Cosmopolitanism in the Americas

Preface

vii Preface Before the turn of the nineteenth century, the “Americas” referred to the shared histories of revolutionary independence across the hemisphere. Yet, the term had contested meanings depending on the context of its use. Lester Langley notes that even before the Latin American wars of independence, the term “American” came to serve as a symbol of cultural unity against the Spanish. He cites Thomas Jefferson ’s description of the Americas as “one hemisphere” with different systems of interest, yet in which all nation states of the Americas were made to suffer from the ravages and wars of European tyranny (32). In his exploration of the “essence” (“la esencia”) of Latin America, Leopoldo Zea found that the term and place was incomprehensible without contending with its counterpart, Anglo-Saxon America: “in order to be legitimate, it has to encompass both Americas” (“para ser legítima, tendrá que englobar a ambas Américas”) (9). Yet the histories of north and south are different and even ideologically counterposed; Spain and Portugal conquered and colonized Latin America to disseminate Christianity, while the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the United States by Europe was a consequence of the destabilization of the values of Christianity in order to elaborate new ones (see Zea). One has roots in modernity and modernizing ideas, while the other was hitched to the backward pull of Spain and Portugal. By 1898, peninsular Spanish influence in the colonized world was in decline while the U.S., after strategic military and economic successes against Spain, rose to rapid prominence. Cosmopolitanism provided a loose theoretical framework for coming to terms with this hemispheric dynamic; in Latin American cultural productions, it meant making use of Western European culture to fortify national identity and domesticate the universals of spirit and justice to defend against U.S. materialism. For U.S. and Latin American states, cosmopolitanism was a political catch-all for relationships across the Americas; for the Organization of American States’ mission of hemispheric security, peace, and free trade. The term had many different meanings in the Americas, dependent upon the part of the hemisphere in which it traveled; on the one hand, it was a theoretical tool for cultural decolonization, yet for the north, it encoded a new form of colonization under the alibi of hemispheric peace. As this diversity of uses attests, cosmopolitanism is most meaningful in practice, in context, and in the very specificity that the viii Preface term seems to avoid. It is perhaps most meaningful in its applied localities: each instance of its manifestation belies the difficulties of its universal aspirations. During the rise of American hemispheric politics, there were several literary movements circulating under the principle of cosmopolitanism. Critics discuss the international cosmopolitan literature movements of the turn of the century almost exclusively as a European and Euro-American phenomenon comprising writers like Henry James, Gertrude Stein, or Oscar Wilde. However there was a vital literary cosmopolitanism in Latin America conversant in the European tradition while at work on the creation of a national literary culture—this movement was called modernismo for its principle of modern innovation. For Federico de Onís, modernismo meant the integration of literatures of Latin America into universal literature, what many critics have noted as the first independent literary movement ; the first sign of independence, the first real cultural rupture from Spain’s colonial legacy and assertion of cultural parity with the United States. Cosmopolitanism in the Americas represents a comparative cultural studies approach to the issues of cosmopolitanism during the rise of international political organizations and global literary communities (for the emerging field of comparative cultural studies, see Tötösy de Zepetnek). This book provides a wider and comparative context for the study of cosmopolitanism focused through a Latin American consumption of Western European and Euro-American literary culture in modernity. The political cosmopolitanism of U.S.-based American unity or the “our America” (“nuestra América”) of Pan-American defensive unity were the acceptable cosmopolitanisms, yet there was another cosmopolitanism, one that was less politically overt, less acceptable—but not, as some critics claim, politically inert. The “other” cosmopolitanism was a kind of cultural transvestism, a taking on of the markers and characteristics of major foreign urban centers in a way that would alter and “modernize” gender/sexual self-representation. This cosmopolitanism was a way of experiencing the city either by writing about it or reading about it. Literature was key to creating sympathy and empathy through identification while it promoted...