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11 1 Foundational Images of the Nation in Latin America Hugo Achugar N ation and nationalism have made their mark on scholarship in the most divergent disciplines, fueling debates that have focused on connections to literature, history, memory, narrative, ethnicity , sexual identity, gender, and culture. Scholars of visual arts and communication studies have also actively engaged in these debates. Indeed, few and far between are the academic disciplines that have not been affected by conversations on nation and nationalism. This essay reformulates, in part, an argument on the nation in Latin America that I have been developing over many years. In a previous attempt to make the case, I concluded by claiming that in addition to the lettered city, and long before the apotheosis of the televised city, there was a visual city.1 The notion of visual art as an expression of national identity is common currency in intellectual circles, or at least it has been during mul­ tiple historical moments. This old idea was based on the premise that the nation—and consequently all things national—preceded all artistic production . Nation and the national enjoyed an ahistorical existence.2 This romantic scheme gave birth to the concepts of “the spirit of a people,” volkgeist , and folklore, which nourished stories that have attempted to explain the deep roots (or the beginnings) of nations and communities. Among scholars, this “essentialist” understanding of nation has gradually lost support and been replaced by the widely accepted idea that nations and the meaning of what is national are social constructs. In other words, nations do not precede states; rather, they are shaped by them and their institutions , or the hegemonic social sector. This “constructionist” interpretation has been advanced fundamentally through literary analysis and by This chapter was translated from Spanish by William G. Acree Jr. 12 Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America studies of the printed word and written culture. In this spirit, Julio Ramos maintained that far from what literature could mean to us today—a relatively specialized activity, distinct from other discursive practices and from the everyday use of language—the longing expressed in Martí’s prologue [to Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde’s“Poema del Niágara”] is a response to the crisis faced by a cultural system in which literature—or rather, letters—had risen to a place of utmost importance in the organization of new Latin American societies. Literature (with a capital L), the ideal expression of a rationalized and homogenous national language, became the space—perhaps fictitious— where models of behavior were communicated, and that projected norms for shaping citizens and citizenship, symbolic frontiers, social imaginaries, and even states in the process of consolidation.3 In spite of the emphasis on the “organization of new Latin American societies,” this line of argument is not so much about nation. It deals more with the role the state plays in the construction of nations, focusing in particular on the significance of literature and the written word, similar to what Benedict Anderson and Doris Sommer have maintained.4 In contrast , this essay aims to illustrate the importance of what I have decided to call foundational images. These images are no less fictional than Sommer’s “foundational fictions” in the national imaginaries constructed by the state and Latin American lettered elites (or the hegemonic sector) throughout the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. The difference resides in the fact that their sustenance and materiality is visual and not written. In this sense, by studying a group of Latin American novels and privileging the written word, Sommer’s argument leaves out components that are central to the construction of national, Latin American imaginaries, and that are intimately related to the visual, even when their visual quality is linked to writing. Furthermore, my claim modifies Benedict Anderson’s well-known conclusions regarding the role of the press and narrative in the formation of imagined communities during the nineteenth century, and attempts to rethink the phenomenon of the construction of national imaginaries in the twentieth century, just as we are entering—so it would seem—a “post-national” period.5 Initially, my interest was to analyze those paintings, images, and icons of various countries that played or appear to have played a definitive part in the configuration of national imaginaries, such as Juan Manuel Blanes’s El juramento de los Treinta y Tres Orientales (The Oath of the Thirty-three Uruguayans) in Uruguay, El velorio (The Wake) from 1893 by the...

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