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[ 1 ] Introduction Modernism in literature and art does not refer to any particular artistic or literary school. It is rather a profound spiritual move carried out by artists and writers from dissimilar schools. —Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, The Way of Perfection There is little doubt that of all the concepts used in discussing and mapping twentieth-century Western literature, “modernism” has become the most important. . . . One must of course be aware that until quite recently,“modernism” was not a widespread concept. —Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism As a concept, neocolonialism is as disempowering as the conditions it portrays. —Robert Young, Postcolonialism In 1965, an English speaker interested in learning about modernist poetry might have turned to the then recently published Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and found, perhaps to her surprise, that the entry on“modernism” described a Hispanic literary movement spanning the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. She would have learned that “a cosmopolitan perspective, a new concinnity of language, and a new poetic diction” were“the main contributions of modernism to Western literature” (Preminger 527). Let’s imagine the same reader going back to the Encyclopedia in 1974, after the publication of the second edition, and discovering that, although the term remains in its English form in the page header, the only entry on the subject appears now under its Spanish name, modernismo. Since the entry remains the same, however, she does not think twice about it. Twenty years later, in 1993, our imaginary reader goes back to the library to consult what is now called the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. “Modernism” has returned to its pages as an entry (now accompanied by “Postmodernism”), but the Hispanic literary movement that so caught her attention almost thirty years back is not to be found anywhere in that entry. In fact, the [ 2 ]   The Inverted Conquest entry mentions no Hispanic poet. Puzzled, she remembers the odd change of language in the previous edition and, sure enough, finds what she is looking for under the Spanish term modernismo. In the updated entry, however, the assessment of modernismo’s contributions to Western literature is no longer there. This persistent imaginary reader is not the unsuspecting witness of a progressive move toward multiculturalism; on the contrary, she has traced through the years a critical operation of exclusion. As modernism came to be the object of increasing theorization in the Anglo American academy and beyond, reaching its peak with the advent of the postmodernism debate, Hispanic modernism (perhaps never more than a curiosity in those same circles) was rapidly set aside, not as a result but as a precondition of that theorization.1 Hispanic“modernism,” the first movement to coin and theorize the term, may be condemned to remain untranslatable , italicized, and often accompanied by an explanatory note to reassure any unsuspecting reader that indeed modernismo is not modernism. Matei Călinescu stands out as an important exception to the rule, insightfully identifying modernismo as the first instance of an aesthetic theorization that was able to see beyond the“parochial squabbles” (70) of contemporary schools and movements. It is a testament to the power of the critical process of exclusion that, despite his book’s remaining an important reference for the study of modernism, Călinescu’s comments have fallen on deaf ears. It is a sign of the speedy naturalization of the process of exclusion that, by 1998, Perry Anderson could find it “contrary to conventional expectation” that modernism was born“in a distant periphery rather than at the center of the cultural system of the time” (Origins 3), while in 2002, Fredrick Jameson could refer to the“scandal of Spanish usage” (100), perhaps anticipating the reaction of his readers when he told them, as he was about to, that modernism was indeed first coined in Spanish America.2 The “otherization” of modernismo, however, has not been exclusive to Anglo American and European studies. Spanish American criticism itself, having naturalized a certain understanding of Anglo European modernity, often either has questioned the very existence of nineteenth-century modernity in Spanish America or has considered it imperfect, defined by what it lacked rather than by what it was.3 As a result, modernismo’s story has turned into the tale of an attempt by writers to be modern, a wishful thinking, an unfulfilled desire, when not simply a story of ghosts. The Anglo European self is confirmed by Spanish America’s...

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