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[ 49 ] Chapter 2 The Transatlantic Literary Field and the Rise of Modernismo The burden is necessarily greater for an American—for he must deal more or less, if only by implication, with Europe; whereas no European is obliged to deal in the least with America. No one dreams of calling him less complete for not doing so. —Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James It is surprising to compare the publication dates of various Latin American texts and others that are considered their model because in most cases they were contemporaneous; but at the time it seemed impossible to see the“originality” of Latin Americans. —Graciela Montaldo, La sensibilidad amenazada As the twenty-first century began, Jesús Martín Barbero, Néstor García Canclini, and other prominent Latin American intellectuals stated their belief that rather than geopolitics or geoeconomics, the world in the twenty-first century will revolve around geocultural circuits; it will be divided among different cultural spaces, one of which, they propose, must be Latin America: “Las luchas políticas, cada vez más, serán de disputa por el modelo cultural de la sociedad, es decir, por modelos y sentidos de vida individual y colectivo, por modelos de modernidad ” (Garretón 34). [Political struggles will increasingly be over the cultural model of society, that is, over models and understandings of individual and collective life, over models of modernity.]1 Neither the diagnostic about the relevance of culture and definitions of modernity in the global scene nor the proposal about the Latin American cultural space may be particularly new. Well over a century earlier, Spanish American modernistas would have agreed with both as they set out to make the Latin American geocultural space count in the larger global cultural space. In 1891, José Martí published his most influential essay, warning about shifting conditions in the location, distribution, and manifestations of power, identifying the emergence of new geocultural networks and models of modernity, and [ 50 ]   The Inverted Conquest stressing the need for Latin American culture to be a relevant part of what he diagnosed as a new universal order. He famously called this Latin American geocultural space “our America.” Like intellectuals today, Martí believed that the times were over when people thought of culture as geographically limited, as something local and homogeneous. Martí, as would Darío, Rodó, and many others, identified a struggle over the symbolic, over the meanings of culture and modernity as individual and collective experiences, and their implications for a global politics of inclusion and exclusion, of domination and subordination. Following the model of cultural fields developed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as a mediating concept between culture and power, between literature and society, in this chapter I read the constitution of modernismo in the context of the geocultural and geopolitical spaces that were emerging at the time and within which Spanish American modernismo must be understood.2 I study what, adapting Bourdieu’s concept, I call the transatlantic literary field, the European and American transnational field. This is a field of fields, a complex space marked by struggles over symbolic capital at a time when geocultural spaces were in the process of redefinition along sometimes overlapping, sometimes competing, and always shifting lines. I then analyze how those struggles affected the Spanish American literary field—a transnational field itself—and discuss some of the principle ways by which modernismo staked its claim within this field and accomplished what Bourdieu calls a“literary revolution,” transforming the way literature was written in Spanish. In doing so, modernista writers constructed a Spanish American cultural space from which to think about Spanish America and Spain, and engage in the new cultural battles of modernity. Bourdieu’s Literary Field and the Limits of the National Model The Field as a Space of Struggle for Symbolic Capital The field of cultural production is a theoretical model developed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in order to break away from both the Marxist understanding of superstructure and the idea that culture is moved by “ ‘great individuals,’ unique creators irreducible to any condition or conditioning” (Field 29).3 Instead, Bourdieu ’s model functions as a mediator between cultural practice and social structures , a structural system of both symbolic and social relations. This system or “field” is relatively autonomous, that is, governed by its own rules and not directly by those of politics or economics or religion. Although the cultural field, like all other fields, is contained by the larger field of power, it is...

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