privilege the authority of autochthonous intellectuals, Mañach's sociological art theories articulated through the literary genre of the essay not only provide an alternative to US and European criticism, but also demonstrate that Cultural Studies methods in Latin America predated those of Britain and the US.

In her introduction, Arencibia Coloma explains that, while scholars have attended to the individual essays compiled in Historia y estilo, alongside other works of Mañach devoted to particular cultural manifestations, the 1944 volume as a whole has not been carefully studied. Consequently, previous readers have missed Mañach's singular contribution to art historical theory. From the island's colonial past to his present, Mañach traces artistic trends in tandem with the island's geography, institutions, forms of government, minor and major political events, and, especially, to stages in the nation-building project. What he formulates is a processional evolution of styles as both constituted and constitutive of historical circumstance. Arencibia Coloma later notes that, for contemporary readers, such a relationship between art and its sociopolitical context is taken as a given. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, Eurocentric discourses and periodizations dominated; these discourses tended to focus on form, as having its own internal raison d'être and linear chronology, or iconography, privileging correlations with texts such as [End Page 293] the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology. Ultimately, Mañach succeeds in understanding the trajectory of Cuban art styles in relation to its academies and immediate historical climate, that is, as a process and not a phenomenon.

Practicing an Electivist philosophy, Mañach was not tethered to any one ideology and selected concepts from a variety of thinkers and discourses. In this respect, together with his multidisciplinarity, Arencibia Coloma argues that Mañach further escapes Eurocentric models and their presumed inherent theorems. Significantly, Mañach drew from the historiography of the Longue Durée, Emile Durkheim's notions of societal integration and collective consciousness, Herbert Spencer's evolutionism and aggregates, and Oswald Spengler's notion of cultures as discrete organisms with souls. While positivist historians focused on the facticity of documents, the dates of battles and the names of generals, the Longue Durée historiographers set their sights on much longer, wholistic processes. As Arencibia Coloma explains, in Mañach's dense cultural essays the binary between politics and aesthetics collapses and a single literary work is considered a more efficacious synthesis of the era's zeitgeist than a heap of government documents. Drawing from Durkheim, Spencer, and Spengler (among others), Mañach elaborates various stages in the evolution of the nation, like the maturation of a larger subjectivity, imbued with a consciousness. For Mañach, what he describes as initially an amorphous aggregate eventually becomes a...

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